Zarathustra has once again spoken

Zarathustra lived on his own for ten years in the mountains where he listened to the trees and learnt the ways of the nature. When leaving to get back to the civilization again, he meets saints on the way and they recall who Zarathustra once was, and who he has changed to become during the years in exile. During this time Zarathustra came to believe in his own ‘God’, which he called Superman – as he did believe that God, as we know him from Christianity, is dead. But Superman is the purpose of the world, the meaning of life and the reason why we are all alive.

‘I am a prophet of the lightning and a heavy drop from the cloud: but this lightning is called Superman’ (p45)

We follow Zarathustra’s journey as he travels from village to village to spread his ideas and theories about everything you can ever imagine – and a few of them does not make sense at all to me as they are very much expressed in a philosophical way, which to me equals confused and complicated. He expresses a lot of thoughts on how the body and the soul are not necessarily connected, instead the soul is just a separate part inside your body but the two of them do not cooperate in the way we might think they do. Further on, Zarathustra speaks of the Ego – the great contempt of man – and how it rules our Self through our different senses, through passion and joy, through love and hate and so on.

‘There is always a certain madness in love. But also there is always a certain method in madness’ (p68)

Zarathustra speaks of the state as the coldest of all cold monsters, and how it seems to turn everything into sickness and tragedy that it touches. He speaks about your neighbours as poisonous flies. He speaks of the filthiness that exists at the bottom of a man’s soul – because the only thing they seem to find satisfying here on earth is sex with a woman. He believes that a slave, a tyrant and neither a woman can be a man’s friend for the reasons that a slave cannot be a friend, a tyrant cannot have a friend and a woman can do nothing else than love, not be a friend.

‘If I wanted to shake this tree with my hands I should be unable to do it. But the wind, which we cannot see, torments it and bends it where it wishes. It is invisible hands that torment and bend us the worst’ (p69)