itself? Its web hangs here; touch it, make it tremble.
Here it comes, willingly – welcome, tarantula! On your back your triangle and mark sits in black; and I know too what sits in your soul.
Revenge sits in your soul: wherever you bite, there black scabs grow;
your poison makes the soul whirl with revenge!
So I speak to you in parables, you who cause the souls to whirl, you
preachers of equality! Tarantulas you are to me and hidden avengers!
But I want to expose your hiding places to the light; therefore I laugh
into your face my laughter of the heights.
Therefore I tear at your web, so that your rage might lure you from
your lie-hole lair, and your revenge might spring forth from behind your
word “justice.” For that mankind be redeemed from revenge: that to me is
the bridge to the highest hope and a rainbow after long thunderstorms.
But the tarantulas want it otherwise, to be sure. “That the world become
full of the thunderstorms of our revenge, precisely that we would regard
as justice,” – thus they speak with one another.
“We want to exact revenge and heap insult on all whose equals we are
not” – thus vow the tarantula hearts.
“And ‘will to equality’ – that itself from now on shall be the name for
virtue; and against everything that has power we shall raise our clamor!”
You preachers of equality, the tyrant’s madness of impotence cries thus
out of you for “equality”: your secret tyrant’s cravings mask themselves
thus in your words of virtue!
Aggrieved conceit, repressed envy, perhaps the conceit and envy of
your fathers: it erupts from you like a flame and the madness of revenge.
What is silent in the father learns to speak in the son; and often I found
the son to be the father’s exposed secret.
They resemble the inspired, but it is not the heart that inspires them –
but revenge. And when they are refined and cold, it is not the spirit but
envy that makes them refined and cold.
Their jealousy even leads them along the thinkers’ path; and this is the
mark of their jealousy – they always go too far, such that their exhaustion
must ultimately lay itself to sleep in snow.
From each of their laments revenge sounds, in each of their praisings
there is harm, and being the judge is bliss to them.
But thus I counsel you my friends: mistrust all in whom the drive to
punish is strong!
Those are people of bad kind and kin; in their faces the hangman and
the bloodhound are visible.
Mistrust all those who speak much of their justice! Indeed, their souls
are lacking not only honey.
And when they call themselves “the good and the just,” then do not
forget that all they lack to be pharisees is – power!
My friends, I do not want not be mixed in with and mistaken for others.
There are those who preach my doctrine of life, and at the same time
they are preachers of equality and tarantulas.
They speak in favor of life, these poisonous spiders, even though they
are sitting in their holes and have turned against life, because they want
to do harm.
They want to harm those who hold power today, for among them the
sermon on death is still most at home.
If it were otherwise, then the tarantulas would teach otherwise; and they
after all were formerly the best world slanderers and burners of heretics.
I do not want to be mixed in with and mistaken for these preachers of
equality. For thus justice speaks to me: “humans are not equal.”
And they shouldn’t become so either! What would my love for the
overman be if I spoke otherwise?
On a thousand bridges and paths they shall throng to the future, and
ever more war and inequality shall be set between them: thus my great
love commands me to speak!
Inventors of images and ghosts shall they become in their hostility, and
with their images and ghosts they shall yet fight the highest fight against
each other!
Good and evil, and rich and poor, and high and trifling, and all the
names of values: they shall be weapons and clanging signs that life must
overcome itself again and again!
Life itself wants to build itself into the heights with pillars and steps; it
wants to gaze into vast distances and out upon halcyon beauties – therefore
it needs height!
And because it needs height, it needs steps and contradiction between
steps and climbers! Life wants to climb and to overcome itself by climbing.
And look here, my friends! Here, where the tarantula’s hole is, the ruins
of an ancient temple are rising – look here now with enlightened eyes!
Indeed, the one who once heaped his thoughts skyward here in
stone – he knew the secret of all life like the most wise!
That struggle and inequality and war for power and supremacy are
found even in beauty: he teaches us that here in the clearest parable.
How divinely the vault and the arch bend and break each other as they
wrestle; how they struggle against each other with light and shadow, these
divinely struggling ones –
In this manner sure and beautiful let us also be enemies, my friends!
Divinely let us struggle against each other!
Alas! Then the tarantula bit me, my old enemy! Divinely sure and
beautiful it bit me on the finger!
“Punishment and justice must be” – thus it thinks. “Not for nothing
shall he sing his songs in honor of hostility here!”
Yes, it has avenged itself! And alas! Now it will also make my soul whirl
with revenge!
But so that I do not whirl, my friends, bind me fast to this pillar here!
I would rather be a stylite than a whirlwind of revenge!
Indeed, Zarathustra is no tornado or whirlwind; and if he is a dancer,
nevermore a tarantella dancer! –
Thus spoke Zarathustra.