The Antichristian Book Study: Section 1.

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
1

Section 1 reads:

Again, I have not much to add to this: it kind of speaks for itself. But we can pursue the Hyperborean thread - we modern Theseuses!

Ha! Splendid! Wikipedia tells me that Theseus did indeed visit the Hyperboreans! Does that make him one? Perhaps not. Or does finding the exit to the modern labyrinth by that very fact make one one?

Wikipedia also tells me;

“Hyperborea, or Hyperboria (“beyond the Boreas (north wind)”), was perfect, with the Sun shining twenty-four hours a day.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperborea

A land far to the north where the sun shines twenty-four hours a day - might this refer to the original Polar Continent?

The thunder and lightning Nietzsche also mentions in a letter concerning The Antichristian:

“With a cynicism which is destined to become world-historical, I have now related myself: the book is called “Ecce Homo” and is an assassination without the least respect for the crucified one: it ends with thunder and lightning against everything Christian or infected by Christianity that you won’t know anymore where to turn or what to do. At last I am the first psychologist of Christianity and, old artillerist that I am, can move up heavy guns the existence of which not even any opponent of Christianity had suspected in the least.— The whole is the prelude to the Revaluation of All Values, the work which lies before me, finished: I swear to you, in two years we shall have the whole earth in convulsions. I am a destiny.—”
[Letter to Georg Brandes, November 20, 1888.]

Hail Nietzsche!

2

For the sake of accessibility, I think I will post the rest of the sections in this same thread. The first two installments of The Antichristian Book Study may be found under the titles “The Antichristian Book Study: Preliminary Considerations.” and “The Antichristian Book Study: Preface.”

Nietzsche ended the first section in expressing the formula of “our” happiness (“we” Hyperboreans): “a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal…” And immediately he gives such a Yes and a No:

“Moraline” is a coinage: it means “moral poison” (compare “nicotine”). He will coin a word with a similar construction later on (“Judaine”).

Power is the power to will; the feeling of power arises not in “having” power, but in using power, in willing.

Weakness is weakness of the will.

Virtù may be translated as “prowess”. George Bull usually renders it this way, in his translation of Il Principe.

This section is echoed in a posthumously published note:

Elsewhere, I have already stated that the slave revolt in morality made the truth, the natural rank order, stand on its head.- How this has come to pass - in Europe, in any case -, we shall see later on.

3

I got the phrase “the original polar continent” from Miguel Serrano’s account of one of his talks with Jung:

“''In the west, there was once a way of individual initiation into love: the mystery of the Grail, of its Esoteric Order of Knights and the hermeticism of the German and Provenial troubadours and of the Fedele d’Amore in northern Italy. […]
‘This miraculous Hyperborean initiation comes from a great distance, from the original polar continent, where the female magicians, the priestesses of magic love, Morgana and Allouine, appeared. And also the women who, in the legend of the Grail, healed the wounded warrior and the Sick King. This mystery comes to us from an unfathomable distance. In the west, it was destroyed with the Cathars and the Templars, with the Minnesänger and the Fedele d’Amore, with the troubadours of the Languedoc, in the eternal war with the enemies of the divine myth. What had been a private, unique, aristocratic initiation has become vulgarised in the exotericism of the Church of Rome, which has taken possession of its symbols and adulterated them. The Gnostic Lady, Sophia, Woevre Saelde, the feminine Holy Spirit, Parakletos, the Dove, has been popularised as the Virgin Mary; the Exchange of Hearts, which is in reality the awakening of the Anahata chakra, has been externalised in the cult of the heart of Jesus. The crown of thorns and the rosary have replaced the Templars’ alchemical rose of a thousand petals, the Sahasrara chakra, at the summit of the invisible skull. It is the assassination of the sacred way of Kundalini, of the Tantric road of the chakras. A hermetic initiation of solar love has been adulterated by an exoteric, lunar religion, by an anthropomorphic, exclusively materialistic cult.
'The initiation of “loveless love” has been destroyed, and man has gone over to the diffusion of a physical, matriarchal love, centred purely on the physical body of the woman, in which the externalised Eve triumphs, desecrating the warrior, imposing her female urgency and her “Demetrian” fever for procreation. Love has become human, all too human. The “loveless love” of the warrior, of the troubadour, is the mystery of the Grail. The love of the unresurrected woman and man is the Church of Rome, lunar Christianity. The initiatory poem has deteriorated into the novel, the popular literature and the unhealthy sexualism of our day.”
[Serrano, NOS: The Book of Resurrection, Another Turn of the Wheel, A-MOR.]

What wonder that this passage describes a slave transvaluation of noble values! Jung, of course was a Nietzschean. He derived his concept of the Self from Nietzsche - from Thus Spake Zarathustra, Of the Despisers of the Body, to be exact.

I am also reminded of Commander Merlin’s suggestion that Nietzsche was a member of an occult lodge. As such, he might have been familiar with these matters.

Indeed, this section from Serrano’s book may explain a lot of section 1 of The Antichristian. For instance, Jung paints a completely different picture of Parsifal from Wagner’s:

“'It has been said that the man who loves God needs seven incarnations in order to enter Nirvana and liberate himself, and that the man who hates him needs only three. It is without God but with his own “fury” that Parsifal achieved the Grail and his individuation, his Self, his totality. This is the difference between the Liquid Road and the Dry Road. We do not know whether, as well as his “fury”, his Phobos, his fear of the Mother, Parsifal carried with him a “memory of a beloved”, as he was supposed to have advised his friend Gawaine to do. Parsifal, with his “fury”, or his hatred, was resisting a participation mystique. Samadhi, fusion with Adhi, the Primordial Being, doesn’t await him at the end of his road. Because this would be the way of sainthood. What awaits him is Kaivalya, total separation, supreme individuation, Absolute Personality, the ultimate solitude of the Superman. This is the way of the magician, the Siddha, the tantric hero of the Grail. The cosmic isolation of the risen Purusha.”
[ibid.]

Did not Nietzsche say in section 1 that “[w]e […] were most remote from the happiness of the weaklings, from “resignation””?

The “loveless love” that Jung speaks of, by the way, is the warrior’s “uniting with his lady only in the mind; or rather, in the Maithuna, the mystical Tantric coitus.” About this, he goes on to say the following:

“'When we talk about the religion of love of the troubadours, of the initiated knights of the Grail, of the true Rosicrucians, we must try to discover what lies behind their language. In those days, love did not mean the same thing as it does in our day. The word Amor (Love) was a cipher, it was a code word. Amor spelt backwards is Roma. That is, the word indicated, in the way in which it was written, the opposite to Roma, to all that Rome [the Church] represented. Also, Amor broke down into “a” and “mor”, meaning Without-Death.
That is, to become immortal, eternal, thanks to the way of initiation of A-Mor. A way of initiation totally opposed to the way of Rome. An esoteric, solar Kristianity. The Gnostic Kristianity of Meister Eckhart. And mine. Because I have tried to teach western man to resurrect Kristos in his soul. Because Kristos is the Self for western man.
'This is why Roma destroyed Amor, the Cathars, the Templars, the Lords of the Grail, the Minnesänger, everything which may have originated in the “Hyperborean Blood Memory” and which may have had a polar, solar origin.
'The love talked and written about so much in novels, poetry and magazines, the love of one’s neighbour, the universal love of the churches, love of humanity, has nothing whatsoever to do with “loveless love” (A-Mor, Without-Death), which is a harsh discipline, as cold as ice, as cutting as a sword, and which aspires to overcome the human condition in order to reach the Kingdom of the Immortals, Ultima Thule.”
[ibid.]

It is a shame I do not have Jung’s “Christ, a Symbol of the Self” (a chapter from his Aion) with me (at all times). I will try to render its essence from heart, and may always substantiate the things I say with quotes when I get home.

In this chapter, Jung is concerned with the psychological necessity of (the coming of) the Antichrist. He argues that the Christ, who was supposed and meant to be a symbol of the whole Self, only reflects the bright side of the Self, whereas “in the empirical Self, light and dark form a paradoxical unity”. The Antichrist is thus the necessary complement of this all-too-optimistic view of the Self. However, Jung shows that the Church Fathers have argued that the dark side of the Self is only an insubstantial shadow. There may not be light without darkness, but the light is the true Self. I agree with this, and yet I completely oppose the Church Fathers. How can this be? Whence this paradoxical stance?

The Church Fathers affirmed a transvalued Christ. The one-sided Christ-symbol represents only the “good” urges, not the “evil” ones. If we revalue this slave transvaluation, however, so that “good” becomes bad (weak) and “evil” good (strong) again, we can see that weakness is really only absence of strength, even as darkness is only absence of light. Thus our Kristos is only light, only strength, only power, only joy.

Helljoy!

4

Let us continue with section 3.

This section eliminates two misunderstandings. But to understand these misunderstandings, we have to jump ahead to section 4. There he calls this higher type “a kind of overman [Ãœbermensch]”. This means that Zarathustra’s assertion that there has never yet been an Ãœbermensch is refuted, as well as the notion suggested by Zarathustra’s metaphor, in his prologue, of the Ãœbermensch being to man as man is to the ape. This has suggested to many that the Ãœbermensch be the next stage in human evolution; but this is not so, as Nietzsche explicitly says here: man is an end.

Well then. I might just as well continue with section 4 - and 5, for that matter.

Hell, let us just continue on - this is all crystal-clear. If anyone has questions, feel free to ask.

We must understand here that the word translated as “pity” is Mitleiden. This has the same structure as the - equally Indo-European - English Latinism “compassion”. The word “passion” is derived from the Latin passio, root passion-, which is a noun formed of the verb pati, “to suffer”. “The passion of the Christ” is the supposed suffering of Jesus, not his “passion” for anything (though this last, more common, sense is derived from the same root meaning: to have a passion for something is to ache for something). The prefix con- is cognate to cum, “with”, which corresponds exactly to the German mit, “with”. So Mitleiden as well as compassio mean “suffering with”, “fellow-suffering” (as Thomas Common translates Mitleiden in Thus Spake Zarathustra).

5

"Christ exemplifies the archetype of the self. He represents a totality of a divine or heavenly kind, a glorified man, a son of God sine macula peccati, unspotted by sin. As Adam secundus he corresponds to the first Adam before the Fall, when the latter was still a pure image of God […].
The God-image in man was not destroyed by the Fall but was only damaged and corrupted (“deformed”), and can be restored through God’s grace. The scope of the integration is suggested by the descensus ad inferos, the descent of Christ’s soul to hell, its work of redemption embracing even the dead. The psychological equivalent of this is the integration of the collective unconscious which forms an essential part of the individuation process. St. Augustine says: “Therefore our end must be our perfection, but our perfection is Christ,” since he is the perfect God-image. For this reason he is also called “King.” His bride (sponsa) is the human soul, which “in an inwardly hidden spiritual mystery is joined to the Word, that the two may be in one flesh,” to correspond with the mystic marriage of Christ and the Church. Concurrently with the continuance of this hieros gamos in the dogma and rites of the Church, the symbolism developed in the course of the Middle Ages into the alchemical conjunction of opposites, or “chymical wedding,” thus giving rise on the one hand to the concept of the lapis philosophorum, signifying totality, and on the other hand to the concept of chemical combination.
The God-image in man that was damaged by the first sin can be “reformed” with the help of God, in accordance with Romans 12 : 2: “And be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is . . . the will of God) (RSV). The totality images which the unconscious produces in the course of an individuation process are similar “reformations” of an a priori archetype (the mandala). As I have already emphasized, the spontaneous symbols of the self, or of wholeness, cannot in practice be distinguished from a God-image. Despite the word metamorphousthe (‘be transformed’) in the Greek text of the above quotation, the “renewal” (anakainosis, reformatio) of the mind is not meant as an actual alteration of consciousness, but rather as the restoration of an original condition, an apocatastasis. This is in exact agreement with the empirical findings of psychology, that there is an ever-present archetype of wholeness which may easily disappear from the purview of consciousness or may never be perceived at all until a consciousness illumunated by conversion recognizes it in the figure of Christ. As a result of this “anamnesis” the original state of oneness with the God-image is restored. It brings about an integration, a bridging of the split in the personality caused by the instincts striving apart in different and mutually contradictory directions.”
[Jung, Aion, Christ, a Symbol of the Self.]

6

I will leave the sections dealing with theologians, Kant, the Christian conception of God, Buddhism, and barbarians (sections 8-23) for what they are for now, and continue with section 24.

"Here I merely touch on the problem of the genesis of Christianity. The first principle for its solution is: Christianity can be understood only in terms of the soil out of which it grew—it is not a counter-movement to the Jewish instinct, it is its very consequence, one inference more in its awe-inspiring logic. In the formula of the Redeemer: "Salvation is of the Jews.“—”

This principle is expounded in the Genealogy, first treatise, section 8:

“[F]rom the trunk of that tree of vengefulness and hatred, Jewish hatred—the profoundest and sublimest kind of hatred, capable of creating ideals and reversing values, the like of which has never existed on earth before—there grew something equally incomparable, a new love, the profoundest and sublimest kind of love—and from what other trunk could it have grown? One should not imagine it grew up as the denial of that thirst for revenge, as the opposite of Jewish hatred! No, the reverse is true! That love grew out of it as its crown, as its triumphant crown spreading itself farther and farther into the purest brightness and sunlight, driven as it were into the domain of light and the heights in pursuit of the goals of that hatred—victory, spoil, and seduction—by the same impulse that drove the roots of that hatred deeper and deeper and more and more covetously into all that was profound and evil. This Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate gospel of love, this “Redeemer” who brought blessedness and victory to the poor, the sick, and the sinners—was he not this seduction in its most uncanny and irresistible form, a seduction and bypath to precisely those Jewish values and new ideals? Did Israel not attain the ultimate goal of its sublime vengefulness precisely through the bypath of this “Redeemer,” this ostensible opponent and disintegrator of Israel? Was it not part of the secret black art of truly grand politics of revenge, of a farseeing, subterranean, slowly advancing, and premeditated revenge, that Israel must itself deny the real instrument of its revenge before all the world as a mortal enemy and nail it to the cross, so that “all the world,” namely all the opponents of Israel, could unhesitatingly swallow just this bait? And could spiritual subtlety imagine any more dangerous bait than this? Anything to equal the enticing, intoxicating, overwhelming, and undermining power of that symbol of the “holy cross,” that ghastly paradox of a “God on the cross,” that mystery of an unimaginable ultimate cruelty and self-crucifixion of God for the salvation of man? What is certain, at least, is that sub hoc signo [under this sign] Israel, with its vengefulness and revaluation of all values, has hitherto triumphed again and again over all other ideals, over all nobler ideals.——”

7

I once wrote a “revaluation” of this section:

“[F]rom those heavens of mercy and love, of Christian love – the highest and most sublime, namely idealizing, glorifying love, which has not had its equal on Earth – something equally incomparable came down, a new contempt, the highest and most sublime of all kinds of contempt: – and from what other heavens could it possibly have come?.. One shouldn’t imagine it has sprung from something like the genuine denial of this will to love, like the opposite of Christian love! No, the reverse is true! This contempt came down from this love, as its thunderbolt, as the triumphant thunderbolt striking as it were deeper and deeper into the most perfect darkness and absence of sun, in pursuit of the goals of that love – power, glory, ecstasy – with the same impulse that made the wings of that love stretch themselves higher and higher and more and more lovingly out to all that is high and good. This Friedrich Nietzsche, as the incarnate cacodaemonium of contempt, this “tyrant” who brought glory and power to the rich, the healthy, the upright – wasn’t he this seduction in its most mysterious and irresistible form, a seduction and detour to precisely those Christian values and ideals? Doesn’t Christianity attain the ultimate goal of its sublime mercy precisely on the detour of this “tyrant”, this ostensible opposer and disintegrator of Christianity? Wasn’t it part of the mystical art of a truly grand politics of mercy, of a clear-sighted, superhuman, all-embracing and spontaneous mercy, that the genuine instrument of its mercy had to renounce Christianity itself before all the world as a mortal enemy and shatter it to pieces, in order that “all the world”, namely all those opposed to Christianity could unhesitatingly swallow just this bait? And could one on the other hand, with all possible greatness of spirit, imagine any more wholesome bait than this? Anything to equal the stimulating, inspiring, awakening, and purifying power of this metaphor of the “right road to Hell”, this thrilling paradox of a “pious man on his way to Hell”, this mystery of an unimaginable ultimate utmost tenderness and self-damnation of a great man for the sake of mankind?.. What is certain, at least, is that sub hoc signo Christianity, with its mercy and determination of all values, will triumph again and again over all other ideals, over all baser ideals.––”
[Elaia, A New Contempt.]

One may perhaps smile at this “revalution”; yet is not Nietzsche’s contempt indeed a form of, if not Christian, then at least Kristian love? Of “loveless love”, “which is a harsh discipline, as cold as ice, as cutting as a sword, and which aspires to overcome the human condition in order to reach the Kingdom of the Immortals, Ultima Thule”?

8

“One should never forgive Christianity for having destroyed such men as Pascal. One should nevr cease from combatting just this in Christianity: its will to break precisely the strongest and noblest souls. One should never rest as long as this one thing has not been utterly and completely destroyed: the ideal of man invented by Christianity, its demands upon men, its yes and its No, with regard to men. The whole absurd residue of Christian fable, conceptual cobweb-spinning and theology does not concern us; it could be a thousand times more absurd and we would not lift a finger against it. But we do combat the ideal that, with its morbid beauty and feminine seductiveness, with its furtive slanderous eloquence appeals to all the cowardices and vanities of wearied souls - and the strongest have their weary hours - as if all that might, in such states, seem most useful and desirable - trust, guilelessness, modesty, patience, love of one’s fellows, resignation, submission to God, a sort of unharnessing and abdication of one’s whole ego - were also the most useful and desirable as such; as if the petty, modest abortion of a soul, the virtuous average-and-herd mand, did not only take precedence over the stronger, more evil, covetous, defiant, prodigal, and therefore a hundred times more imperiled kind of man, but provided nothing less than the ideal, the goal, the measure, the highest desideratum for mankind in general. To erect this ideal was the most sinister temptation ever placed before mankind: for with it, the more strongly constituted exceptions and fortunate cases among men, in whom the will to power and to the growth of the whole type “man” took a step forward, were threatened with destruction; with the values of this ideal, the growth of these higher men, who for the sake of their superior claims and tasks also freely accept a life more full of peril (expressed economically: a rise in the cost of the undertaking in proportion to the decline in the probability of its success) would be attacked at the roots. What is it we combat in Christianity? That it wants to break the strong, that it wants to discourage their courage, exploit their bad hours and their occasional weariness, convert their proud assurance into unease and distress of conscience, that it knows how to poison and sicken the noble instincts until their strength, their will to power turns backward, against itself - until the strong perish through orgies of self-contempt and self-abuse: that gruesome way of perishing of which Pascal provides the most famous example.”
[WP 252, entire.]

9

:laughing:

10

I will now jump to section 44.

“The Gospels stand apart. The Bible in general suffers no comparison. One is among Jews: first consideration to keep from losing the thread completely. The simulation of “holiness” which has really become genius here, never even approximated elsewhere in books or among men, this counterfeit of words and gestures as an art, is not the accident of some individual talent or other or of some exceptional character. This requires race. In Christianity all of Judaism, a several-century-old Jewish preparatory training and technique of the most serious kind, attains its ultimate mastery as the art of lying in a holy manner. The Christian, this ultima ratio of the lie, is the Jew once more—even three times more…— To be determined, as a matter of principle, to apply only concepts, symbols, attitudes which have been proved by the practice of the priest; instinctively to reject every other practice, every other perspective of value and usefulness—that is not merely tradition, that is heritage: only as heritage does it seem like nature itself. The whole of mankind, even the best heads of the best ages—(except one, who is perhaps merely inhuman [Nietzsche himself]—), have permitted themselves to be deceived. The Gospel has been read as a book of innocence…: no small indication of the mastery here attained in histrionics.— Of course, if we saw them, even if only in passing, all these queer prigs and synthetic saints, that would be the end—and precisely because I do not read words without seeing gestures, I make an end of them…”
[AC 44.]

Compare this to:

“The profound contempt with which the Christian was treated in the noble areas of classical antiquity is of a kind with the present instinctive aversion to the Jews: it is the hatred of the free and self-respecting orders for those who are pushing and who combine timid and awkward gestures with an absurd opinion of their own worth.”
[The Will to Power, section 186.]

To be continued.

11

“[L]ittle abortions of prigs and liars began to claim for themselves the concepts of God, truth, light, spirit, love, wisdom, life—as synonyms for themselves, as it were, in order to define themselves against “the world”: little superlative Jews, ripe for every kind of madhouse, turned all values around in their own image, just as if “the Christian” alone were the meaning, the salt, the measure, also the Last Judgment, of all the rest… The whole calamity became possible only because a related, racially related, kind of megalomania already existed in this world, the Jewish one: as soon as the cleft between the Jews and the Jewish Christians opened, no choice whatever remained to the latter but to apply against the Jews themselves the same procedures of self-preservation that the Jewish instinct recommended, whereas hitherto the Jews had applied them only against everything non-Jewish. The Christian is merely a Jew of “more liberal” persuasion.”
[AC 44.]

“What follows from this? That one does well to put on gloves when reading the New Testament. The proximity of so much uncleanliness almost forces one to do this. We would no more choose the “first Christians” to associate with than Polish Jews: not that one even required any objection to them… they both do not smell good.”
[AC 46.]

“To be attacked by a “first Christian” is not to be soiled… On the contrary: it is an honor to be opposed by “first Christians.” One does not read the New Testament without a predilection for that which is maltreated in it—not to speak of “the wisdom of this world,” which an impudent windmaker tries in vain to ruin with “foolish preaching”… Even the Pharisees and scribes derive an advantage from such opposition: they must have been worth something to have been hated in so indecent a manner. Hypocrisy—what a reproach in the mouths of “first Christians”!”
[ibid.]

Compare this last fragment to Zarathustra:

“O my brethren, into the hearts of the good and just looked some one once on a time, who said: “They are the Pharisees.” But people did not understand him.
The good and just themselves were not free to understand him; their spirit was imprisoned in their good conscience. The stupidity of the good is unfathomably wise.”
[Thus Spake Zarathustra, Of Old and New Tables, 26.]

This means that the ones to whom Jesus spoke where themselves hypocrites.

“Moral: every word in the mouth of a “first Christian” is a lie; every act he performs a falseness of instinct—all his values, all his goals are harmful; but whomever he hates, whatever he hates, that has value… The Christian, the priestly Christian in particular, is a criterion of value.— — Need I add that in the whole New Testament there is only a single figure who commands respect? Pilate, the Roman governor. To take a Jewish affair seriously—he does not persuade himself to do that. One Jew more or less—what does it matter?.. The noble scorn of a Roman, confronted with an impudent abuse of the word “truth,” has enriched the New Testament with the only saying that has value—one which is its criticism, even its annihilation: “What is truth?”…”
[ibid., with added emphasis.]

“That we find no God—either in history or in nature or behind nature—is not what differentiates us, but that we experience what has been revered as God not as “godlike” but as miserable, as absurd, as harmful, not merely as an error but as a crime against life… We deny God as God… If one were to prove this God of the Christians to us, we should be even less able to believe in him.— In a formula: deus, qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio [God as Paul created him is a negation of God].”
[AC 47.]

Enough for now.