ON THE TARANTULAS
ON THE TARANTULAS
SEE,THIS IS THE tarantula’s hole! 6 Do you want to see the tarantula itself? Here hangs its web: touch it, so that it trembles.
There it comes willingly: welcome, tarantula! Your triangle and symbol sit black upon your back; and I also know what sits in your soul.
Revenge sits in your soul: wherever you bite, a black scab grows; your poison makes the soul giddy with revenge!
Thus I speak to you in a parable, you who make the soul giddy, you preachers of equality! To me you are tarantulas and the secretly vengeful!
But soon I will bring your hiding places to light: therefore I laugh in your faces my laughter of the heights.
Therefore I tear at your web, that your rage may lure you from your hole of lies, and your revenge may leap forth from behind your word “justice.”
For that man be redeemed from revenge: for me that is the bridge to the highest hope, and a rainbow after long storms.
But of course the tarantulas would have it otherwise. “That the world may become full of the storms of our revenge, let precisely that be called justice by us”—thus they talk to one another.
“We shall wreak vengeance and insult on all who are not as we are”—thus the tarantula-hearts promise themselves.
“And ‘will to equality’—that itself shall henceforth be the name of virtue; and against everything that has power we will raise our outcry!”
You preachers of equality, the tyrant-madness of impotence cries thus in you for “equality”: thus your most secret tyrant appetite disguises itself in words of virtue!
Soured conceit, repressed envy, perhaps your fathers’ conceit and envy: they erupt from you as flame and frenzy of revenge.
What was silent in the father speaks out in the son; and I often found the son to be the father’s secret revealed.
They resemble the inspired: yet it is not the heart that inspires them-but revenge. And when they become refined and cold, it is not spirit, but envy, that makes them refined and cold.
Their jealousy leads them also upon thinkers’ paths; and this is the sign of their jealousy—they always go too far: so that their weariness has at last to lie down and sleep even on the snow.
Revenge sounds out of all their complaints, a malevolence is in all their praise; and to be judge seems bliss to them.
But thus I counsel you, my friends: mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!
They are people of a bad race and lineage; out of their faces peer the hangman and the bloodhound.
Mistrust all those who talk much of their justice! Truly, it is not only honey that their souls lack.
And when they call themselves “the good and just,” do not forget, that nothing is lacking to make them Pharisees except—power!
My friends, I do not want to be mixed up and confused with others.
There are those who preach my doctrine of life: and are at the same time preachers of equality and tarantulas.
That they speak well of life, though they sit in their hole, these poisonous spiders, with their backs turned on life: this is because they want to do harm.
They want to harm those who now have power: for with those the preaching of death is still most at home.
Were it otherwise, then the tarantulas would teach otherwise: and they themselves were formerly the best slanderers of the world and burners of heretics.
I do not want to be mixed up and confused with these preachers of equality. For justice speaks thus to me: “Men are not equal.”7
And neither should they become so! What would my love of the Übermensch be, if I spoke otherwise?
They should press on to the future on a thousand bridges and paths, and there should be more and more war and inequality among them: thus my great love makes me speak!
In their hostilities they shall become inventors of images and ghosts, and with those images and ghosts they shall yet fight the highest fight against one another!
Good and evil, and rich and poor, and high and low, and all names of the values: they shall be weapons and ringing signs that life must overcome itself again and again!
Life wants to build itself up into the heights with columns and stairs: it wants to look into the far distance and out towards joyful beauties—therefore it needs height!
And because it needs height, it needs steps and conflict among the steps and the climbers! Life wants to climb and in climbing overcome itself.
And just look, my friends! Here, where the tarantula’s hole is, there rises up the ruins of an ancient temple-just look at it with enlightened eyes!
Truly, he who once piled up his thoughts here in stone, knew as well as the wisest about the secret of all life!
That there is battle and inequality even in beauty, and war for power and superpower: that is what he teaches us here in the plainest parable.
How divinely vault and arches break through each other here in the wrestling match: how they strive against each other with light and shade, the godlike strivers.—
Thus assured and beautiful let us also be enemies, my friends! Divinely will we strive against one another!—
Alas! Now the tarantula, my old enemy, has bitten me! Divinely assured and beautiful it bit me on the finger!
“There must be punishment and justice”—thus it thinks: “and here he shall not sing songs in honor of enmity in vain!”
Yes, it has revenged itself! And ah! now it will also make my soul dizzy with revenge!
That I may not veer round, my friends, bind me fast to this pillar! I would rather be a stylite than a whirl of revenge!
Truly, Zarathustra is no cyclone or whirlwind: and if he is a dancer, he will never dance the tarantella!—
Thus spoke Zarathustra.