"Nietzsche's \"Zarathustra\" : Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939"

C. G. Jung

ISBN 10: 0691099537 / ISBN 13: 9780691099538

Published by The University Press Group Ltd Sep 1988, 1988

Neuware - As a young man growing up near Basel, Jung was fascinated and disturbed by tales of Nietzsche's brilliance, eccentricity, and eventual decline into permanent psychosis. These volumes, the transcript of a previously unpublished private seminar, reveal the fruits of his initial curiosity: Nietzsche's works, which he read as a student at the University of Basel, had moved him profoundly and had a lifelong influence on his thought. During the sessions the mature Jung spoke informally to members of his inner circle about a thinker whose works had not only overwhelmed him with the depth of their understanding of human nature but also provided the philosophical sources of many of his own psychological and metapsychological ideas. Above all, he demonstrated how the remarkable book Thus Spake Zarathustra illustrates both Nietzsche's genius and his neurotic and prepsychotic tendencies. Seller Inventory # 9780691099538

Synopsis:

As a young man growing up near Basel, Jung was fascinated and disturbed by tales of Nietzsche's brilliance, eccentricity, and eventual decline into permanent psychosis. These volumes, the transcript of a previously unpublished private seminar, reveal the fruits of his initial curiosity: Nietzsche's works, which he read as a student at the University of Basel, had moved him profoundly and had a lifelong influence on his thought. During the sessions the mature Jung spoke informally to members of his inner circle about a thinker whose works had not only overwhelmed him with the depth of their understanding of human nature but also provided the philosophical sources of many of his own psychological and metapsychological ideas. Above all, he demonstrated how the remarkable book Thus Spake Zarathustra illustrates both Nietzsche's genius and his neurotic and prepsychotic tendencies.


Since there was at that time no thought of the seminar notes being published, Jung felt free to joke, to lash out at people and events that irritated or angered him, and to comment unreservedly on political, economic, and other public concerns of the time. This seminar and others, including the one recorded in Dream Analysis, were given in English in Zurich during the 1920s and 1930s.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

NIETZSCHE'S ZARATHUSTRA

NOTES OF THE SEMINAR GIVEN IN 1934-1939By C. G. JUNG

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1988 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-09953-8

Contents

INTRODUCTION...........................................................................ixACKNOWLEDGMENTS........................................................................xxiiA NOTE ON THE TEXT.....................................................................xxiiiMEMBERS OF THE SEMINAR.................................................................xxivLIST OF BIBLIOGRAPHIC ABBREVIATIONS....................................................xxviI. 2 May 1934..........................................................................3II. 9 May 1934.........................................................................21III. 16 May 1934.......................................................................38IV. 23 May 1934........................................................................56V. 6 June 1934.........................................................................72VI. 13 June 1934.......................................................................91VII. 20 June 1934......................................................................110VIII. 27 June 1934.....................................................................129I. 10 October 1934.....................................................................149II. 17 October 1934....................................................................166III. 24 October 1934...................................................................183IV. 31 October 1934....................................................................202V. 7 November 1934.....................................................................219VI. 14 November 1934...................................................................236VII. 21 November 1934..................................................................246VIII. 28 November 1934.................................................................263IX. 5 December 1934....................................................................281X. 12 December 1934....................................................................300I. 23 January 1935.....................................................................323II. 30 January 1935....................................................................339III. 6 February 1935...................................................................356IV. 13 February 1935...................................................................372V. 20 February 1935....................................................................388VI. 27 February 1935...................................................................407VII. 6 March 1935......................................................................424VIII. 13 March 1935....................................................................441I. 8 May 1935..........................................................................457II. 15 May 1935........................................................................474III. 22 May 1935.......................................................................489IV. 29 May 1935........................................................................506V. 5 June 1935.........................................................................523VI. 12 June 1935.......................................................................541VII. 19 June 1935......................................................................561VIII. 26 June 1935.....................................................................580I. 16 October 1935.....................................................................601II. 23 October 1935....................................................................619III. 30 October 1935...................................................................638IV. 6 November 1935....................................................................658V. 13 November 1935....................................................................677VI. 20 November 1935...................................................................692VII. 27 November 1935..................................................................712VIII. 4 December 1935..................................................................729IX. 11 December 1935...................................................................748I. 22 January 1936.....................................................................767II. 29 January 1936....................................................................786III. 5 February 1936...................................................................804IV. 12 February 1936...................................................................821V. 19 February 1936....................................................................840VI. 26 February 1936...................................................................857VII. 4 March 1936......................................................................873I. 6 May 1936..........................................................................893II. 13 May 1936........................................................................911III. 20 May 1936.......................................................................926IV. 27 May 1936........................................................................946V. 3 June 1936.........................................................................965VI. 10 June 1936.......................................................................983VII. 17 June 1936......................................................................1000VIII. 24 June 1936.....................................................................1019I. 5 May 1937..........................................................................1037II. 12 May 1937........................................................................1055III. 19 May 1937.......................................................................1075IV. 26 May 1937........................................................................1093V. 2 June 1937.........................................................................1113VI. 9 June 1937........................................................................1132VII. 16 June 1937......................................................................1149VIII. 23 June 1937.....................................................................1170IX. 30 June 1937.......................................................................1189I. 4 May 1938..........................................................................1209II. 11 May 1938........................................................................1230III. 18 May 1938.......................................................................1248IV. 25 May 1938........................................................................1264V. 8 June 1938.........................................................................1281VI. 15 June 1938.......................................................................1298VII. 22 June 1938......................................................................1317I. 19 October 1938.....................................................................1339II. 26 October 1938....................................................................1355III. 2 November 1938...................................................................1372IV. 9 November 1938....................................................................1389V. 16 November 1938....................................................................1404VI. 30 November 1938...................................................................1421VII. 7 December 1938...................................................................1437I. 18 January 1939.....................................................................1457II. 25 January 1939....................................................................1475III. 1 February 1939...................................................................1493IV. 8 February 1939....................................................................1512V. 15 February 1939....................................................................1528REFERENCES TO THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF Thus Spake Zarathustra.....................1545INDEX..................................................................................1547

Chapter One

LECTURE I 2 May 1934

Dr. Jung:

Ladies and Gentlemen: I made up my mind to give you a Seminar about Zarathustra as you wished, but the responsibility is on your heads. If you think that Zarathustra is easier than those visions, you are badly mistaken, it is a hell of a confusion and extraordinarily difficult. I broke my head over certain problems; it will be very hard to elucidate this work from a psychological angle. However, we will try to do our best, but you must cooperate.

I think, concerning the technique, that it will be best to go through the chapters from the beginning, and I am afraid it will take us far more than one term to plough through the whole thing. It is considerably longer than the visions we have been working on but we can stop any time you wish; perhaps you will get sick of it in the long run but I would not know any other way of dealing with it. You know, these chapters of Zarathustra are sort of sermons in verse, but they have some analogy with the visions in as much as they are also evolutionary incidents. They form a string of experiences and events, manifestations of the unconscious, often a directly visionary character; and therefore it is probably recommendable to follow the same technique in the analysis which we have applied to the visions. There are certain chapters which consist of or start from visions, or are comments on visions or dreams Nietzsche had had, and other chapters are sermons spoken by Zarathustra.

Now Zarathustra is by no means a merely metaphorical or poetical figure invented by the author himself. He once wrote to his sister that Zarathustra had already appeared to him in a dream when he was a boy. Then I found an allusion to the peculiar fact that Nietzsche as a young man studied in Leipzig, where there is a funny kind of Persian sect, the so-called Mazdaznan sect, and their prophet is a man who calls himself El Ha-nisch. But that man is said to be a German from the blessed land of Saxony named Haenisch, a well-known Saxon name; as a matter of fact, the professor of Oriental languages here told me that when he was studying Persian in Leipzig, this man was in the same seminar. He is certainly not the originator of that Mazdaznan sect; it is of older origin. They took over certain Persian ideas from the Zend-Avesta, particularly the hygienic rules which they applied in a more or less mechanical way, accompanied by metaphysical teaching also taken from the Zend-Avesta, which, as you know, is a collection of the sacred books of the Zoroastrian belief. It has been assumed that Nietzsche became acquainted with certain members of that sect and thus got some notion about Zarathustra or the Zoroastrian traditions. Personally, however, I don't believe this; he would never have gotten a very high idea of Zarathustra through their representations. Nietzsche was a well-read man, in many ways very learned, so it is quite probable or even certain, that he must have made some special studies along the line of the Zend-Avesta, a great part of which was already translated in his days. There is now a good German translation, and an English one in the series of The Sacred Books of the East. It consists of books of very different periods, the earliest of which, the Yasna, includes the so-called Gathas, sermons in verse. These are called the verse sermons of Zarathustra and are written in a special dialect of old Iranian; as they are very archaic, the oldest of all, it is assumed that they really go back to the time of Zarathustra. And these would form the model for the verse sermons of Nietzsche's Zarathustra.

We must go a little into the history of that Zoroastrian belief because it plays a certain role in the symbolism of the book. Zarathustra is almost a legendary figure, yet there are certain notions about him which prove that he must have been a real person who lived in a remote age. It is not possible to place him exactly either geographically or chronologically, but he must have lived between the seventh and ninth centuries B.C. probably in north-western Persia. He taught chiefly at the court of a king or prince named Vishtaspa. (The Greek form of this name is Hystaspes, which you may remember was the name of the father of Darius I.) The story says that Zarathustra first became acquainted with the two ministers at the Court of Vishtaspa, and through them with the noble queen whom he converted, and then through her he converted the king. This is psychologically a very ordinary proceeding, it usually happens that way. One of the most successful propagandists of early Christianity in high circles was the Pope Damasus I, whose nickname was matronarum auriscalpius, meaning the one who tickles the ears of the noble ladies; he used to convert the nobility of Rome through the ladies of the noble families. So this is probably a historic detail in the life of Zarathustra. Then in contradistinction to certain other founders of religions, he married and lived to be quite old. He was killed by soldiers, while standing near his altar, on the occasion of the conquest of his city.

The Gathas are probably authentic documents which date from Zarathustra's time and it is quite possible that they were his own doing. Practically nothing can be concluded from them as to historical detail, but that ancient teaching was remarkably intelligent for those days, and it was characterized by one particular feature which was, one could say, the clue for the fact that Nietzsche chose that figure. In fact, Kietzsche himself says that he chose Zarathustra because he was the inventor of the contrast of good and evil; his teaching was the cosmic struggle between the powers of light and darkness, and he it was who perpetuated this eternal conflict. And in the course of time Zarathustra had to come back again in order to mend that invention, in order to reconcile the good and evil which he separated in that remote age for the first time. It is true that one would not be able to indicate any thinker earlier than Zarathustra who stressed the contrast between good and evil as a main principle. The whole Zoroastrian religion is based upon this conflict.

The dogmatic teaching is that in the beginning there was one all-wise and all-powerful god called Mazda (which means simply the wise one, something like Laotze) with the attribute of Ahura. Ahura is the Iranian version of the Sanskrit word Asura, which is the name of the spiritual god in the oldest parts of the Rigveda. You know the Rigveda is a collection of poems or hymns, part of the sacred literature of the Hindus, which goes back to an extremely remote age, perhaps to the time of the primitive Aryan invaders of India. One of the oldest parts contains the so-called frog songs of the priests and they are supposed to date back to five thousand B.C. though I don't know whether that estimate is correct. In those old frog songs, as I have told you, the priests in their rain charms identifted themselves with the frogs; when there was a drought the priests sang the frog songs as if it had rained. They imitated the frogs as they sing after the rain, because they feel well then in their ponds, but when there is no water there is nothing to sing about-as primitives also, in order to produce rain, imitate the fall of rain-drops, or they sprinkle blood or milk, or they whistle, imitating the sound of the wind that brings clouds. This Asura is the highest god and he is different from the concept of the deva. (Deva or devs, the plural, is the root word from which, for instance, Zeus is derived, and Deus, and Ziu, and from that our word Tuesday.) The devs are the shining gods of the day, of the clear blue sky, of things visible in the daylight, while Asura is a god within, a god of chiefly spiritual and moral character. Now in the later development—in the later parts of the Rigveda—Asura disintegrated into a multitude of asuras, and they are demons of a definitely evil nature. And you find the same thing happening with the devs in Persia. The Zoroastrians had that concept of Asura, the highest god, that very ancient idea of the Rigveda, and they chose the name in the Persian form, Ahura, as an attribute for Mazda, so their god was called Ahura Mazda.

Ahura Mazda, the greatest god, the wise man, is generally supposed to be Zarathustra's creation, and he came to that formulation probably through inner experiences of which his story tells. These experiences are called in the old literature, "Meetings and Questionings"; that is, he met Ahura Mazda, or his spoken word called Vohu Mano, meaning the good attitude. The German word for Vohu Mano would be: die gute Gesinnung, the good attitude, a good intention, a good word, the right word. We could easily translate it, with no particular philosophical difficulty, by the Christian concept of the Logos; the spoken word represents God in the incarnated form, the Logos as incarnated in Christ would be the exact counterpart of Vohu Mano. One finds the same concept in Islam in the mystical Sufi sect, where Allah, because he is unnameable, ineffable, and therefore formless, appears in tangible form in Chidr, the green one, who is called "the first angel of Allah," "the Word," "the Face of Allah." "The Angel of the Face" is a similar conception in the Old Testament, a sort of tangible representation of an absolutely intangible and indefiable deity. So Ahura Mazda, or Vohu Mano, became experiences to Zarathustra, the so-called Meetings and Questionings. He had, I think, seven Meetings with the good spirit of the god Ahura Mazda. (There is also a bad spirit of which we shall talk presently.) He received the revelation, he was taught the truth by that spirit. I mention that now because it is a parallel to Nietzsche's Zarathustra.

The name Zarathustra in Persian is written Zarathushtra; ushtra is typically Persian and it means camel. There is a family story about him and all the names in his family have to do with mares and stallions, horses and cattle, camels, etc., showing that they are quite native and that he belonged to a sort of cattle people. Also his idea of a perfect reward in heaven was exceedingly archaic. He himself hoped that after a life full of merit he would be rewarded in the land of the hereafter by the good gift of one stallion and twelve mares, as well as by the possession of a perfectly youthful and beautiful body. One finds very similar ideas in Islam still. The Greek version of the name Zarathustra is Zoroaster. But the Greeks knew practically nothing of his teaching; to them he was a great sorceror and astrologer; anything that went under Zoroaster's name was magic and black arts.

Now, besides the manifestation of god in the spoken word or in the good intention of the Vohu Mano, there is the corresponding dark manifestation, the evil spirit, Angro Mainyush. (He was later called Ah-riman, and Ahura Mazda was called Ormazd.) These two spirits, Vohu Mano and Angro Mainyush, were together in the original Ahura Mazda, showing that in the beginning there was no separation of good and evil. But after a while they began to quarrel with each other, and a fight ensued, and then the creation of the world became necessary. So Ahura Mazda created the world, but he was so upset by it that for six thousand years he did not know what to do, and then Angro Mainyush broke into his creation and spoiled the whole show. And since then there is hell to pay, because all the light got lost in that darkness, and the hosts of devils he brought into this world are now to be combatted. For he had one great success right in the beginning: he succeeded in converting the devs to his convictions and so they became devils (devils comes from devs of course), just as Ahura became ahuras, many devils. So the original beautiful gods of the day, the gods of the visible things, beauty and harmony, became evil and nocturnal demons and formed the main body of evil forces, just as the old Germanic gods became storm devils and all sorts of evil spirits when they were dethroned by Christianity. So there was a perpetual fight between Vohu Mane) and the hosts of evil led by Angro Mainyush.

What Ahura Mazda is doing in the end is not quite visible or understandable; he is of course supposed to be on the side of the good—he is with his good spirit, but whether he is with his bad spirit too is not dear. It is the same awkward situation that we have in Christianity, where we are also not quite sure what the relationship is between God and the devil. Is it a co-dominion with God?—or what is it? That Christian awkwardness is an old inheritance from Persia—I could tell you several other things which would substantiate that idea—and therefore the theologians don't like Zarathustra and criticize him. But he is really the founder of the Christian dogma; all the oblique and contrary things in the Christian dogma can be found in the Persian religion as well. The only thing the theologians can say about it is that Christianity is a much higher religion. They point out with great satisfaction that the Persian religion is only a religion of rewards, that people are good only in order to be rewarded in heaven, and the founder himself expected a stallion and twelve mares—"and you see how low that is!" But I don't agree with that entirely; that little difference was in the time of Homer and Greek mythology—not to speak of the Germanic traclitions—when the slaughtering of children and eating of human flesh still took place. Those were highly primitive times, so no wonder that Zarathustra had somewhat concretized expectations. Otherwise his teaching was remarkably wise and advanced. He was the main opponent of magic, for example; he tried to uproot magic wherever he met it, and the temples and the priests also had to go by the board. They had no real priests in the beginning, it was like the beginning of Christianity. But soon the same process appeared as it did later on in Christianity—the influx of primitive magic and primitive heathenish ideas—and the beautiful monotheism of Ahura Mazda was split up into a multitude of gods, like the splitting up of God into the Trinity and then into the many saints and so on. Ahura Mazda had qualities naturally: he was the truth, he was wisdom, he was justice, etc., and those qualities became personified as the so-called amesha spentas which are immortal spirits. One was truth, another justice, and so on-abstract qualities like the so-called attributes of God in the Christian dogma. These amesha spentas became gods too, and the whole spiritual attitude of the early Zoroastrian teaching changed and became a tremendously specialized ritualism.

The original teaching of Zarathustra, however, was characterized by a real spiritual piety. It was the Gesinnung, the moral attitude, that counted, more than the external works. His teaching was that as you commit sin outside in reality, so you can commit sin inside as a sin of conscience, and it is the same thing, just as bad. And think of the eighth or ninth century B.C. which was the niveau of such religious teaching! It is an amazingly high level, and this extraordinary moral discrimination points to a most unusual genius.

Now this was the model for Nietzsche's Zarathustra. It had nothing to do with the Mazdaznan sect. I think it is rather, as he says, that that figure was an experience of old standing; it was the early experience of the old wise man. You know, we often speak of that figure as a personification of the inherited wisdom of the ages, the truth that has become instinctive through experience, one could say, having been lived millions of times, a sort of wisdom of nature that is born in us and to which we owe the coordination of our whole biological as well as psychological system—that old experience which is still visible in our dreams and in our instincts. This is the mental or spiritual aspect of a perfectly natural fact, namely, the teleology of a living system. So Nietzsche chose a most dignified and worthy model for his old wise man, because to him it was that same kind of experience.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from NIETZSCHE'S ZARATHUSTRAby C. G. JUNG Copyright © 1988 by PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Bibliographic Details

Title: "Nietzsche's \"Zarathustra\" : Notes of the ...
Publisher: The University Press Group Ltd Sep 1988
Publication Date: 1988
Binding: Buch
Condition: Neu