On the Three Transformations

Three transformations of the spirit I name for you: how the spirit becomes a camel, and the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.

There is much that is heavy for the spirit, for the strong, load-bearing spirit in which reverence dwells: its strength craves the heavy and the heaviest.

What is heavy? so asks the load-bearing spirit; so it kneels down like the camel and wants to be well loaded.

What is the heaviest thing, you heroes? so asks the load-bearing spirit, that I may take it upon myself and rejoice in my strength.

Is it not this: to humble oneself in order to wound one’s pride? To let one’s folly shine in order to mock one’s wisdom?

Or is it this: to part from our cause when it celebrates its victory? To climb high mountains in order to tempt the tempter?

Or is it this: to feed on the acorns and grass of knowledge and for the sake of truth to suffer hunger in the soul?

Or is it this: to be sick and send the comforters home and make friends with the deaf, who never hear what you want?

Or is it this: to step into filthy water if it is the water of truth, and not to push away cold frogs and hot toads?

Or is it this: to love those who despise us, and to offer our hand to the ghost when it wants to frighten us?

All these heaviest things the load-bearing spirit takes upon itself: like the camel that hurries loaded into the desert, so it hurries into its desert.

But in the loneliest desert the second transformation takes place: here the spirit becomes a lion; it wants to seize freedom as its prey and be master in its own desert.

Here it seeks out its last master: it wants to become his enemy and the enemy of its last god; it wants to wrestle for victory with the great dragon.

Which is the great dragon that the spirit no longer wants to call master and god? “You-shall” is the great dragon’s name. But the spirit of the lion says “I will.”

“You-shall” lies in its path, glittering gold, a scaly beast, and on every scale “You-shall!” gleams golden.

Values a thousand years old gleam on these scales, and thus speaks the mightiest of all dragons: “All the value of things—it gleams on me.”

“All value has already been created, and all created value—that is I. Truly, there shall be no more ‘I will’!” Thus speaks the dragon.

My brothers, why is the lion needed in the spirit? Why is the beast of burden not enough, which renounces and is reverent?

To create new values—even the lion cannot yet do that: but to create freedom for itself for new creating—that the might of the lion can do.

To create freedom for itself and a sacred No even to duty: for that, my brothers, the lion is needed.

To take for oneself the right to new values—that is the most terrible taking for a load-bearing and reverent spirit. Truly, to it this is plunder, and the business of a beast of prey.

Once it loved the “You-shall” as its most sacred thing: now it must find delusion and caprice even in the most sacred, so that it may plunder freedom from its love: the lion is needed for this plunder.

But tell me, my brothers, what can the child still do that even the lion could not? Why must the preying lion still become a child?

The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a wheel rolling out of itself, a first movement, a sacred Yes-saying.

Yes, for the game of creating, my brothers, a sacred Yes-saying is needed: the spirit now wills its own will; the one who was lost to the world wins its own world.

Three transformations of the spirit I have named for you: how the spirit became a camel, and the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.—

Thus spoke Zarathustra. And at that time he was staying in the town called: the Motley Cow.