On the Tarantulas
Look, this is the tarantula’s cave! Do you want to see it yourself? Here hangs its web: touch it, so that it trembles.
There it comes, willingly: welcome, tarantula! Black on your back sits your triangle and emblem; and I know too what sits in your soul.
Revenge sits in your soul: wherever you bite, black scabs grow; with revenge your poison makes the soul whirl!
Thus I speak to you in a parable, you who make souls whirl, you preachers of equality! To me you are tarantulas and secretly vengeful ones!
But I shall bring your hiding places to light soon enough: that is why I laugh my laughter of the heights in your face.
That is why I tear at your web, so that your rage may lure you out of your cave of lies, and your revenge leap out from behind your word “justice.”
For that the human being be redeemed from revenge: that is to me the bridge to the highest hope and a rainbow after long storms.
But the tarantulas, of course, want it otherwise. “Let justice mean to us precisely this: that the world be filled with the storms of our revenge”—thus they speak with one another.
“Revenge we will practice, and abuse, against all who are not equal to us”—thus the tarantula hearts pledge themselves.
“And ‘will to equality’—that itself shall henceforth become the name for virtue; and against everything that has power we will raise our outcry!”
You preachers of equality, the tyrant-madness of impotence thus cries out of you for “equality”: your most secret tyrant-lusts thus disguise themselves in words of virtue!
Embittered conceit, suppressed envy, perhaps your fathers’ conceit and envy: out of you it breaks forth as flame and the madness of revenge.
What the father kept silent comes to speech in the son; and often I found the son to be the father’s secret laid bare.
They resemble the inspired: but it is not the heart that inspires them—but revenge. And when they become refined and cold, it is not the spirit but envy that makes them refined and cold.
Their jealousy leads them onto the thinkers’ paths too; and this is the mark of their jealousy—they always go too far: so that in the end their weariness must lie down to sleep on snow.
From every one of their complaints revenge sounds, in every one of their praises there is a wish to hurt; and being judge seems bliss to them.
But this is what I advise you, my friends: mistrust all in whom the urge to punish is powerful!
They are people of a bad kind and descent; out of their faces look 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 the just,” do not forget that they lack nothing to be Pharisees but—power!
My friends, I do not want to be mixed up and confused with others.
There are those who preach my teaching of life: and at the same time they are preachers of equality, and tarantulas.
That they speak in favor of life, though they sit in their cave, these poison spiders, and turned away from life: this is because they want to hurt with it.
They want to hurt those who now have power: for among these the preaching of death is still most at home.
Were it otherwise, the tarantulas would teach otherwise: and it was precisely they who were once the best slanderers of the world and burners of heretics.
With these preachers of equality I do not want to be mixed up and confused. For thus justice speaks to me: “Human beings are not equal.”
Nor shall they become so! What would my love of the Übermensch be if I spoke otherwise?
On a thousand bridges and footbridges they shall throng toward the future, and ever more war and inequality shall be set among them: thus my great love makes me speak!
Inventors of images and ghosts they shall become in their enmities, and with their 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 the names of values: weapons they shall be, and clanking signs that life must overcome itself again and again!
Life itself wants to build itself up into the height with pillars and steps: it wants to gaze into vast distances and out toward blissful beauties—that is why it needs height!
And because it needs height, it needs steps, and contradiction between the steps and those who climb! Life wants to climb, and in climbing to overcome itself.
And just look, my friends! Here, where the tarantula’s cave is, the ruins of an ancient temple rise upward—just look at it with enlightened eyes!
Truly, whoever once piled his thoughts up in stone toward the heights here knew the secret of all life like the wisest!
That there is struggle and inequality even in beauty, and war for power and supremacy: this he teaches us here in the clearest parable.
How divinely vault and arch break against each other here, as in a wrestling match: how they strive against one another with light and shadow, the divinely striving—
As surely and beautifully let us be enemies too, my friends! Divinely we will strive against one another!—
Woe! Now the tarantula has bitten me myself, my old enemy! Divinely sure and beautiful, she bit me in the finger!
“There must be punishment and justice—so she thinks: not for nothing shall he sing songs here in honor of enmity!”
Yes, she has taken her revenge! And woe! now with revenge she will make my soul whirl too!
But so that I do not whirl, my friends, bind me fast here to this pillar! I would rather be a pillar saint than a whirlwind of vengefulness!
Truly, no spinning wind or whirlwind is Zarathustra; and if he is a dancer, never, though, a tarantula dancer!—
Thus spoke Zarathustra.