Of the Tarantulas

See, this is the tarantula's cave! Do you want to see the tarantula itself? Here hangs its web: touch it and make it tremble.
Here it comes docilely: Welcome, tarantula! Your triangle and symbol sit black upon your back; and I know too what sits within your soul. Revenge sits within your soul: a black scab grows wherever you bite; with revenge your poison makes the soul giddy!
Thus do I speak to you in parables, you who make the soul giddy, you preachers of equality! You are tarantulas and dealers in hidden revengefulness!
But I will soon bring your hiding places to light: therefore I laugh my laughter of the heights in your faces.
I pull at your web that your rage may lure you from your cave of lies and your revenge may bound forward from behind your word 'justice'.
For that man may be freed from the bonds of revenge: that is the bridge to my highest hope and a rainbow after protracted storms.
But, naturally, the tarantulas would have it differently. 'That the world may become full of the storms of our revenge, let precisely that be called justice by us' - thus they talk together.
'We shall practise revenge and outrage against 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 we shall raise outcry against everything that has power!'
You preachers of equality, thus from you the tyrant-madness of impotence cries for 'equality': thus your most secret tyrant-appetite disguises itself in words of virtues.
Sourced self-conceit, repressed envy, perhaps your fathers' self-conceit and envy: they burst from you as a flame and madness of revenge.
What the father kept silent the son speaks out; and I often found the son the father's revealed secret.
They resemble inspired men: but it is not the heart that inspires them - it is revenge. And when they become refined and cold, it is not their mind, it is their envy that makes them refined and cold.
Their jealously leads them upon thinkers' paths too; and this is the mark 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 rings in all their complaints, a malevolence is in all their praise; and to be judge seems bliss to them.
Thus, however, I advise you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the urge to punish is strong!
They are the people of a bad breed and a bad descent; the executioner and the bloodhound peer from out their faces.
Mistrust all those who talk much about 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 into Pharisses except - power!
My friends, I do not want to be confused with others or taken for what I am not.
There are those who preach my doctrine of life: yet are at the same time preachers of equality, and tarantulas.
That they speak well of life, these poison spiders, although they sit in their caves and with their backs turned on life, is because they want to do harm by speaking well of life.
They want to do harm to those who now possess power: for with those the preaching of death is still most at home.
If it were otherwise, the tarantulas would teach otherwise: and it is precisely they who were formerly the best world-slanderers and heretic burners.
I do not want to be confused with these preachers of equality, nor taken for one of them. For justice speaks thus to me: 'Men are not equal.'
And they should not become so, either! for what were my love of the Superman if I spoke otherwise?
They should press on to the future across a thousand bridges and gangways, and there should be more and more war and inequality among them: thus my great love makes me speak!
They should become devisers of emblems and phantoms in their enmity, and with their emblems and phantoms they should fight together the supreme fight!
Good and evil, and rich and poor, and noble and mean, and all the names of the virtues: they should be weapons and ringing symbols that life must overcome itself again and again!
Life wants to raise itself on high with pillars and steps; it wants to gaze into the far distance and out upon joyful splendour - that is why it needs height!
And because it needs height, it needs steps and conflict between steps and those who climb them! Life wants to climb and in climbing overcome itself.
And just look, my friends! Here, where the tarantula's cave is, there rises up the ruins of an old temple - just look at it with enlightened eyes!
Truly, he who once towered up his thoughts in stone here knew as well as the wisest about the secret of all life!
That there is battle and inequality and war for power and predominance even in beauty: he teaches us that here in the clearest parable.
How divinely vault and arch here oppose one another in the struggle: how they strive against one another with light and shadow, these divinely-striving things.
Beautiful and assured as these, let us also be enemies, my friends! Let us divinely strive against one another!
Ha! Now the tarantula, my old enemy, has bitten me! Divinely beautiful and assured, it bit me in the finger!
'There must be punishment and justice' - thus it thinks: 'here he shall not sing in vain songs in honour of enmity!'
Yes, the tarantula has revenged itself! and alas, now it will make my soul, too, giddy with revenge!
But so that I may not veer round, tie me tight to this pillar, my friends! I would rather be even a pillar-saint than a whirlpool of revengefulness!
Truly, Zarathustra is no veering wind nor whirlwind; and although he is a dancer, he is by no means a tarantella dancer!

Thus spoke Zarathustra.