Corpus · Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Have We Really Stopped Worshipping?

Thus Spoke Zarathustra — Essential Reading Path · Reading 9 of 10

Read: Part IV, “The Higher Man,” internal §§1–6, stopping before §7; resume at §18 and read through §20. Omit §§7–17. Then read “The Awakening,” internal §2 only, followed by the complete “The Ass-Festival” (all three sections). Stop before “The Drunken Song.”
Allow: About 80–105 minutes, including the passages, this guide, rereading, and a short written response.

Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche. Free alternative: The Higher Man, §§1–6 · The Higher Man, §§18–20 · The Awakening, §2 · The Ass-Festival (Thomas Common, Thus Spake Zarathustra).

Chapter names follow Common’s edition; see the edition guide for alternate titles. Its Roman numerals I–LXXX number chapters across the book, while the assignment above specifies parts and internal sections. If highlighting fails, locate the stated chapter and section. This guide uses overman where Common writes superman. The introduction and appended notes by other writers are distinct from Nietzsche’s text; the explanations below are this guide’s commentary.

Before you read

A group rejects an institution that once supplied its convictions and ceremonies. Its members prize independence. Later, they begin repeating a new leader's phrases, gathering around familiar rituals, and treating doubts as failures of loyalty. The object of devotion has changed. Has their relationship to authority?

Now complicate the example. Suppose their gathering also makes them laugh at themselves and releases a real burden. A practice could restore dependence and permit recovery at the same time. That possibility makes the scenes in this reading harder to judge than a simple story of relapse.

Part IV begins after further months and years have passed; Zarathustra's hair has become white. In the intervening narrative, a cry of distress draws him through encounters with troubled figures, whom he directs toward his cave. They gather there and share a meal. Our first selection belongs to his address to these guests.

They include two kings, a former pope, a magician, a voluntary beggar, a wanderer and shadow, a soothsayer, a conscientious investigator, and the ugliest man. Their old sources of orientation have faltered in different ways. Calling them higher men does not make them the overman.

The main question: Can a new festival help people become independent, or does their need to worship turn even liberation into another devotion?

Three things to notice

1. A severe invitation. In “The Higher Man,” §§1–6, distinguish the future Zarathustra desires from the guests he addresses. Retain the speech's hostility to equality, comfort, and ordinary claims on care.
2. A lesson in laughter. In §§18–20, follow the crown from Zarathustra's own head toward his listeners. What would laughing beyond themselves require? Sections 7–17 are omitted from this selection.
3. Changing judgments of the festival. Follow the litany, Zarathustra's interruption, the guests' different explanations, and his eventual encouragement. Who thinks the worship is recovery, folly, or renewed belief?

A way to read the passages

Returning to the failed marketplace lesson

“The Higher Man” begins with Zarathustra recalling his first public address. Speaking to everyone, he now says, amounted to reaching no one. He draws a lesson about choosing an audience and tells the higher men to leave the marketplace. “The Higher Man,” §1

But the lesson comes with an explicit rejection of equality. Zarathustra hears the crowd grounding equal standing in God, then insists that God's death leaves the higher men free to refuse equality before the crowd. His concern is not merely that noisy surroundings make concentration difficult.

The conclusion requires scrutiny. Losing one religious justification for equality would not disprove every possible justification for it. His declaration also does not demonstrate the worth of the hierarchy he favors. We should preserve the anti-egalitarian commitment while examining its reasons.

In §2, the death of God becomes an opening for a human future and a source of fear. The guests are invited to desire the overman's life. The distinction is crucial: they receive a demand oriented beyond their present condition, not a certificate that they have already fulfilled it. §2

Why disappointment makes these guests promising

Section 3 contrasts preserving humanity with surpassing it. Zarathustra finds hope in the guests' contempt and despair because these indicate that they have not made peace with prevailing expectations. Their dissatisfaction can preserve a capacity for another aspiration. §3

This is qualified hope, not the claim that suffering or dissent automatically makes someone exceptional. The guests still have to transform their relation to themselves. Their name marks a relative distinction within humanity; the overman names the further possibility Zarathustra announces.

The speech's severity must remain audible. He places that future above concern for the neighbor, the poorest, and the most distressed. He attacks the happiness of the greatest number and uses contemptuous language associating the servile and the feminine with what he rejects.

These are ethical and gendered exclusions within the aspiration. Translating the speech into encouragement to find one's individual path would conceal its ranking of whose needs matter. We can recognize its challenge to complacency while refusing to take that ranking for granted.

Courage, danger, and the refusal to make things easier

Section 4 asks for courage without witnesses, including a divine witness. The courageous person sees the abyss and feels fear, then confronts it. Blindness, intoxication, or emotional coldness cannot supply the relevant achievement because they may prevent the danger from being recognized. §4

Section 5 renews a difficult claim from “The Convalescent.” Zarathustra says humanity must become better and more evil: the most evil is necessary for the overman’s best. What this evil includes, and what could justify it, remain difficult questions. His assertion does not establish which transgressions are justified or who may bear their costs. §5

Section 6 then refuses the role of comforting rescuer. He will not repair the guests' failures or provide easier paths. His images include destruction by lightning, and he distinguishes their suffering over themselves from his own suffering over humanity. §6

This is more severe than advising persistence through a difficult task. The teacher dismisses ordinary miseries and claims a higher order of suffering. Neither his intensity nor his description of his own ordeal proves that this hierarchy is justified.

Keep that hardness beside what follows. Laughter will enter a demanding, exclusive account of transformation; it does not simply replace the earlier claims with universal reassurance.

The crown of laughter has to move

After the omitted §§7–17, resume at §18. Zarathustra places a crown of laughter on his own head and consecrates his laughter himself. A familiar language of sacred authority survives, but the speaker claims responsibility for the consecration. §18

In §19, elevated hearts must be joined by moving legs. Even awkward dancing can be a beginning. The image makes room for imperfect attempts at joy rather than demanding flawless lightness before one may begin. §19

Section 20 praises an unruly wind and tells the higher men to laugh beyond themselves. Failure has left possibilities open. He finally throws the crown toward them: the capacity cannot remain his personal spectacle for an admiring audience. §20

Imagine people able to joke about their former pretensions without requiring everyone to admire their new sophistication. That would differ from laughing only at outsiders. The image helps us see what a movement beyond self-importance might involve; it does not erase the speech's continuing contempt for the populace and the ill-constituted.

The question now becomes whether the listeners can make anything of this invitation. Repeating the teacher's praise of laughter will not establish that they have learned it.

A suddenly pious silence

The narrative passes through further songs and exchanges before “The Awakening.” The guests have become noisy and merry, and Zarathustra has gone outside. In the assigned §2, sudden silence and the smell of incense draw him back to the cave entrance. He discovers them kneeling before the ass. “The Awakening,” §2

Zarathustra first interprets this as renewed piety and madness. The narrator describes the assembled worshippers, while the ugliest man delivers the litany. Keeping those voices separate matters: we are watching participants interpret a performance, not receiving one settled explanation of it.

The comparisons with credulous old women, here and in the next chapter, make contempt for women part of the comedy. Zarathustra's later racialized insult involving the shadow's companions adds another degrading register. These judgments should not disappear because the scene is comic.

When every answer sounds like yes

The litany praises the ass for carrying burdens, accepting service, and never refusing. Its silence becomes a strategy for avoiding error; its apparent stupidity becomes hidden wisdom. The worshippers supply meanings the animal does not articulate.

They also attribute world-creation to it, declare it beyond good and evil, praise its indiscriminate welcome, and celebrate its bodily appetites. Christian devotional language mixes with echoes of Zarathustra's own vocabulary. Familiar forms of reverence can absorb apparently irreverent teachings.

The ass repeatedly brays. Common renders the sound as an affirmative response, making the coincidence between braying and saying yes explicit. Yet a repeated sound is not evidence that the animal has confronted a question, understood an alternative, or created a value.

This is the comic pressure on Reading 8. A difficult affirmation cannot be identified simply by counting affirmative noises. The ass's unvarying response can resemble a holy yes while showing none of the struggle with what must be affirmed.

The parody also threatens the teacher. If his language can be used this way, he cannot establish its meaning merely by repeating it more forcefully. What his listeners do with it becomes part of its test.

Five explanations, rather than one return to belief

“The Ass-Festival” begins with Zarathustra himself braying louder than the animal as he interrupts. He pulls the worshippers up and questions them. His intervention is already caught within the scene's comic language. “The Ass-Festival,” §1

The former pope openly values having something to worship. An earthly form seems preferable to no object at all, and he regards an abstract account of God as a path toward unbelief. His answer reveals the persistence of devotion's need after its former object has failed.

The wanderer and shadow claims that the old God lives again and blames the ugliest man. He describes divine death as a prejudice. This is the shadow's explanation, not the narrator announcing that the book's earlier diagnosis has been reversed.

The magician concedes that his conduct was stupid and repugnant to him. Agreement with Zarathustra leaves the question of his participation unresolved. Recognizing a practice's foolishness has not prevented him from joining it.

The conscientious investigator develops a comic argument for an eternal, slow, stupid deity. He suggests that excessive cleverness may desire folly, then turns the charge toward Zarathustra: the teacher's own winding paths could lead toward the ass. Intellectual ingenuity is being used to defend what initially looks indefensible.

The ugliest man answers differently. He invokes Zarathustra's teaching that laughter can kill more thoroughly than anger. Perhaps the festival is mockery that finishes undoing divine authority. His transformed appearance encourages the possibility of a change, but his mischievous reply leaves his exact commitment uncertain.

The explanations range from renewed devotion through embarrassed participation to a claim of destructive parody. Treating every guest as having precisely the same belief would flatten the scene.

Childhood, earth, and the teacher's reversal

In §2, Zarathustra accuses the guests of disguising their delight in becoming pious children again. He directs them out of the cave, then plays with the religious promise of a kingdom belonging to children. He rejects the heavenly destination in favor of an earthly kingdom.

The childhood image has more than one resonance. Becoming childish can mean retreating into dependence; the book has also made the child an image of new beginning. The scene does not allow every return to childhood to count automatically as creative innocence.

Then §3 changes the judgment. Zarathustra likes the guests' renewed joy, calls for new festivals, and treats this one as a favorable sign of convalescence. He even invites its repetition, out of love for themselves and for him.

This endorsement prevents a simple moral of relapse. Their invented ceremony may have helped them recover a capacity for celebration, even if it borrows old forms. He recognizes something they have devised in his company rather than insisting that recovery duplicate his own performance.

Yet the final invitation to remember him also echoes the devotional structure under examination. Does the teacher become another sacred center? The ending permits that question alongside the real importance he gives their joy.

Pause here: Explain why Zarathustra's first rebuke and his final approval each make sense in the scene. What does each response notice that the other might miss?

A difficulty to keep in view

Can a borrowed ritual loosen dependence while also preserving it?

The guests' laughter might create distance from beliefs that formerly commanded them. A familiar ceremony can become available for play. Their recovery from despair matters even if the festival falls short of the teacher's ideal.

But the pope still needs an object of adoration, and several guests defend their conduct through the teacher's own words. The closing remembrance of Zarathustra risks redirecting worship toward him. These are concrete grounds for questioning how far their independence extends.

Joy alone therefore cannot certify liberation, just as ritual alone cannot prove a complete return to old belief. Ask what the practice enables its participants to do afterward. Can they tolerate disagreement, revise the ceremony, or leave the teacher's shelter? This reading opens those questions without answering them in advance.

The hierarchy of higher men also needs continuing scrutiny. Their exceptional status is asserted through exclusions and contempt as well as aspiration. Understanding their incomplete transformation does not oblige us to endorse the standards by which others are placed beneath them.

We can let the festival be both a limited achievement and an unresolved problem. The next scenes will test whether joy acquired in the cave can survive a change in circumstances.

Check your understanding

Try answering before opening each suggested response.

What should I write in my notes?

Write 200–300 words judging whether the ass-festival represents progress, dependence, or a mixture of both.

1. Choose one demand from the assigned sections of “The Higher Man.” Explain what it asks the guests to become.
2. Use a specific feature of the litany to show how the festival complicates that demand.
3. Compare two guests' explanations. Keep their claims distinct from the narrator's description and Zarathustra's judgments.
4. Explain the force of Zarathustra's eventual encouragement, including its invitation to remember him.
5. State one further action or response that would help you assess the guests' independence. Leave the next reading's events open.

A successful response gives the joy and the renewed devotion serious attention. It supports its judgment through the scene's changes rather than treating parody as automatically liberating or worship as automatically unchanged.

Continue the reading

Reading 10: Why Does Zarathustra Leave Again? →

The final reading follows “The Drunken Song” and “The Sign.” An apparent affirmation during the night meets a new morning, and Zarathustra's relation to his guests becomes a question about his own next task.

Carry this question forward: What would show that a moment of joy has become a capacity someone can carry beyond the gathering that produced it? Keep the teacher inside that question too. His need for listeners has been part of the story since the opening address to the sun.

Return to the Essential Reading Path

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