Role

Chapter 2

The dream and diction of a God, did the world once seem to me - colored vapors before the eyes of a divinely dissatisfied one.

Good and evil, and joy and woe, Magic and Purity, and I and thou all colored vapours did they seem to me before creative eyes. The creator wished to look away from himself, thereupon he created the world.

Intoxicating joy is it for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and forget himself. Intoxicating joy and self-forgetting, did the world once seem to me.

Thus, once on a time, did I also cast my fancy beyond man, like all worldsmen. Beyond man, forsooth?

A new will teach I unto men: to choose that path which man hath not followed blindly, and to approve of it and no longer to slink aside from it, like the sick and perishing Beholders of Magic!

The sick n perishing Beholders - it was they who despised the body, heavens and the earth, and invented their world of magic, and the redeeming blood-drops but even those sweet and sad poisons they borrowed from the body, heavens and the earth!

From their misery they sought escape, and the stars were too remote for them.
Then they sighed: "O that there were heavenly paths by which to steal into another existence and into happiness!" Then they contrived for themselves their by-paths and bloody magics!

Beyond the sphere of their body and this earth they now fancied themselves transported, these ungrateful ones. But to what did they owe the
convulsion and rapture of their transport? To their body, heaven and this earth.

What happened, my brethren? I surpassed myself, the suffering one. I carried
mine own ashes to the mountain a brighter flame I contrived for myself. And lo!
Thereupon the phantom of nigthmare WITHDREW from me!

To me the convalescent would it now be suffering and torment to believe in such nightmare-phantoms: suffering would it now be to me, and humiliation. Thus I speak of nightmares now to the Beholders of Magic.

Suffering was it, and impotence that created all Strength and the short madness of unwilling sleep, which only the greatest of sufferer experienced.

Weariness, which sought to get to the ultimate with one leap, with a death-leap - a poor ignorant weariness, almost unwilling even to will any longer that created all phantasms and nightmares.

Believe me, my brethren! It was the body which despaired of the body it groped with the fingers of the infatuated spirit at the ultimate walls.

Believe me, my brethren! It was the body which despaired of the earth - it heard the bowels of existence speaking unto it.

And then it sought to get through the ultimate walls with its head and not with its head only - into Purity.