Blog Post

Nietzsche’s Dance With Zarathustra

Constantine Sandis • 12 May 2021

In 1885 Nietzsche finished writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which he has the prophet proclaim many Nietzschean ideas in parables and epiphets. Constantine Sandis asks why Nietzsche particularly chose Zarathustra.

In M. Night Shyamalan’s superhero film Unbreakable , the fragile-boned Elijah believes that somewhere out there he has an enemy with the exact opposite property, whom he eventually identifies as the ‘unbreakable’ security guard David Dunn. A similar kind of reasoning led Nietzsche to name the protagonist of his religious parody Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-5) after Zoroaster (‘Zarathustra’ is a Westernised version of the name). Nietzsche viewed the Persian prophet as his arch rival: an opponent of similar power and stature, whom he admired but could never fully overcome. In the character of ‘Zarathustra’, Nietzsche attempts to create his own spokesman worthy of Zoroaster’s greatness. As the psychologist Carl Jung put it in his lectures on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (1934-9), while it is true that “Nietzsche chose a most dignified and worthy model for his wise old man,” he also took him to be “the founder of the Christian dogma” [of moral objectivity] that Nietzsche so vehemently opposed. He also notes that Zarathustra’s recorded age in Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the same as “the legendary age of Christ when he began his teaching career.”

The Mask of Zoroaster

Jung also suggested that Zarathustra manifests a second personality for Nietzsche, which was perhaps awaiting an opportunity to be expressed. This reading is supported by Nietzsche’s claim that during one of his lakeside walks in Sils-Maria in Switzerland, in July 1881, he experienced a vision concerning Zarathustra and the nature of inspiration. He describes the experience as follows in his posthumously-published autobiographical Ecce Homo (which, among other things, is a parody of Wagner’s self-indulgent My Life , which Nietzsche described as ‘an agreed-upon fable’...