Personal Recollections

Preface to Esoteric Nietzsche

[This is the Preface to the Esoteric Nietzsche project.]

The time was the early 1970s. The world seemed to crackle with the possibilities of immanent change and upheaval. I am sure that the world usually seems that way to a young man of nineteen, especially if he is just returning from a life of vagabonding around Europe and just entering college. But these subjective feelings were also paralleled with objective current world events repeated assassinations, moon landings, Woodstock, Vietnam, Watergate, etc. This historical crackling was nothing new, it had reached a crescendo in late November of 1963 and had just kept rolling. The energy was seeping into the popular culture in profound ways. I had taken up the teachings of Anton LaVey and plagued the Jesus Freaks at my junior college with my outlandish appearance in the commons areas of Eastfield College on the outskirts of Dallas. In all of this I had also discovered the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. I frequently carried a copy of the ubiquitous edition of The Portable Nietzsche— just as Jim Morrison is shown carrying that same edition in an early scene in Oliver Stone’s film The Doors. So, when I was not carrying The Satanic Bible under my arm, I might be carrying this volume of Nietzsche’s writings. One day I went into an office of the c9llege on some sort of business and there ran into one of my old high school teachers, Jim Daniel, who had held a class with the intriguing title “Problems in Democracy.” In this we read interesting books, from W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folks to George Orwell’s 1984, with special attention to logical and critical thinking. I never knew just how special Mr. Daniel actually was until that day. He saw me with the Nietzsche volume and suggested that I might want to take a look at Robert S. De Ropp’s The Master Game. The time was 1972, my age was nineteen, the world and the mid were full of possibilities.

Nietzsche cast his magic spell on me as he had on generations of people throughout the 20^thcentury all around the world. As we will see Nietzsche’s words can energize the psyches of individuals in a wide variety of ways. The mytho-poetic text of Zarathustra can only be compared to either religious texts from antiquity or to “received” texts such as Aleister Crowley’s The Book of the Law, which was itself in large measure inspired by Zarathustra both in form and content. With that reality being understood, the reader/student is moved in two directions: To attempt to understand the true, or hidden, meaning of the text itself (coupled with Nietzsche’s other writings, or to attempt to utilize the text as an instrument to help the student to actualize his own will to power— to energize and give direction to the student’s life.

As we will discover, Nietzsche’s ideas are essentially esoteric on at least two levels. They are written in clever ways to encode what he was actually intending to say, but what was “written between the lines” was the most powerful of messages. Then on the other hand, Nietzsche himself was seeking to unwrap and thus reveal the meaning of the text he had written even to himself. Works written in a fit of inspiration usually require a great deal of thought and effort to become more intelligible even to the writer. This is why it seems that Nietzsche kept reissuing his works with new prefaces in order to allow them to recur repeatedly, but with new elements giving new contexts and frameworks. Was this itself an exercise in the eternal return? Was this a demonstration of how it works in written form as a reflection of how it works in life itself?

It seems that Nietzsche’s thought was so profound that its absolute meaning and interpretation will always defy any attempt to reduce it to logical and rule-bound precepts. Nietzsche himself rejected such approaches to philosophy, so we could never expect him to have it any other way. What I hope to do in what follows is to reframe Nietzsche’s ideas and writings in a way that brings it home to the realm of the esoteric as outlined here. Additionally, in so doing, I wish to expand the frame of reference as to just what the esoteric is in order to make it a more useful tool for the understanding of works such as those of Nietzsche represent.