Nick DeHoust: Zarathustra and Counter-Myth

In what many consider to be his magnum opus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche speaks through his mythological prophet figure, Zarathustra. Zarathustra is based loosely on the 6th-century Iranian prophet, Zoroaster, whom Nietzsche identifies as the founder of the Judeo-Christian tradition. However, inversely to Zoroaster, Zarathustra is intended to destroy this tradition. “[H]e who has to be a creator in good and evil, truly, has first to be a destroyer and break values,” he says (139). Nietzsche finds the predominantly Judeo-Christian moral system of the West extremely problematic, and he endeavors to overturn it in many of his works. With Zarathustra, Nietzsche wants to instead teach the lesson of the will to power and ultimately to introduce the Ubermensch. In this way, the prophet Zarathusta is a myth that is set up in opposition to another myth: the Christian myth. I find it interesting that mythopoesis, like many other ways of revealing truth, can sometimes work in opposition to itself. I wonder what makes one side more convincing than the other, for if the properties of mythopoesis exist equally in both myths, they seem to negate each other. Must we return to the tings-in-themselves for answers? Can we?

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