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First EssayGood and Evil, Good and Bad6
From this rule that the concept of political superiority always resolves itself into the concept of spiritual priority, it is not really an exception (although there is room for exceptions), when the highest caste is also the priest caste and consequently for its total range of meanings prefers a scale of values which recalls its priestly function. So, for example, for the first time the words "pure" and "impure" appear as marks of one`s social position and later a "good" and a "bad" develop which no longer refer to social position.
People should be warned not to take these ideas of "pure" and "impure" from the outset too seriously, too broadly, or even symbolically. All the ideas of ancient humanity are much rather initially to be understood to a degree we can hardly imagine as coarse, crude, superficial, narrow, blunt and, in particular, unsymbolic. The "pure man" is from the start simply a man who washes himself, who forbids himself certain foods which produce diseases of the skin, who doesn`t sleep with the dirty women of the lower people, who has a horror of blood - no more, not much more!
On the other hand, from the very nature of an essentially priestly aristocracy it is clear enough how even here early on the opposition between different evaluations could become dangerously internalized and sharpened. And in fact they finally ripped open fissures between man and man, over which even an Achilles or a free spirit could not cross without shivering. From the very beginning there is something unhealthy about such priestly aristocracies and about the customary attitudes which govern in them, which turn away from action, sometimes brooding, sometimes exploding with emotion, as a result of which in the priests of almost all ages there have appeared debilitating intestinal illness and neurasthenia.
But what they themselves came up with as a remedy for this pathological disease - surely we can assert that it has finally shown itself, through its effects, as even a hundred times more dangerous than the illness for which it was meant to provide relief. Human beings are still sick from the after effects of this priestly naïveté in healing! Let`s think, for example, of certain forms of diet (avoiding meat), of fasting, of celibacy, of the flight "into the desert" (Weir Mitchell`s isolation, but naturally without the fattening up cure and overeating which follow it - a treatment which constitutes the most effective treatment for all hysteria induced by the ideals of asceticism): consider also the whole metaphysic of the priests - so hostile to the senses, making men so lazy and sophisticated - or the way they hypnotize themselves in the manner of fakirs and Brahmins - Brahmanism employed as a glass head and a fixed idea Consider finally the only too understandable and common dissatisfaction with its radical cure, with nothingness (or God - the desire for a unio mystica [mystical union] with God is the desire of the Buddhist for nothingness, nirvana - nothing more!).
Among the priests, everything becomes more dangerous - not only the remedies and arts of healing, but also pride, vengeance, mental acuity, excess, love, thirst for power, virtue, illness - although it`s fair enough to add that on the foundation of this basically dangerous form of human existence, the priest, for the first time the human being became, in general, an interesting animal, that here the human soul first attained depth in a higher sense and became evil - and, indeed, these are the two fundamental reasons for humanity`s superiority, up to now, over other animals.
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