men. The work of a suffering and tortured God, did the world
then seem to me.

The dream--and diction--of a God, did the world then seem to me;
coloured vapours before the eyes of a divinely dissatisfied one.

Good and evil, and joy and woe, and I and thou--coloured 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.

This world, the eternally imperfect, an eternal contradiction's image
and imperfect image--an intoxicating joy to its imperfect creator:--thus
did the world once seem to me.

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

Ah, ye brethren, that God whom I created was human work and human
madness, like all the Gods!

A man was he, and only a poor fragment of a man and ego. Out of mine own
ashes and glow it came unto me, that phantom. And verily, it came not
unto me from the beyond!

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 WITHDREW from me!

To me the convalescent would it now be suffering and torment to believe
in such phantoms: suffering would it now be to me, and humiliation. Thus
speak I to backworldsmen.

Suffering was it, and impotence--that created all backworlds; and
the short madness of happiness, which only the greatest sufferer
experienceth.

Weariness, which seeketh to get to the ultimate with one leap, with
a death-leap; a poor ignorant weariness, unwilling even to will any
longer: that created all Gods and backworlds.

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 "the other world."

But that "other world" is well concealed from man, that dehumanised,
inhuman world, which is a celestial naught; and the bowels of existence
do not speak unto man, except as man.

Verily, it is difficult to prove all being, and hard to make it speak