Breaking news: Nietzsche was a Priest King!

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May 2012

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May 28 - Memorial Day

[Shikhandi Panthar]

As I woke up earlier this morning than I had expected, for some reason I leafed through the end of Priest Kings of Gor and happened to come across these pages:

The High Initiate of Ar and myself regarded one another.
Suddenly I did not feel him as an enemy any longer and I sensed that somehow he did not regard me either as a threat or foe.
"Do you know of the Sardar?" I asked him.
"Enough," he said.
"Then why?" I asked.
"It would be hard for you to understand," he said. I could smell the smoke from the burning thigh of the bosk as it hissed and popped on the sacrificial fire.
"Speak to me," I said.
"With most," he said, "it is as you think, and they are simple, believing members of my caste, and there are others who suspect the truth and are tormented, or who suspect the truth and will pretend—but I, Om, High Initiate of Ar, and certain of the High Initiates are like none of these."
"And how do you differ?" I asked.
"I—and some others—" he said, "wait for man." He looked at me. "He is not yet ready."
"For what?" I asked.
"To believe in himself," said Om, incredibly. He smiled at me. "I and others have tried to leave open the gap that he might see it and fill it—and some have—but not many."
"What gap is this?" I asked.
"We speak not to man's heart," said Om, "but only to his fear. We do not speak of love and courage, and loyalty and nobility—but of practice and observance and the punishment of the Priest-Kings—for if we so spoke, it would be that much harder for man to grow beyond us. Thus, unknown to most members of my caste, we exist to be overcome, thus in our way pointing the way to man's greatness."
I looked at the Initiate for a long time, and wondered if he spoke the truth. These were the strangest things I had heard from the lips of an Initiate, most of whom seemed interminably embroiled in the rituals of their caste, in the arrogance and archaic pedantry of their kind.
I trembled for a moment, perhaps from the chill winds sweeping down the Sardar.
"It is for this reason," said the man, "that I remain an Initiate."
"There are Priest-Kings," I said at last.
"I know," said Om, "but what have they to do with what is most important for man?"
I thought about it for a moment. "I suppose," I said, "— very little."
"Go in peace," said the Initiate, stepping aside.

PKoG, pp. 428-9

"Your world is dying," I said to Misk.
"The universe itself will die," said Misk.
He had his antennae lifted to the white fires that burned in the black night over Gor.
I surmised he was speaking of those entropic regularities that apparently prevailed in reality as we know it, the loss of energy, its transformation into the ashes of the stellar night.
"It will grow cold and dark," said Misk.
I looked up at him.
"But in the end," said he, "life is as real as death and there will be a return of the ultimate rhythms, and a new explosion will cast forth the primitive particles and we shall have another turn of the wheel, and someday, sometime, in eons which defy the calculations even of Priest-Kings, there may be another Nest, and another Earth, and Gor, and another Misk and another Tarl Cabot to stand upon a windy hill in the moonlight and speak of strange things."
Misk's antennae looked down at me.
"Perhaps," he said, "we have stood here, on this hill, thusly together, unknown to either of us, already an infinite number of times."
The wind seemed now very cold and very swift.
"And what did we do?" I asked.
"I do not know what we did," said Misk. "But I think I would now choose to do that action which I would be willing that I should do again and again with each turning of the wheel. I would choose so to live that I might be willing that I should live that life a thousand times, even forever. I would choose so to live that I might stand boldly with my deed without regret throughout eternity."
The thoughts that he had spoken horrified me.
But Misk stood, the wind whipping his antennae, as though he were exalted.
Then he looked down at me. His antennae curled. "But I speak very foolishly," he said. "Forgive me, Tarl Cabot."
"It is hard to understand you," I said.

PKoG, pp. 450-1

It simply stroke me how shamelessly Norman borrowed the latter dialogue from Nietzsche's Ewige Wiederkunft idea (Nietzsche, by the way, stole the idea from the ancient Middle-Eastern and Stoic concept of ἐκπύρωσις). And it is clear also that the words of Om, the High Initiate of Ar, a few pages earlier are utterly Nietzschean too, and allude both to the Übermensch and Gott-ist tot concepts. But let's not complain: it seems that Norman is at his best when he is plagiarizing someone else! 

Just compare the above with this:

The greatest weight.-- What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, s. 341.

"I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?
All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment...
Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.
Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth...
What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour when your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue.
The hour when you say, 'What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself.'
The hour when you say, 'What matters my reason? Does it crave knowledge as the lion his food? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.'
The hour when you say, 'What matters my virtue? As yet it has not made me rage. How weary I am of my good and my evil! All that is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.'
"Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman--a rope over an abyss...
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under...

"I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.
Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.
'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the last man, and blinks.
The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea; the last man lives longest.
'We have invented happiness,'say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth...
One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion.
No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.
'Formerly, all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they blink...
One has one's little pleasure for the day and one's little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health.
'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink."

F. Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra, pp. 3-5.

By the way, I just love that last section about the Last Man. A very striking depiction of us all, modern men, I believe… But enough said.

On the whole, even though Priest Kings is a rather tedious read, it remains one comparatively good book in the series, and I wonder why, in the way we usually role-play these novels there is so little (if any) reference to Initiates, Priest Kings, Golden Beetles, and the like. I imagine it could be fun to have some sim represent the Nest with all it's chambers and slaves working within it. Just a thought...

[Xaz Elephas]

I have been thinking on that too lately. Though I did try to play a White Caste for a while and no one wanted to play with him because I really think no one knew how to role-play with him.   I want to see a Kurr and PK battle. I have only seen a PK once IC and it was done very well.  I would really like to see more of this pop up.

[Trenzos Dyrssen]

Because SL Gor = Conan men and lithe slaves. Anything else is, apparently, not BTB.

You try being creative and no one wishes to take up on it. I wrote up a storyline revolving around a stone that fell from the sky, which actually had elements that would, if properly managed, be able to fuel energy. People don't seem to like that kind of role-play though in SL Gor.

I think it's due to the fact that people just wish to stick to a mould and not change at all. And seeing as sci-fi elements in Gor was perhaps the main element in the Gorean Chronicles, it just stumps me as well. We just need to be way more creative and stop worrying about BTB and GE or other such tags that just limit your role-play.

[Shikhandi Panthar]

I concur.

The novels provide a variety of settings and characters that is often overlooked when it comes to RP. Most of what we can find online revolve around inter-city conflicts and men / women (be they free or slaves) interactions. And the way I see it, it is the modality of how these two main things are played out that differ between BTB and GE. But the sci-fi element (space ships, Priest Kings, Kurii and their respective implanted human agents…) is almost totally shunned. The only occasion where I took part in a significant RP involving Kurii (a meter-less epic battle!) took place many months ago, at the downfall of Salernum… And yes, I guess very few people are willing to get out of the usual RP rut where they usually are.

Same goes with some of the castes, which are extremely under-played (say: Builders and Initiates for instance). I, like Xaz, tried to play an Initiate when I started playing on here, some 18 months ago, before I decided I would join the BC. And, I agree it was not very rewarding. Mostly because of the scarcity of such roles around and the fact that other players know very little about them, let alone how to interact with them (they do know that Initiates dress in white and shave their heads, but that's about it in most cases). Perhaps it is due to the fact that Initiates are supposed to be extremely powerful figures in any given city, and the players of the Red Caste, who usually have control over cities (through a Ubar), are not willing to be at their beck and call. Perhaps it is also due to the fact that Initiates are supposed to be celibate men and not touch women, which makes the role a bit frustrating when there are so many female characters around --but hell, I don't see why one could not play a corrupt Initiate who would use or abuse women (a bit like some sexually active prelates in history: think of Pope Alexander VI, who had had some seven or eight illegitimate children with his several mistresses!).

[Taog Ra]

Shik - Love this post.  Back at the top of your forum game I see!  And great to have seen you in the RP world as well.

I did a brief stint as an Initiate a long time ago.  Or rather, in order to drum up some RP, impersonated a white caste.  I went so far as to shave the hair but left the goatee that was textured into the avi skin.  There were 2-3 of us, and times gone by so I don't recall where we visited, but suffice to say the reactions/interactions were not invalid, they were null and void.  So in epic style, we 'blue flamed' our imposter selves and called it a day and an end to that SL Gor social experiment.

I do know a guy who is persistent that plays a white caste and can possibly steer him your way if you'd like to try that RP.

T.

[Shikhandi Panthar]

Thank you so much, Taog! Great to have seen you in Laura recently. It's an amazing sim and steadily growing, which, nowadays is a rarity!

It would indeed make much sense RPwise to play an Assassin on the payroll of the Initiates! Although my time online is rather limited right now, that would be a very tempting option down the road.

Which makes me think, as I reread my previous post, that one other massive reason why people might not want to pick the White Caste role (considering how fighting, torturing, raping and pew-pew is important for the fun of so many players) is that they cannot bear arms or, for that matter, get their own hands dirty with any sort of physical violence. They leave this dirty business to a secular arm, be it of the caste of Warriors or that of the Assassins… But that is perhaps a moot point, since this rule, by and large, would also apply to Scribes, Physicians, Merchants, etc. and to all females (if we are talking BTB, needless to say).

Oh and, by the way, where are those strangely peaceful Spider People?