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1CREATURE AND CREATOR
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3“The tension of soul in misfortune which communicates to it its energy, its shuddering in view of rack and ruin, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, and exploiting misfortune, and whatever depth, mystery, disguise, spirit, artifice, or greatness has been bestowed upon the soul—has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In man creature and creator are united: in man there is not only matter, shred, excess, clay, mire, folly, chaos; but there is also the creator, the sculptor, the hardness of the hammer, the divinity of the spectator, and the seventh day—do ye understand this contrast?”
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5Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
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10Man is a creature who has the potential to become a creator.
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12However, to be good at being a man — to manifest, demonstrate and embody the virtues that men recognize immediately as masculinity in each other — it is not necessary to create or even to procreate.
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14How many brave warriors — bold and brilliant exemplars of Strength, Courage, Mastery and Honor — have died childless on the battlefields of history? How many men who were shrinking, delicate, embarrassments to their brothers have managed to seed a woman? One can be good at being a man without becoming a father, and one can become a father without ever being very good at being a man.
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16Man has the potential to create his world, to dream cosmologically and ejaculate his vision upon the womb of the earth, to call up that creation from the fertile soil as the sun calls the trees toward the sky. Man is capable of reordering and reshaping the world around him to please him and to serve him. From simple stone, he can bring forth swords and statuary, pillars and Parthenons. Man can give names and meanings, and in this naming, reorient the perceptions of other men. Man can tell a story or paint a picture that propagates in the minds of men and women he may never meet. Man can look upon his peers and organize them into a priesthood, a band of pirates, a congress, a round table, or a regiment. What is all of this, if not magic? This visionary potential to make and to master — this is the spark of a god in man!
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18But, to be good at being a man, as a beast, this creativity is not required. A man can be strong, brave, competent and beloved by his brothers without ever creating much of anything.
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20To be good at being a man in any time is good enough for most, and to strive to be better at being a man in this flabby, flaccid and feminine age is an upstream slog worthy of a solid nod. Even this, I would argue, is a creative act. There is something different in the man who makes that choice which distinguishes him from the man who allows himself to be swept along with the current. This man, at the very least, is a self-creator and a chooser of values.
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22There are many virtues that we could identify and encourage in men. Philosophers and theologians and football coaches have come up with countless lists of masculine virtues and values. The task of weeding through these lists to separate the aspects of the masculine experience that were both universal and essential produced the four Tactical Virtues of masculinity. Most of the others serve a particular society or culture or worldview, or are “too human” and not specific enough to men or masculinity. However, if I were to suggest an optional fifth virtue of masculinity that, while not always required to be perceived as being good at being a man, is still profoundly relevant to the experience of maleness, that virtue would be “Creation.”
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24Throughout history, humans have recognized and revered the generative power in man. This is symbolized, most obviously, by man’s procreative potential and the sexual act.
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26Woman, the fertile earth, waits. Perhaps she even lures or coaxes, as she serves her own ends. However, to conceive human life — the word “conceive” itself comes from a root that means “to take” — woman relies on male action. Male procreative action initiates life, gives life — starts a new human world.
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28To be a human male whose body is functioning properly is to experience sexual desire and the impulse toward carnal creation, even if that desire is intellectualized, suppressed or diverted in some non-reproductive way. This impulse toward biological creation is a universal male experience that has made male sexuality a powerful metaphor for more abstract creative activity.
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30The sex act itself is the act of man as a beast, satisfying his primal desire. Despite desperate attempts to sanitize it by clammy, life-despising puritans and efforts to elevate and decorate it with charming euphemisms about “love-making,” despite all of the hand-rubbing double-talk of sleazy spiritual gurus — at the moment of climax, sex is the chthonic convulsion of a creature overcome by the wild darkness of nature. At no moment are we more nakedly — more completely — beasts.
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32And yet, this feral rutting toward insemination and oblivion also symbolizes the potential in man that exists in no other animal. All animals reproduce themselves. Man can also reproduce his dreams.
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34Dreaming alone is unremarkable, but when man takes action and imposes his dream on the world around him, he realizes a potential in himself that differentiates him from simpler men and beasts. It is this visionary creation — facilitated by the strength and the will to impose it! — that distinguishes the Noble beast who masters the world around him from the average beast. It is through visionary creation that man truly becomes what he is and completes himself. Visionary creativity is not necessary to be good at being a man, but it is what separates great and Noble men from other men.
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38Where are you, creators? Noble beasts? Where are the men of the wheel and the chariot, the terrors of the steppe, the men of thunder and the shining sun? Where are the men who make marvels and masterpieces, who found orders and demand not merely utility — but beauty? Who has a symphony in his heart? Where are the egos big enough to build castles? Who among you has the courage to become a new prophet for a new age? Better still, a thousand new prophets for a thousand new ages! Only YOU can drown out the mind-numbing hum of the universal hive!
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40I know that not all of you can become or even want to become “Zarathustra.” Not every man is concerned with being great, but if you’re reading this, you’re reading it because you want to be greater. You want to become better. You want to access the potential that you have and become the best version of yourself. You see all of the problems in the world that I see, but you want to overcome them and thrive despite them, because you love yourself and you love being a man and you want to discharge your strength and LIVE while you are alive.
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42This manly beast, in his savage completeness, walks the earth without remorse for his existence. He is unconcerned with external sources of moral valuation, because he believes in his own judgement and his own worth. However, he is a social beast, when he walks with others, he must consider the consequences of his actions and judgements on the group. He is hungry for victory, always moving and looking forward, searching for the next feast and demonstration of his worth — always looking for the next win.
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44The mindset of this complete beast — this Noble creature — is, in itself, a solution to navigating the challenges of this comic and dystopic wilderness and avoiding the trap that turns men of worth into weasels. The spiritual path that leads beyond that land of waste is the path of creation. Creation is the countermeasure to blaming and complaining, resentment and resignation. Beyond even overcoming, creation is positive action in the opposite direction of ressentiment. The creator makes not only the way, but the world. Creation is the distinguishing characteristic of Nobility. Masters redefine and reshape the world around them. This is the true way of first kings and the kernel of aristocracy — conquering is the successful discharge of strength, but creation is the imposing of will and vision. In the vacuous wake of melee, the Noble Beast reorders his world. This is the work of a Romulus.
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46Today, the men who value Strength, Courage, Mastery and Honor — the men who love being men and who want to be more of what they are — tend to become frustrated, angry and reactionary. I understand these frustrations and I understand the anger, but you can’t turn back the clock and return to some idealized version of the past. The future is all that you have ahead of you, and the best way to improve your own life is to create a positive vision for your own future and begin to shape the world around you. Maybe that means procreating and focusing on raising a family, maybe it means creating or helping to create an organization or a work of art. Maybe it means investing in your career or running a business that allows you to become a patron and fund new art and new culture that is in harmony with your own aesthetic and philosophical values. If you’re angry at the media, create your own. If your channels are being shut down, make new channels. Be the visionary father and make the way.
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50Nietzsche theorized that the Ancient Greeks were, “obliged to create” both great art and the Olympian gods themselves out of necessity, as a response to suffering, chaos and disorder.16 He believed that their highest art form was Attic tragedy, specifically the work of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and in that drama he saw a controlled tension between what he called the Apollonian and the Dionysian elements in man. The Dionysian, named for the Greek god of wine, was symbolized by the chorus, chanting and singing in unison. The Dionysian force is the creature in man — earthy, intoxicated, lusty, impulsive, lost in the undulating, unified consciousness of the eternal. Apollo is the god of the sun, and of prophecy. Nietzsche associates him with “the plastic arts,” including sculpture and even poetry. The Apollonian reacts to Dionysian disorder by dreaming his own world into existence, by giving it shape and putting it in order.
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52This theory that the principle mechanism of creation relies on an exchange between visceral, mysterious darkness and the light from the sky that reveals order is even older than the Greeks. It’s an echoing theme that runs through Indo-European culture and religion. Linguists and archaeologists have reconstructed a skeletal sketch of Proto-Indo-European mythology and religion from its surviving cognates.
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54Proto-Indo-European is believed to have thrived in the Pontic-Caspian steppe between the fifth and fourth millennium BC, and is regarded as the root language and culture that produced the earliest forms of Western, Slavic, Persian and Indic languages — including English, German, Latin, Greek, Spanish, French, Russian and Hindustani.
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56The Proto-Indo-Europeans believed that, at the beginning of time, there was a pair of twin brothers named *Manu and *Yemo, accompanied by a cow. *Manu (the root of the word “man”), sacrificed his brother *Yemo (which may mean “twin”). Assisted by the sky gods, *Manu made the world from the parts of his brother’s dismembered body. *Manu “became the first priest, the creator of the ritual of sacrifice that was the root of world order.”17
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58The sky gods who assist or bless his creation — or in honor of whom his sacrifice was made — are *Dyeus Ph2ter, the “sky father,” and *Perkwunos, the god of war and the storm. Dyeus, or “sky,” became the word for god itself, as in Deus, Dios, *Tîwaz and the Indo-Aryan deva. His characteristics, blended with the power of warrior-god *Perkwunos, are found in the Greek Zeus and the Roman Jupiter. The thunder of the storm god reverberates in Thor, Indra and the Slavic Perun. There are remarkable similarities concerning the theme of creation through bloody sacrifice in hymns of the Rig Veda18 and in the Germanic cosmology in which the world is crafted from the slain body of Ymir by Odin — who inhabits an Olympian sky-realm above and beyond humanity known as Asgard.
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60As god of madness and inspiration, in addition to being the sky-dwelling Allfather and visionary creator, Odin incorporates the Dionysian and the Apollonian — the chthonic and the solar elements of creation — into one god-concept. It is possible that the later, more thoroughly recorded tales of Odin found in the Eddas may have combined aspects of the calm, rational and solar Tyr or *Tîwaz with the wild, magical, ecstatic aspects of Odin or *Wôdhanaz, eventually assigning Tyr a supporting role.
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62Still, as comparative philologist Georges Dumézil pointed out in Mitra-Varuna, the “one-eyed god” and the “one-handed god” together still symbolize another collaborative duality found throughout Indo-European ideas about the nature of creation and leadership. Tyr sacrificed his hand to make the gods’ binding of the terrible wolf Fenrir a balanced legal agreement, whereas Odin sacrificed his eye for mysterious wisdom. Dumézil also noted that early forms of Tyr (Mars Thincsus) presided over the “thing” —the gathering during which Germanic tribal societies decided important legal and official matters. This dark-light dualistic collaboration between the “magician” and “jurist,” between the “terrible” and the “ordered,” is another facet of the dark/light, earth/sky dynamic that Dumézil found in the Roman kings Romulus and Numa, as well as the Indo-Iranian pairing of Mitra and Varuna. The sober and rational arrangement of creation proceeds from the wild mystery of inspiration, unreason and intoxication.
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66It is through this solar reaction to darkness and chaos that the creature of man becomes a creator and seeds the Dionysian earth with his Apollonian dreams. The beast of man is of the earth and its wet, eternal mystery pulses just beneath his skin, but he accesses his greatest potential — his nobility and godhood — when he commands it and gives it shape, first in his dreams, and then by mastering himself and the world beyond himself. The base creature, when cornered, lashes out wildly in the dark. The Noble Beast — man in his completeness — rises and lights up the night with the solar vision of a bold creator.
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68Oh, you reactionaries…
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70I know your anger and your suffering. I know the star that calls you and in following that star I too have stumbled into the trap of ressentiment. Of blaming and hating and screaming at the sky. I’ve been blocked by the dense wood and I see the towering wall of stone, but…
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72…greatness flows from the creativity and overcoming that chaos and challenge inspires in the man whose Noble belief in his own worth drives him forward to demonstrate his potential and realize the miracle of his own godhood.
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74If you cannot see the way, make the way.
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76If you despise the world around you, do not lament the passing of a dream you never knew — dream the world that you want NOW. Begin from where you are. Dream a new world and impose it from above. Thrust your hands into the decaying soil, scoop it up and sculpt it — give it shape with all of your strength. Life was never fair and creation was never easy. Take the world you have and make the one you want. Be the god that gives it life.
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78And if you don’t know where to start — if you have nothing but your own body — start there. Create and recreate yourself. Be the clay, and become your own dream. Not because you have to, or because it is needed or necessary, but because you want to.
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80Why not?
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82Isn’t that what the conqueror, the master and the first king says?
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84“Why not me?”
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86Why not be the creature who creates himself?
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88And...then...