Miss Wolff: Last time we spoke of the meaning of the self, and in the end of the chapter on death there is quite a new idea: namely, that Zarathustra
is intending to give over his purpose or his teaching to his disciples, so he would not be the only one who carries the idea.
And the idea comes in here that one man alone cannot reach the self.
In one of the last verses he says, “Now be ye friends the heirs of my goal; to you throw I the golden ball.”
I think this is a sort of analogy to the idea of the child, because the child, as Nietzsche puts it, is also something beyond, beyond the parents.
So the idea is to carry on something.
Prof. Jung: So you would connect that passage of the golden ball with the symbolism we encountered before in “Child and Marriage”?
Miss Wolff: It is the same idea, that one person alone cannot achieve the self.
It is phrased very differently, but it comes much nearer the meaning than the chapter on death, though he alludes here to that idea that the self is not one individual alone.
Prof. Jung: Well, when you go back through the chapters you find a sort of preparation, like a preparatory initiation, for this idea.
For instance, begin with chapter 15-though it would be possible to begin before-“The Thousand and One Goals”; that is the idea of many goals with no certainty as to which is the right one.
Then the sixteenth chapter is on neighbor love which means that something else must come in, a partner, a relationship.
The seventeenth chapter is “The Way of the Creating One”: something ought to be created. How can you create?
Well, “Old and Young Women,” chapter 18.
Then if you have to do with women, there is chapter 19, “The Bite of the Adder”: you will be bitten by the snake which is the reversed impregnation-poisoning.
And what is the result? “Child and Marriage,” chapter 20.
That is voluntary death: namely, you go under in that relationship and you reappear as a child, because it is all the interior drama of the unconscious development.
And so it comes to the chapter we have just dealt with, to the idea of the golden ball; that is the symbol for the thing he has created.
Mrs. Frost: In the third verse before the end Nietzsche says, “Thus will I die myself, that ye friends may love the earth more for my sake.” If he dies that we may love the earth more, is it not the reaction against Christ who dies that we may go more into the spirit? And the loving of the earth is surely that love of the golden ball which he hands on.
Prof. Jung: Quite. This is a reaction against the Christian spirit, since Christ really did not die for the earth but for the spirit.
The golden ball has that meaning; it symbolizes Nietzsche’s most important idea, the relation to the earth. But that is not the whole thing.
It is only the antichristian and the pro-earth aspect of the symbolism, and this same symbolism has also spiritual meaning.
But Nietzsche does something new to it and we shall presently come to that. ~Zarathustra Seminars, 787-788