Tuesday and wondering how to get started with this post. This weirdly delightful story parallels the Creation Story in Genesis. You know, the temptation of Eve segment with the talking serpent.

Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s alter ego, is portrayed as encountering a talking adder, while napping. The shock of the encounter was extreme, as he wakes up screaming. The viper does what vipers do. And as the story goes, there is a moment of recognition between the creature and Zarathustra, surprise of surprises the creature speaks. This story mirrors the one in Genesis. But here, an ostensibly fatal bite, is rectified by this serpent, unlike the Genesis story where things go from bad to worse. The adder responds to Zarathustra’s order and takes back the lethal dose of poison.

Yes, this is a story about morality, about good and evil, about right and wrong. Nietzsche/Zarathustra has been charged with purveying immorality. Just what are the outlines of the “immorality” of which plaintiff Nietzsche is charged? That’s what we will explore tomorrow, in part II.

One day had Zarathustra fallen asleep
under a fig-tree, owing to the heat,
with his arm over his face.

And there came an adder
and bit him in the neck,
so that Zarathustra screamed with pain.

When he had taken his arm from his face
he looked at the serpent;
and then did it recognize the eyes of Zarathustra,
wriggled awkwardly,
and tried to get away.

“Not at all,” said Zarathustra,
“as yet have you not received my thanks!
you have awakened me in time; my journey is yet long.”

“your journey is short,”
said the adder sadly; “my poison is fatal.”

Zarathustra smiled.
“When did ever a dragon die
of a serpent’s poison?” – said he.
“But take your poison back!
you are not rich enough to present it to me.”

Then fell the adder again on his neck,
and licked his wound.

When Zarathustra once told this to his disciples
they asked him: “And what, O Zarathustra,
is the moral of your story?”

And Zarathustra
answered them thus:

The destroyer of morality,
the good and just call me:
my story is immoral.

Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Thomas Common. The Bite of the Adder No. 19