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PHILOOPHY  A FA R I

5) Nietzsche and the New Age cult of the

superbeing
DCMR 9, 2021 · COMMNT

In 1883, the same year that

Francis Galton coined the
word ‘eugenics’, a strange
religious text was published,
announcing the coming of a
new type of human. The grand
announcement went
completely unnoticed at the
time, and yet it would capture
the imagination of the world in
the coming decades. The book,
of course, was Friedrich
Nietzsche by Hadi
Karimi Nietzsche’s 몭us Spake
Zarathustra.

Born in Germany in 1844, Nietzsche was a brilliant student, and at

24 became the youngest ever Chair in Classical Philology at the
University of Basle. He seemed set to scale the heights of
European academia, but his career went o몭-piste after he
published his 몭rst book 몭e Birth of Tragedy, a strange, brilliant,
rhapsodic hymn to Richard Wagner, which received poor reviews
and was barely read. He left academia in high dudgeon, fell out
with Wagner, and became a wandering scholar-hermit, traipsing
across Europe with a trunk of books and a portable stove,
completely isolated, writing ever more 몭amboyant and unread
jeremiads against western civilization. In the 1880s, he
experienced an extraordinary burst of creativity, until he su몭ered
a mental collapse in 1889, aged 49, and never worked or even
spoke again until his death in 1900.

In his 1882 book, 몭e Gay Science, Nietzsche declared that the
Christian God was dead. But western civilization was still clinging
to Christian values like goodness, charity, humility, and even
truth. It was time to be brave and face reality. The death of God
had unmoored us from all these tired old values. Free thinkers
should smash them up (one of his books is subtitled ‘how to
philosophize with a hammer’) and create new values, new ways of
being.

In place of Christianity, which he despised, Nietzsche preached a

spiritual biology. Humans are animals, and should embrace our
animality. We should follow the wisdom of the body, and seek a
life of vitality, strength and self-actualization. ‘Become who you
are’, Nietzsche tells us. He suggests we should become the artists
of ourselves, replacing the Christian ideal of ‘goodness’ with an
aesthetic ideal of beauty and intense living.

But this new philosophy of self-actualization is not available to

everyone, only to the biological elite. Nature is ruthlessly unequal.
On the one hand, there is the natural aristocracy, the Alphas, the
‘higher men’, the ‘oligarchs of the spirit’. Far in the distant future,
perhaps there is even the ubermensch, the superbeing, who might
yet evolve. And then there are the lesser humans,
the untermenschen, the weak, the cripples, the mediocre masses.

Christianity and social democracy are massive frauds,

conspiracies against nature’s Alphas. They are ‘slave moralities’ —
somehow, the weak managed to fool the strong into obeying
values like ‘goodness’, ‘humility’, ‘charity’, ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’,
and into believing these values are God-given. In fact, they are
invented as a sly trick to shackle the strong and empower the
weak, who pretend to be humble but are actually driven by
resentment and the lust for power. Judeo-Christianity and liberal
democracy are victim cultures. We shouldn’t glorify the oppressed
and the downtrodden, we should glorify the strong and the vital.

Instead of meekness, the ‘higher men’ should embrace self-

assertion. Instead of asceticism, they should embrace the body
and its desires. Instead of ‘Thou Shalt’, the higher man says ‘I
will!’ Instead of equality, charity, democracy and all that sickly
Victorian bunk, nature’s Alphas should do what they want. They
are beyond good and evil. It is time for the ‘blond beasts’ to throw
o몭 the shackles of Christian civilization and go on the rampage
again:

They enjoy freedom from all social control, they

feel that in the wilderness they can give vent with
impunity to that tension which is produced by
enclosure and imprisonment in the peace of
society, they revert to the innocence of the beast-
of-prey conscience, like jubilant monsters, who
perhaps come from a ghostly bout of murder,
arson, rape, and torture, with bravado and a moral
equanimity, as though merely some wild student’s
prank had been played, perfectly convinced that
the poets have now an ample theme to sing and
celebrate. [The Genealogy of Morals, 1887]
In 몭us Spoke Zarathustra (1883), he unfurls his religious vision of
the coming ubermensch, or Superman:

Behold, I bring you the Superman! The Superman

is the meaning of the earth…. Man is something
that shall be overcome.
Although he never refers to the ubermensch again, he often
returns to the idea of an aristocratic caste of superior humans,
‘higher men’, who should follow their own laws and treat the
masses with disdain. Society should be ordered not according to
‘universal human rights’, but for the emergence of an elite of
superior humans.

In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), he writes:

a good and healthy aristocracy…has no misgivings

in condoning the sacri몭ce of a vast number of
people who must for its sake be oppressed and
diminished into incomplete people, slaves, tools…
society cannot exist for its own sake, but rather
only as a foundation and sca몭olding to enable a
select kind of creature to ascend to its higher task.
The creation of higher beings is a cultural, political and biological
project. It requires the total destruction of Christian values like
charity and belief in the equal sacredness of individual life and its
replacement with a sort of spiritual Darwinism. He writes in 몭e
Will To Power (1901):

All ‘souls’ become equal before God: but this is

precisely the most dangerous of evaluations! if one
regards individuals as equal…one encourages a
way of life that leads to the ruin of the species:
Christianity is the counter-principle to the
principle of selection…The species requires that
the ill-constituted, weak, degenerate, perish: but it
was precisely to them that Christianity turned as a
conserving force…What is ‘virtue’ and ‘charity’ in
Christianity if not just this mutual preservation,
this solidarity of the weak, this hampering of
selection?
Christian pity or compassion is a vice in his biological morality.
In 몭e Will To Power, again, he declares:

precisely pity I recognized as more dangerous than

any vice…One has to respect fatality — that fatality
that says to the weak: perish!
He agreed with the Reverend Malthus that charity and
philanthropy do more harm than good. We should follow nature’s
law:

The weak and ill-constituted shall perish: 몭rst

principle of our philanthropy… And one shall help
them to do so. [The Antichrist, 1895]
The invalid is a parasite on society. In a certain
state it is indecent to go on living…ascending life…
demands the most ruthless suppression and
sequestration of degenerating life [Twilight of the
Idols, 1889]
Although Nietzsche often sounds libertarian and dismissive of
politics, on other occasions he suggests the state should dedicate
itself to ‘the breeding and education of higher men’. He writes
in Schopenhauer as Educator (1875): ‘Mankind must work
continually at the production of individual great men — this and
nothing else is its task’ . There should evolve a ‘party of life’,
which will ‘embrace the greatest of all tasks, the higher breeding
of humanity, together with the remorseless extermination of all
degenerate and parasitic elements’ [Ecce Homo, 1908]

The higher man, he writes, must ‘gain that tremendous energy of

greatness in order to shape the man of the future through
breeding and, on the other hand, the annihilation of millions of
failures’ [Will to Power]. He writes:

Many too many live and they hang on their

branches far too long. I wish a storm would come
and shake all this rottenness and worm-eatenness
from the tree! I wish preachers of speedy death
would come! [Thus Spake Zarathustra]
Reading the quotes above, you may wonder how Nietzsche ever
became so popular, and why he is still so fashionable among
academic philosophers and the general reading public. How is he
not banned or at least criticized as a proto-fascist preacher of
mass murder?

Nietzsche is a writer of great rhetorical skill, insight, humour and

charm, and he is never boring. He never sticks to one point for
long, and he will usually contradict himself within a page. So
there are many Nietzsches, and I have quoted him at his most
brutal. Personally, I think he is a very dangerous philosopher, but
he is also one of the philosophers whose work has meant most to
me, especially in his 몭rst work, 몭e Birth of Tragedy (1872).

His defenders today say that his far-right and fascist devotees
misunderstood him. But, as you can see from the quotes above, it
is not hard to read him as preaching a spiritual elitism and
murderous contempt for those deemed ‘un몭t’. And that’s
precisely how intellectuals interpreted him in the late 19th and
early 20th century.

Nietzsche and the New Age

Nietzsche prophesied his works would only become known 20

years after their publication. This turned out to be true. From
around 1900, his books were discovered and translated, and they
went o몭 like dynamite in European intellectual culture. The
playwright George Bernard Shaw declared in 1896: ‘Before long,
you must be prepared to talk about Nietzsche or retire from
society.’ The American reactionary columnist HL
Mencken announced in 1904 that Nietzsche was ‘the prophet and
embodiment of those habits of thought which are dominant
among the thinking men of the world today’.

Why did his thinking capture the zeitgeist? It was an important

part of what has been called the ‘mystical revival’ of the 1880s-
1920s (see Alex Owen’s 몭e Place of Enchantment, 2007). The
1860s-1870s had been the hey-day of Darwinism, scienti몭c
naturalism and materialism. But by the 1880s, the public mood
had shifted. Where was meaning and purpose in the materialist
universe? What about the mind, the soul, mystical experiences,
life after death?
In the last quarter of the 19th century, various ‘spiritual’
organisations and movements were founded — Theosophy was
founded in 1875, the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1887. These organisations
attempted to forge a path between Christian fundamentalism and
the fundamentalism of scienti몭c materialism, and instead to
create an ‘occult science’ or ‘scienti몭c spirituality’. Like
Nietzsche, these movements preached self-actualization and the
realization of your highest self, and their members were enthused
by the prospect of a New Age and the coming of a new species of
superhuman.

The intellectual and artistic culture of the 1880s-1920s was

remarkably heterodox. New ideas and fads mingled together:
occultism, psychical research, socialism, vegetarianism, anti-vax
or anti-vivisection activism, ‘simple living’, arts and crafts, ‘life
worship’, fascism, feminism, homosexuality, eugenics, ecology
and the Nietzschean cult of the superman, all could jostle together
and fuse in surprising ways. The playwright George Bernard Shaw
summed up the eclecticism of the time: ‘I have attended a Fabian
meeting, gone on to hear the end of a Psychical Research one, and
몭nished by sleeping in a haunted house with a committee of ghost
hunters.”

You can see this heterodox

mingling of ideas in the pages
of 몭e New Age, a progressive
journal edited by A.R Orage
from 1907 to 1922, before Orage
left to become a disciple of
Gurdjie몭. In the 1890s, Orage
was a young spiritual seeker in
Yorkshire. One day in a Leeds bookstore, he met another young
seeker — Holbrook Jackson — who handed him a copy of 몭us
Spake Zarathustra. Orage read it all night and came back the next
day with eyes gleaming.
Orage and Jackson set up an ideas society in Leeds, then moved to
London and bought 몭e New Age in 1907, turning it into the most
exciting avant garde journal of its day. In its pages could be found
essays on everything from scienti몭c utopianism to occultism,
from Fabianism to psychical research. But above all, Orage
turned 몭e New Age into a vehicle for preaching Nietzsche’s cult of
the superbeing. In his 몭rst edition, he wrote:

Believing that the daring object and purpose of the

universal will of life is the creation of a race of
supremely and progressively intelligent beings, the
NEW AGE will devote itself to the serious
endeavour to co-operate with the purposes of
life…
One 몭nds a similar dream of the coming of superbeings
throughout the mystical revival of the 1880s-1920s. It’s there in
Theosophy, in the Golden Dawn, in the Society for Psychical
Research. One 몭nds it in the educational ideas of Maria
Montessori, who preached the coming of the New Child, ‘a
superior being, giving promise of a New Humanity, with powers of
mind and spirit hitherto unsuspected’. It’s there in the Bolshevik
idea of Homo Sovieticus, and in the fascist idea of the New Man. It
eventually 몭ltered down into popular culture, helping to inspire
the idea of ‘superheroes’, who 몭rst appeared in newspaper
cartoons in the late 1930s.
With the new cult of the superbeing came a sense of impatience
with the average masses, and a contempt and panic regarding
those deemed ‘un몭t’, i.e the mentally or physically disabled. There
seemed to be more and more of them. Instead of ascending into
superbeings, there was the danger that humanity would
degenerate into morons and imbeciles. Aldous Huxley wrote in
1934:

If conditions remain what they are now, and if the

present tendency continues unchecked, we may
look forward in a century or two to a time when a
quarter of the population of these islands will
consist of half-wits. What a curiously squalid and
humiliating conclusion to English history!
And so Nietzsche’s dream of the superbeing often fused with
Galton’s eugenics. Historian Dan Stone, author of Breeding
Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar
Britain, points out that early writers on Nietzsche ‘took for
granted the fact that Nietzsche and eugenics were synonymous’.
In 1909, a German eugenicist called Maximilian Mugge wrote in
The Eugenics Review:

To Sir Francis Galton belongs the honour of

founding the Science of Eugenics. To Friedrich
Nietzsche belongs the honour of founding the
Religion of Eugenics…. Both aim at a Superman…
an ideal of a race of supermen, as superior to the
present mankind…as man is superior to the worm.
Nietzsche had preached the need for a new post-Christian ethic
— pitiless, brutal, hard — which would sweep away Christian and
Victorian notions of charity, philanthropy and care for the weak. A
similar pitilessness is apparent in Nietzsche’s Modernist
followers, like DH Lawrence. His novels celebrate Life Worship,
vitality and self-actualization. But this is only possible for the
elite, the aristocrats of the spirit. In his 1923
novel Kangaroo, Lawrence writes: ‘The mass of mankind is
soulless…Most people are dead, and scurrying and talking in the
sleep of death.’

The earth was so crowded with mediocre people, perhaps it

would be better if there was a violent clearing out. In his 1920
novel Women in Love, Ursula rails against ‘these ugly, meaningless
people…She would have liked them all to be annihilated, cleared
away, so that the world was left clear for her.’ Her lover agrees:
‘Not many people are anything at all…It would be much better if
they were just wiped out.’

Like Nietzsche, Lawrence had a particular distaste for the weak,

sick and helpless (even though both were quite sickly themselves).
Victorian humanitarianism was a mistake — the weak should be
put out of their misery. In a letter of 1908, Lawrence wrote:

If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as

big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band
playing softly, and a Cinematograph working
brightly; then I’d go out in the back streets and
main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the
halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently,
and they would smile me a weary thanks; and the
band would softly bubble out the ‘Hallelujah
Chorus’.
Such sentiments were common among Nietzsche’s apostles.
George Bernard Shaw, who preached the coming of
the ubermensch in works like Man and Superman, also called for
the culling of the weak and un몭t. In a lecture to the Eugenics
Society in 1910, he said:

We should 몭nd ourselves committed to killing a

great many people whom we now leave living, and
to leave living a great many people whom we at
 to leave living a great many people whom we at
present kill…A part of eugenic politics would
몭nally land us in an extensive use of the lethal
chamber. A great many people would have to be
put out of existence simply because it wastes other
people’s time to look after them.
A.R Orage, in 몭e New Age, likewise insisted on the necessity of
eugenics to prepare for the coming of the ubermensch, writing:
‘the Superman, if he is to appear at all, must be willed — in plain
English, must be bred’. This involves ‘the much more practical
problem of providing conditions for the multiplication of the
desirable and the extinction of the undesirable’.

We’ve seen in this chapter how Nietzsche’s dream of the

superbeing fused with eugenics in the ‘mystical revival’ of the
1890s-1920s. In the next chapter we will focus on one in몭uential
organisation in the ‘mystical revival’ — the Hermetic Order of the
Golden Dawn, and explore how its members promoted an occult
form of eugenics.

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6) Dune, the Hermetic 4) Francis Galton and the

Order of the Golden new religion of Eugenics
Dawn and ‘occult
eugenics’

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