But now at last, only ten thousand years ago, the event occurred which
put forever out of the question any possibility of prudence in any
waywardness of individual whim, or any deviation from the rule dictated
by the owner of things. This time the something that happened did not
cause an increase of man's mastery over physical Nature. It was,
instead, like that initial invention which turned apes into men. And
again, like spoken language, it was a device to facilitate
communication of mind with mind. In some one of the many groups of
beings who had learned the use of fire, arrows, pots, sheep, and
swords, some genius hit upon the idea of written signs as a medium of
communication with those distant in space, and as a means of
perpetuating a knowledge of the will of the dead among his survivors.
But be it observed that only the master, never the man, only the owner
of things, the controller of circumstances, was in a position to embody
and preserve his judgment and desire in written signs. The new art of
writing enhanced the power of rulers, of chiefs. The Pharaoh, not the
fellah, dictated the inscription that was to be engraved. Thus all the
rulers of the past were now able to perpetuate their power by adding
their sanction to the word of the living chief, while no voice from the
ranks of the governed would be allowed to immortalize itself in written
speech. This is the reason that written language introduced
civilization proper. There was no longer any chance for the wildness of
the beast to crop out. Here began the empire of the dead over the
living; but it was the empire of dead rulers over living slaves. The
mastery over Nature and the monopoly of social power thereby became
practically infinite. The tamers were now omnipotent in comparison with
the tamed. It must be noticed that the process of transforming beasts
into citizens was one to which only the tamed, but not the tamers, were
subjected. The ruler stood outside of and above the rule he made. The
law was for his subjects. This was the case with Henry VIII at the acme
of civilization as it had been with the first of the Pharaohs.
Not only the blond beast of prey, but the swarthy also dictated an
ethic for his subjects in order to keep himself in ascendancy. It was
because Nietzsche admired all beasts of prey and felt contempt for
their victims that he hated Jesus Christ and proudly assumed the title
of Anti-Christ. For Christ had set up an ethic which encouraged the
victims to protest and attempt to win back their primeval initiative,
to take over the sovereignty which had been concentrated in the hands
of the mighty and to diffuse it among the nobodies of the tribe. St.
Luke goes so far as to assert that even before Jesus was born his
Mother entertained levelling ideas. Into her lips he puts a song in
which she magnifies the Lord because she believed her Son would bring
down the mighty and exalt them of low degree. But alas! civilization
went on for fifteen hundred years and succeeded in tying Christianity
to the chariot-wheel of monopolized initiative.