This Magician and Animal Trainer

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemical Tract (Leipzig, 1887)


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There's no doubt he brings with him ointments and balm. But in order to be a doctor, he first has to inflict wounds. Then, while he eases the pain caused by the wound, at the same time he poisons the wound—for that is, above all, what he knows how to do, this magician and animal trainer, around whom everything healthy necessarily becomes ill and everything sick necessarily becomes tame. In fact, he defends his sick herd well enough, this strange shepherd—he protects them against themselves, against the smouldering wickedness, scheming, and maliciousness in the herd itself, against all those addictions and illnesses characteristic of their dealings with each other. He fights shrewdly, hard, and secretly against the anarchy and self-dissolution which start up all the time within the herd, in which the most dangerously explosive stuff, resentment, is constantly piling and piling up. To detonate this explosive material in such a way that it does not blow up the herd and its shepherd, that is his essential work of art and also his most important function.

If we want to sum up the value of the priestly existence in the shortest slogan, we could at once put it like this: the priest is the person who alters the direction of resentment. For every suffering person instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering, or, more precisely, an agent, or, even more precisely, a guilty agent capable of suffering—in short, he seeks some living person on whom he can, on some pretext or other, unload his feelings, either in fact or in effigy. For the discharge of feelings is the most important way a suffering man seeks relief (that is, some anaesthetic)—it's his instinctively desired narcotic against all sorts of torments. In my view, only here can we find the true physiological cause of resentment, revenge, and things related to them, in a longing for some anaesthetic against pain through one's emotions.

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