admiration and self-adulation ("Among a hundred mirrors"—Nietzsche); a Narcissus state, a strange spectacle, perhaps, for profane eyes. The separation from the mother-imago, the birth out of one's self, reconciles all conflicts through the sufferings. This is probably meant by Nietzsche's verse:
"Why hast thou enticed thyself
Into the Paradise of the old serpent?
Why hast thou crept
Into thyself, thyself?. . .
"A sick man now
Sick of a serpent's poison,[42]
A captive now
Whom the hardest destiny befell
In thine own pit;
Bowed down as thou workest
Encaved within thyself,
Burrowing into thyself,
Helpless,
Stiff,
A corpse.
Overwhelmed with a hundred burdens,
Overburdened by thyself.
A wise man,
A self-knower,
The wise Zarathustra;
Thou soughtest the heaviest burden
And foundest thou thyself. . . ."
The symbolism of this speech is of the greatest richness. He is buried in the depths of self, as if in the earth; really a dead man who has turned back to mother earth;[43] a Kaineus "piled with a hundred burdens" and pressed down to death; the one who groaning bears the
