Thus Spake Zarathustra

After ten years alone in the mountains with his eagle and his serpent, Zarathustra comes down to the valley to give away what he has learned, and finds his first audience at a market place — a crowd waiting not for him but for a tightrope walker. He tells them that God is dead and that man is something to be surpassed; they laugh. So begins a book of discourses, parables and songs in which Zarathustra takes his teaching to disciples instead of crowds: the three metamorphoses of the spirit, the despisers of the body, the pale criminal, the thousand and one goals, the vision of eternal recurrence, and at last the higher men who come looking for him in his cave.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote the four parts between 1883 and 1885, the fourth printed privately in an edition of forty copies; he cast it not as argument but as scripture-in-reverse, the form his philosophy is most quoted from and least often read whole. This edition is Thomas Common's English translation, and carries the introduction by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche that accompanied it.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text in its four parts.