THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW

Although Der Wanderer und sein Schatten comes after Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche in Nietzsche’s Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, this entry is such a natural follower of the previous one, Wanderers Or Travelers? that I am happily changing their order here, especially since they come under the same umbrella of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, where the chronology has been disrupted anyway.

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(As a piece of pertinent trivia, our familiar word “planet” comes from the Greek word, meaning “wanderer.” Let us not forget either that through the power of our perennial cultural tradition we identify planets Uranus, Gaea, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Pluto […well, this one used to be thus identified for a while!], Mars, Venus and Mercury,--- with no less than the greatest gods and primeval titans of the ancient world.)

There is no mathematical knowledge to derive from it, but occasional trips into the misty world of intense symbolism and unabashed mysticism can do a lot of good to our imagination and the sense of the irrational, when taken with some detachment and in moderation. The Wanderer and his Shadow is a Nietzschean title, of course, and the trip we are undertaking in this fairly short (and therefore harmless) entry is into the world of wanderer and shadow, in their esoteric existence.

The Schubert song Der Wanderer, to the poem of Georg Philipp Schmidt von Lübeck pictures the wanderer as an utterly unhappy man who has chosen the life of wandering in his search for happiness. At the very end of his quest he finally gets his answer: “There where you are not, there is happiness!”

Apparently, the wandering hero cannot get close to happiness as she is fleeing him all the time, but his quest brings him closer to God, because he Wotan is also a wanderer, at least according to Wagner’s Siegfried. As we know of Nietzsche’s deep spiritual connection to Wagner (the later Nietzsche’s relentless repudiation of Wagner is further proof of that connection, as he was anxiously trying to free himself from that spell), there has to be a special connection to Wotan in Nietzsche’s Wanderer, a Hero emulating God.

And now we come to the mystical significance of the Wanderer’s Shadow. There are few words as heavily soaked in mystical symbolism than Shadow. The shadows of the dead geniuses, which Nietzsche communes with… Shadows as memories… Shadows as forces from the past projecting themselves onto the present and the future… But there is yet another meaning of Shadow coming to us from Richard Strauss’s and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s masterpiece Die Frau ohne Schatten. Shadow as a symbol of fertility and procreation: there is nothing but empty sterility in one deprived of her (or his?) shadow! It does not matter that the great opera was created decades after Nietzsche’s death. Hugo von Hofmannsthal did not conjure up his symbolism out of thin air. There is a powerful mystical bond between Wagner, Nietzsche and Strauss; and chronologicality and other such superficial silliness are powerless to break it or even put it in doubt. Therefore, we can speak of the symbolism of Nietzsche’s Wanderer and his Shadow by invoking the symbolism of Richard Strauss! And here is what we come up with:

The Wanderer and his Shadow is fertile human genius, finding no place on earth where he could be happy. His true place is that of an Eternal Wanderer, among the gods, and only by his detachment from this world can he arrive at his own happiness and in return bestow the happiness of his memory on the world through the fruit of his intellectual and spiritual procreation.