to life”—is expressed. What did the Hellene secure himself with these mysteries? _Eternal_ life, the eternal recurrence of life; the future promised and hallowed in the past; the triumphant Yea to life despite death and change; real life conceived as the collective prolongation of life through procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality. To the Greeks, the symbol of sex was the most venerated of symbols, the really deep significance of all the piety of antiquity. All the details of the act of procreation, pregnancy and birth gave rise to the loftiest and most solemn feelings. In the doctrine of mysteries, _pain_ was pronounced holy: the “pains of childbirth” sanctify pain in general,—all becoming and all growth, everything that guarantees the future _involves_ pain.... In order that there may be eternal joy in creating, in order that the will to life may say Yea to itself in all eternity, the “pains of childbirth” must also be eternal. All this is what the word Dionysus signifies: I know of no higher symbolism than this Greek symbolism, this symbolism of the Dionysian phenomenon. In it the profoundest instinct of life, the instinct that guarantees the future of life and life eternal, is understood religiously,—the road to life itself, procreation, is pronounced _holy,_ ... It was only Christianity which, with its fundamental resentment against life, made something impure out of sexuality: it flung _filth_ at the very basis, the very first condition of our life. 5 The psychology of orgiasm conceived as the feeling of a superabundance of vitality and strength, within the scope of which even pain _acts as a stimulus,_ gave me the key to the concept _tragic_ feeling, which has been misunderstood not only by Aristotle, but also even more by our pessimists. Tragedy is so far from proving anything in regard to the pessimism of the Greeks, as Schopenhauer maintains, that it ought rather to be considered as the categorical repudiation and _condemnation_ thereof. The saying of Yea to life, including even its most strange and most terrible problems, the will to life rejoicing over its own inexhaustibleness in the _sacrifice_ of its highest types—this is what I called Dionysian, this is what I divined as the bridge leading to the psychology of the _tragic_ poet. Not in order to escape from terror and pity, not to purify one’s self of a dangerous passion by discharging it with vehemence—this is how Aristotle understood it—but to be far beyond terror and pity and to be the eternal lust of Becoming itself—that lust which also involves the _lust of destruction._ And with this I once more come into touch with the spot from which I once set out—-the “Birth of Tragedy” was my first transvaluation of all values: with this I again take my stand upon the soil from out of which my will and my capacity spring—I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus,—I, the prophet of eternal recurrence. THE END. THE HAMMER SPEAKETH