SELFknowledge
We are not struggling with ways to become superhuman, but with the ways in which we can become more fully human in a deeply connected more-than-human world. This Journey is represented by the Major Arcana sequence of the Tarot, beginning with the Fool. Rather than a Hero’s Journey, it is (more wisely) known as the Fool’s Journey: the pilgrim soul making its rather more humble way through life.
"The Delphian god cries his oracle to you at the beginning of your wanderings, “Know thyself.” It is a hard saying: for that god “tells nothing and conceals nothing but merely points the way,” as Heraclitus said. But whither does he point? In certain epochs the Greeks were in a similar danger of being overwhelmed by what was past and foreign, and perishing on the rock of “history.” They never lived proud and untouched. Their “culture” was for a long time a chaos of foreign forms and ideas, — Semitic, Babylonian, Lydian and Egyptian, — and their religion a battle of all the gods of the East; just as German culture and religion is at present a death-struggle of all foreign nations and bygone times. And yet, Hellenic culture was no mere mechanical unity, thanks to that Delphic oracle. The Greeks gradually learned to organise the chaos, by taking Apollo’s advice and thinking back to themselves, to their own true necessities, and letting all the sham necessities go. Thus they again came into possession of themselves, and did not remain long the Epigoni of the whole East, burdened with their inheritance. After that hard fight, they increased and enriched the treasure they had inherited by their obedience to the oracle, and they became the ancestors and models for all the cultured nations of the future. This is a parable for each one of us: he must organise the chaos in himself by “thinking himself back” to his true needs. He will want all his honesty, all the sturdiness and sincerity in his character to help him to revolt against second-hand thought, second-hand learning, second-hand action. And he will begin then to understand that culture can be something more than a “decoration of life” — a concealment and disfiguring of it, in other words; for all adornment hides what is adorned. And thus the Greek idea, as against the Roman, will be discovered in him, the idea of culture as a new and finer nature, without distinction of inner and outer, without convention or disguise, as a unity of thought and will, life and appearance. He will learn too, from his own experience, that it was by a greater force of moral character that the Greeks were victorious, and that everything which makes for sincerity is a further step towards true culture, however this sincerity may harm the ideals of education that are reverenced at the time, or even have power to shatter a whole system of merely decorative culture."
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Delphi Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Illustrated) (Series Five Book 24) . Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.
"The Delphian god cries his oracle to you at the beginning of your wanderings, “Know thyself.” It is a hard saying: for that god “tells nothing and conceals nothing but merely points the way,” as Heraclitus said. But whither does he point? In certain epochs the Greeks were in a similar danger of being overwhelmed by what was past and foreign, and perishing on the rock of “history.” They never lived proud and untouched. Their “culture” was for a long time a chaos of foreign forms and ideas, — Semitic, Babylonian, Lydian and Egyptian, — and their religion a battle of all the gods of the East; just as German culture and religion is at present a death-struggle of all foreign nations and bygone times. And yet, Hellenic culture was no mere mechanical unity, thanks to that Delphic oracle. The Greeks gradually learned to organise the chaos, by taking Apollo’s advice and thinking back to themselves, to their own true necessities, and letting all the sham necessities go. Thus they again came into possession of themselves, and did not remain long the Epigoni of the whole East, burdened with their inheritance. After that hard fight, they increased and enriched the treasure they had inherited by their obedience to the oracle, and they became the ancestors and models for all the cultured nations of the future. This is a parable for each one of us: he must organise the chaos in himself by “thinking himself back” to his true needs. He will want all his honesty, all the sturdiness and sincerity in his character to help him to revolt against second-hand thought, second-hand learning, second-hand action. And he will begin then to understand that culture can be something more than a “decoration of life” — a concealment and disfiguring of it, in other words; for all adornment hides what is adorned. And thus the Greek idea, as against the Roman, will be discovered in him, the idea of culture as a new and finer nature, without distinction of inner and outer, without convention or disguise, as a unity of thought and will, life and appearance. He will learn too, from his own experience, that it was by a greater force of moral character that the Greeks were victorious, and that everything which makes for sincerity is a further step towards true culture, however this sincerity may harm the ideals of education that are reverenced at the time, or even have power to shatter a whole system of merely decorative culture."
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Delphi Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Illustrated) (Series Five Book 24) . Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.