XIX. The Bite of the Adder

One day had Zarathustra fallen asleep under a fig-tree, owing to the heat, with his arms over his face. And there came an adder and bit him in the neck, so that Zarathustra screamed with pain. When he had taken his arm…

An adder bites the sleeping Zarathustra in the neck. He thanks it for waking him, says no dragon dies of a serpent's poison, and tells it to take the poison back. The adder licks the wound.

When Zarathustra once told this to his disciples they asked him: “And what, O Zarathustra, is the moral of thy story?” And Zarathustra answered them thus: The destroyer of morality, the good and just call me: my story…

The disciples ask what the moral of the story is. Zarathustra answers that the good and just call him a destroyer of morality, and that his story is immoral.

When, however, ye have an enemy, then return him not good for evil: for that would abash him. But prove that he hath done something good to you. And rather be angry than abash any one! And when ye are cursed, it…

Zarathustra tells his disciples not to shame an enemy with good but to show that the enemy did them a good turn. He says to share out injustice, to prefer a small revenge to none, and to take the blame oneself when one is rich enough to.

I do not like your cold justice; out of the eye of your judges there always glanceth the executioner and his cold steel. Tell me: where find we justice, which is love with seeing eyes? Devise me, then, the love which…

He dislikes the cold justice of judges with the executioner in their eyes. He asks for a love that bears all guilt and a justice that acquits all but the judge. He says he cannot be just from the heart and gives each one his own.

Tell me: where find we justice, which is love with seeing eyes?

Zarathustra asks where one can find justice that is love with seeing eyes.

Finally, my brethren, guard against doing wrong to any anchorite. How could an anchorite forget! How could he requite! Like a deep well is an anchorite. Easy is it to throw in a stone: if it should sink to the bottom,…

Zarathustra warns his brethren not to wrong an anchorite, who cannot forget or requite. He compares him to a deep well into which a stone is easily thrown but cannot be retrieved, and says that if one has wronged him, one should kill him too.