7 passages
Lo, this is the tarantula’s den! Wouldst thou see the tarantula itself? Here hangeth its web: touch this, so that it may tremble. There cometh the tarantula willingly: Welcome, tarantula! Black on thy back is thy…
Zarathustra points to the tarantula's web and addresses the spider in parable. He names the preachers of equality as secretly revengeful and says he will tear their web so that their revenge leaps out from behind the word 'justice'.
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Because, FOR MAN TO BE REDEEMED FROM REVENGE—that is for me the bridge to the highest hope, and a rainbow after long storms.
Zarathustra states the aim opposed to the tarantulas: that man be redeemed from revenge.
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Otherwise, however, would the tarantulas have it. “Let it be very justice for the world to become full of the storms of our vengeance”—thus do they talk to one another. “Vengeance will we use, and insult, against all…
The tarantulas' own pledge of vengeance and 'Will to Equality' is quoted, then unmasked as envy and conceit passed from father to son. Zarathustra tells his friends to distrust those with a strong impulse to punish and those who talk much of justice; the 'good and just' lack only power to be Pharisees.
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My friends, I will not be mixed up and confounded with others. There are those who preach my doctrine of life, and are at the same time preachers of equality, and tarantulas. That they speak in favour of life, though…
Zarathustra refuses to be mixed up with tarantulas who preach his doctrine of life from their dens. He says they do so only to do injury to the powerful, and that they were once world-maligners and heretic-burners.
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Good and evil, and rich and poor, and high and low, and all names of values: weapons shall they be, and sounding signs, that life must again and again surpass itself!
Zarathustra wants men to throng to the future with ever more war and inequality among them. Their values are to be weapons in the supreme fight, for life builds itself aloft with columns and stairs and strives to rise.
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And just behold, my friends! Here where the tarantula’s den is, riseth aloft an ancient temple’s ruins—just behold it with enlightened eyes! Verily, he who here towered aloft his thoughts in stone, knew as well as the…
Beside the den stand the ruins of an ancient temple, whose vault and arch strive against each other in light and shade. Zarathustra reads this as a parable of struggle and inequality in beauty, and asks his friends to be enemies in the same way.
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Verily, no cyclone or whirlwind is Zarathustra: and if he be a dancer, he is not at all a tarantula-dancer!—
The tarantula bites Zarathustra on the finger, thinking he should not sing of enmity for nothing. He asks his friends to bind him to the pillar, preferring to be a pillar-saint rather than a whirl of vengeance.
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What the critics said
Ludovici says that as a sociologist Nietzsche aimed at an aristocratic order of society and the rearing of an ideal race, holding that men are not equal and that every elevation of the type man has been the work of an aristocratic society with a long scale of ranks.
Ludovici identifies the tarantulas with Socialists and Democrats whose criticism of society from below is suppressed envy, and says Nietzsche refuses to be confused with them, including the 'Nietzschean Socialists' who preach his doctrine together with equality.