two are the forces most precious to mankind.

The first is Demeter, the Goddess.
She is the Earth—or any name you wish to call her—and she sustains humanity with solid food.

Next came the son of the virgin, Dionysus, bringing the counterpart to bread, wine and the blessings of life’s flowing juices.
His blood, the blood of the grape, lightens the burden of our mortal misery.
When, after their daily toils, men drink their fill, sleep comes to them, bringing release from all their troubles. There is no other cure for sorrow.
Though himself a God, it is his blood we pour out to offer thanks to the Gods. And through him, we are blessed.

Do not mistake the rule of force for true power. Men are not shaped by force.

This God [Dionysus] is also a prophet. Possession by his ecstasy, his sacred frenzy, opens the soul’s prophetic eyes.
Those whom his spirit takes over completely often with frantic tongues foretell the future.

We have seen that Dionysos has no contact whatever with the Aryan world of ideas, but that he can be connected at a number of points with non-Hindu Dravidian religion, as exemplified by the religion of the Kotas of South India and the Oraons and others in the Chota Nagpur-Orissa area.

The cult of Dionysos had no element of asceticism or self-inflicted suffering.

If we take account only of this denoscription of the Greek Dionysos, we find a number of incontestable resemblances between Dionysos and Siva; it is easy to understand why the two have been so often identified.

We are often reproached with having taken as our slogan word anarchy which stirs up fear in so many minds. “Your ideas are excellent – we are told – but you must admit that you have made an unfortunate choice in naming your party. Anarchy, in current speech, is the synonym for disorder, for chaos; that word awakens in the mind the idea of colliding interests, of individuals at war with each other, who cannot succeed in establishing harmony.” ...

The anarchist party hastened to accept the name that was given to it. It insisted first of all on the hyphen uniting an and archy, explaining that under that form, the word an-archy, of Greek origin, signified no power, and not “disorder”; but soon it accepted the word as it was, without giving a useless task to proof-readers or a lesson in Greek to its readers.

The word was thus returned to its primitive, ordinary and common meaning, expressed in 1816 in these words by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. “The philosopher who wants to reform a bad law does not preach insurrection against it…. The character of the anarchist is quite different. He denies the existence of the law, he rejects its validity, he incites men to ignore it as a law and to rise up against its implementation.” The meaning of the word has become even broader today: the anarchist denies not only existing laws, but all established power, all authority; yet the essence remains the same; the anarchist rebels – and this is where he begins – against power, authority, under whatever form it may appear.

But this word, we are told, awakens in the mind the negation of order, and hence the idea of disorder, of chaos!

Let us try to understand each other. What kind of order are you talking about? Is it the harmony of which we dream, we anarchists? The harmony that will establish itself freely in human relations once humanity ceases to be divided into two classes, one sacrificed to the other? The harmony that will arise spontaneously from the solidarity of interests, when all men will form the same single family, when each will work for the well-being of all and all for the well-being of each? Evidently not! Those who reproach anarchism for being the negation of order are not speaking of that future harmony; they speak of order as it is conceived in our present society. So let us take a look at this order which anarchy wishes to destroy.

Order, as it is understood today, means nine-tenths of humanity working to procure luxury, pleasure and the satisfaction of the most execrable of passions for a handful of idlers.

Order is the deprivation for this nine-tenths of humanity of all that is necessary for a healthy life and for the reasonable development of the intellectual qualities. Reducing nine-tenths of humanity to the condition of beasts of burden living from day to day, without ever daring to think of the pleasures man can gain from the study of science, from artistic creation – that is order!

Order is poverty; it is famine become the normal order of society. It is the Irish peasant dying of hunger; it is the peasant of a third of Russia dying of diphtheria, of typhus, of hunger as a result of need in the midst of piles of wheat destined for export. It is the people of Italy reduced to abandoning their luxuriant countryside to wander over Europe seeking some tunnel or other to excavate, where they will risk being crushed to death after having survived a few months longer. It is land taken from the peasant for raising animals to feed the rich; it is land left fallow rather than being given back to those who ask nothing better than to cultivate it.

Order is the woman selling herself to feed her children; it is the child reduced to working in a factory or dying of starvation; it is the worker reduced to the state of a machine. It is the phantom of the worker rising up at the doors of the rich. It is the phantom of the people rising up at the gates of the government.

Order is a tiny minority, elevated into the seats of government, which imposes itself in that way on the majority and prepares its children to continue the same functions in order to maintain the same privileges by fraud, corruption, force and massacre.

Order is the continual war of man against man, of trade against trade, of class against class, of nation against nation. It is the cannon that never ceases to roar over Europe; it is the devastation of countryside, the sacrifice of whole generations on the battlefield, the destruction in a single year of wealth accumulated by centuries of hard toil.

Order is servitude, it is the shackling of thought, the brutalizing of the human race, maintained by the sword and the whip. It is the sudden death by fire-damp, or the slow death by suffocation, of hundreds of miners blown up or buried each year by the greed of the employers, and shot down and bayoneted as soon as they dare complain.

Order, finally, is the drowning in blood of the Paris Commune. It is the death of thirty thousand men, women and children, torn apart by shells, shot down, and buried alive, under the streets of Paris. It is the destiny of Russian youth, immured in prisons, isolated in the snows of Siberia, the best and purest of them dying by the hangman’s rope.

That is order.

And disorder? What is this you call disorder?

It is the uprising of the people against this ignoble order, breaking its fetters, destroying the barriers, and marching towards a better future. It is humanity at the most glorious point in history. It is the revolt of thought on the eve of the revolution; it is the overthrowing of hypotheses sanctioned by the immobility of preceding centuries; it is the opening out of a whole flood of new ideas, audacious inventions, it is the solution of the problems of science.

Disorder is the abolition of ancient slaveries, it is the uprising of the communes; it is the destruction of feudal serfdom, the effort to make an end to economic servitude.

Disorder is the insurrection of peasants rising up against priests and lords, burning castles to give place to farmsteads, emerging from their hovels to take their place in the sun. It is France abolishing royalty, and delivering a mortal blow to serfdom in all of Western Europe.

Disorder is 1848, making the kings tremble and proclaiming the right to work. It is the people of Paris who fight for a new idea and who, while succumbing to massacre, bequeath to humanity the idea of the free commune, and open for it the way towards that revolution whose approach we foresee and whose name will be “the social revolution.”

Disorder – what they call disorder – is all the ages during which whole generations sustained an incessant struggle and sacrificed themselves to prepare a better existence for humanity by freeing it from the servitude of the past. It is the ages during which the popular genius took its free way and in a few years made gigantic steps forward, without which men would have remained in the condition of the slave of antiquity, cringing and debased by misery.

Disorder is the blossoming of the most beautiful passions and the greatest of devotions, it is the epic of supreme human love.

The word anarchy, implying the negation of order, and invoking the memory of the most beautiful moments in the life of the peoples – is it not well chosen for a party that marches towards the conquest of a better future?

The moral inhibition of the child’s natural sexuality, the last stage of which is the severe impairment of the child’s genital sexuality, makes the child afraid, shy, fearful of authority, obedient, “good,” and “docile” in the authoritarian sense of the words. It has a crippling effect on man’s rebellious forces because every vital life-impulse is now burdened with severe fear; and since sex is a forbidden subject, thought in general and man’s critical faculty also become inhibited. In short, morality’s aim is to produce acquiescent subjects who, despite distress and humiliation, are adjusted to the authoritarian order. Thus, the family is the authoritarian state in miniature, to which the child must learn to adapt himself as a preparation for the general social adjustment required of him later. Man’s authoritarian structure—this must be clearly established—is basically produced by the embedding of sexual inhibitions and fear in the living substance of sexual impulses.

[T]he sexual inhibitions and debilitations that constitute the most important prerequisites for the existence of the authoritarian family and are the most essential groundwork of the structural formation of the lower middle-class man are compassed with the help of religious fears, which are infused with sexual guilt-feelings and deeply embedded in the emotions. Thus we arrive at the problem of the relation of religion to the negation of sexual desire. Sexual debility results in a lowering of self-confidence. In one case it is compensated by the brutalization of sexuality, in the other by rigid character traits. The compulsion to control one’s sexuality, to maintain sexual repression, leads to the development of pathologic, emotionally tinged notions of honor and duty, bravery and self-control.

Ungratified sexuality is readily transformed into rage.

Nature, good and evil. — At first, men imagined themselves into nature:
they saw everywhere themselves and their kind, especially their evil and capricious qualities, as it were hidden among the clouds, storms, beasts of prey, trees and plants: it was then they invented ‘evil nature’. Then there came along an age when they again imagined themselves out of nature, the age of Rousseau: they were so fed up with one another they absolutely had to have a corner of the world into which man and his torments could not enter: they invented ‘good nature’.

Freedoers and freethinkers. — Freedoers are at a disadvantage compared with freethinkers because people suffer more obviously from the consequences of deeds than from those of thoughts. If one considers, however, that both the one and the other are in search of gratification, and that in the case of the freethinker the mere thinking through and enunciation of forbidden things provides this gratification, both are on an equal footing with regard to motive: and with regard to consequences the decision will even go against the freethinker, provided one does not judge – as all the world does – by what is most immediately and crassly obvious. One has to take back much of the defamation which people have cast upon all those who broke through the spell of a custom by means of a deed – in general, they are called criminals. Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has hitherto always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed; – history treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!

Works and faith. — Protestant teachers continue to propagate the fundamental error that all that matters is faith, and that out of faith works must necessarily proceed. This is simply not true: but it has so seductive a sound it has confused other intelligences than Luther's (namely those of Socrates and Plato): even though the evidence of every experience of every day speaks against it. The most confident knowledge or faith cannot provide the strength or the ability needed for a deed, it cannot replace the employment of that subtle, many-faceted mechanism which must first be set in motion if anything at all of an idea is to translate itself into action. Works, first and foremost! That is to say, doing, doing, doing! The ‘faith’ that goes with it will soon put in an appearance – you can be sure of that!

Mood as argument. — ‘What is the cause of a cheerful resolution for action?’ – mankind has been much exercised by this question. The oldest and still the most common answer is: ‘God is the cause; it is his way of telling us he approves of our intention.’ When in former times one consulted the oracle over something one proposed to do, what one wanted from it was this feeling of cheerful resolution; and anyone who stood in doubt before several possible courses of action advised himself thus: ‘I shall do that which engenders this feeling.’ One thus decided, not for the most reasonable course, but for that course the image of which inspired the soul with hope and courage. The good mood was placed on the scales as an argument and outweighed rationality: it did so because it was interpreted superstitiously as the effect of a god who promises success and who in this manner gives expression to his reason as the highest rationality. Now consider the consequences of such a prejudice when clever and power-hungry men availed themselves – and continue to avail themselves – of it! ‘Create a mood!’ – one will then require no reasons and conquer all objections!

The actors of virtue and sin. — Among the men of antiquity famed for their virtue there were, it appears, a countless number who play-acted before themselves: the Greeks especially, as actors incarnate, will have done this quite involuntarily and have approved it. Everyone, moreover, was with his virtue in competition with the virtue of another or of all others: how should one not have employed every kind of art to bring one's virtue to public attention, above all before oneself, even if only for the sake of practice! Of what use was a virtue one could not exhibit or which did not know how to exhibit itself! – Christianity put paid to these actors of virtue: in their place it invented the repellent flaunting of sin, it introduced into the world sinfulness one has lyingly made up (to this very day it counts as ‘good form’ among good Christians).

Pride in the spirit. — The pride of mankind, which resists the theory of descent from the animals and establishes the great gulf between man and nature – this pride has its basis in a prejudice as to what spirit is: and this prejudice is relatively young. During the great prehistoric age of mankind, spirit was presumed to exist everywhere and was not held in honour as a privilege of man. Because, on the contrary, the spiritual (together with all drives, wickedness, inclinations) had been rendered common property, and thus common, one was not ashamed to have descended from animals or trees (the noble races thought themselves honoured by such fables), and saw in the spirit that which unites us with nature, not that which sunders us from it. Thus one schooled oneself in modesty – and likewise in consequence of a prejudice.

The brake. — To suffer for the sake of morality and then to be told that this kind of suffering is founded on an error: this arouses indignation. For there is a unique consolation in affirming through one's suffering a ‘profounder world of truth’ than any other world is, and one would much rather suffer and thereby feel oneself exalted above reality (through consciousness of having thus approached this ‘profounder world of truth’) than be without suffering but also without this feeling that one is exalted. It is thus pride, and the customary manner in which pride is gratified, which stands in the way of a new understanding of morality. What force, therefore, will have to be employed if this brake is to be removed? More pride? A new pride?

Feelings and their origination in judgments. — ‘Trust your feelings!’ – But feelings are nothing final or original; behind feelings there stand judgments and evaluations which we inherit in the form of feelings (inclinations, aversions). The inspiration born of a feeling is the grandchild of a judgment – and often of a false judgment! – and in any event not a child of your own! To trust one's feelings – means to give more obedience to one's grandfather and grandmother and their grandparents than to the gods which are in us: our reason and our experience.

False conclusions from utility. — When one has demonstrated that a thing is of the highest utility, one has however thereby taken not one step towards explaining its origin: that is to say, one can never employ utility to make it comprehensible that a thing must necessarily exist. But it is the contrary judgment that has hitherto prevailed – and even into the domain of the most rigorous science. Even in the case of astronomy, has the (supposed) utility in the way the satellites are arranged (to compensate for the diminished light they receive owing to their greater distance from the sun, so that their inhabitants shall not go short of light) not been advanced as the final objective of this arrangement and the explanation of its origin? It reminds us of the reasoning of Columbus: the earth was made for man, therefore if countries exist they must be inhabited. ‘Is it probable that the sun should shine on nothing, and that the nocturnal vigils of the stars are squandered upon pathless seas and countries unpeopled?’

Drives transformed by moral judgments. — The same drive evolves into the painful feeling of cowardice under the impress of the reproach custom has imposed upon this drive: or into the pleasant feeling of humility if it happens that a custom such as the Christian has taken it to its heart and called it good. That is to say, it is attended by either a good or a bad conscience! In itself it has, like every drive, neither this moral character nor any moral character at all, nor even a definite attendant sensation of pleasure or displeasure: it acquires all this, as its second nature, only when it enters into relations with drives already baptised good or evil or is noted as a quality of beings the people has already evaluated and determined in a moral sense. – Thus the older Greeks felt differently about envy from the way we do; Hesiod counted it among the effects of the good, beneficent Eris, and there was nothing offensive in attributing to the gods something of envy: which is comprehensible under a condition of things the soul of which was contest; contest, however, was evaluated and determined as good. The Greeks likewise differed from us in their evaluation of hope: they felt it to be blind and deceitful; Hesiod gave the strongest expression to this attitude in a fable whose sense is so strange no more recent commentator has understood it – for it runs counter to the modern spirit, which has learned from Christianity to believe in hope as a virtue. With the Greeks, on the other hand, to whom the gateway to knowledge of the future seemed not to be entirely closed and in countless cases where we content ourselves with hope elevated inquiry into the future into a religious duty, hope would, thanks to all these oracles and soothsayers, no doubt become somewhat degraded and sink to something evil and dangerous. – The Jews felt differently about anger from the way we do, and called it holy: thus they saw the gloomy majesty of the man with whom it showed itself associated at an elevation which a European is incapable of imagining; they modelled their angry holy Jehovah on their angry holy prophets. Measured against these, the great men of wrath among Europeans are as it were creations at second hand.

‘Pure spirit’ a prejudice. — Wherever the teaching of pure spirituality has ruled, it has destroyed nervous energy with its excesses: it has taught deprecation, neglect or tormenting of the body and men to torment and deprecate themselves on account of the drives which fill them; it has produced gloomy, tense and oppressed souls – which believed, moreover, they knew the cause of their feeling of wretchedness and were perhaps able to abolish it! ‘It must reside in the body! the body is still flourishing too well!’ – thus they concluded, while in fact the body was, by means of the pains it registered, raising protest after protest against the mockery to which it was constantly being subjected. A general chronic over-excitability was finally the lot of these virtuous pure-spirits: the only pleasure they could still recognise was in the form of ecstasy and other precursors of madness – and their system attained its summit when it came to take ecstasy for the higher goal of life and the standard by which all earthly things stood condemned.

The boy believes that he'll only become a proper I, a proper guy, when he becomes a man; the man thinks that only in the afterlife will he be something proper. And for us to come nearer to actuality immediately, even the best are still today telling each other the tale that one has to take up into himself the state, his people, humanity, and who knows what all, in order to be an actual I, a “free, state citizen,” a “free or true man”; they also see my truth and actuality in the acceptance of an alien I and devotion to it. And what sort of an I? An I that is neither an I nor a you, an imaginary I, a phantasm.

During the Middle Ages the church could well tolerate many states living united in it; likewise, after the Reformation, and especially af­ter the Thirty Years' War, states learned to tolerate many churches (denominations) being gathered under one crown. But all states are religious and, as the case may be, are often “Christian states,” and set themselves the task of forcing the ungovernable, the “egoists,” under the bond of the unnatural, i.e., to Christianize them. All institutions of the Christian state have the objective of Christianizing the peo­ple. Thus, the court has the objective of forcing people to justice, the school that of forcing them to spiritual culture; in short, the objective of protecting those who act in a Christian manner from those who act in an unchristian manner, of bringing Christian action to dom­inance, of making it powerful. Among these means of coercion, the state also counted the church, it required a—particular religion from everybody. Dupin recently said against the clergy: “Instruction and education belong to the state.”

Certainly, all that concerns the principle of morality is a state mat­ter. Thus, the Chinese state meddles so much in family affairs, and one is nothing, if one is not, above all, a good child to his parents. With us as well, family affairs are thoroughly state affairs; it's just that our state—places trust in the families without anxious supervision; it keeps the family bound through the ties of marriage, and these ties cannot be broken without it.

But that the state makes me responsible for my principles, and de­mands certain ones from me, could lead me to ask: What does the “bat in my belfry” (principle) have to do with it? Very much, because the state is the—ruling principle. People suppose that in matters of divorce, in marriage law in general, it's a question of the proportion of rights between church and state. Rather it's a question of whether something sacred should rule over human beings, whether it is called faith or moral law (morality). The state, as a ruler, behaves the same way the church did. The latter is based on devoutness, the former on morality.

The best state would clearly be the one which has the most loyal citizens, and the more the devoted sense of legality is lost, the more the state, this system of morality, this moral life itself, becomes dimin­ished in force and quality. With the “good citizens,” the good state also degenerates and dissolves into anarchy and lawlessness. “Respect for the law!” The state as a whole is held together by this cement. “The law is sacred, and anyone who transgresses it is a criminal.” Without crime, no state: the moral world—and that is the state—is stuffed full of rogues, swindlers, liars, thieves, etc. Since the state is the rule of law, its hierarchy, therefore the egoist, in all cases where his advantage runs up against the state, can only satisfy himself through crime.

The state cannot give up the claim that its laws and regulations are sacred. With this, the individual is considered precisely as the unholy (barbarian, natural human being, egoist), since he is against the state, which is precisely how the church once viewed him.

As the church had mortal sins, so the state has capital crimes; as the one had heretics, so the other has traitors; the one had ecclesiastical penalties, the other has criminal penalties; the one had inquisitorial trials, the other has fiscal trials; in short, there sins, here crimes, there sinners, here crim­inals, there inquisition and here—inquisition. Won't the sanctity of the state fall like that of the church? The awe of its laws, the reverence of its sovereignty, the humility of its “subjects”—will this last? Will the “sacred face” not be disfigured?

What a folly to demand of state power that it should enter into an honest fight with the individual, and, as one expresses himself with freedom of the press, share sun and wind equally! If the state, this concept, is to be an effective power, it must simply be a higher power against the individual. The state is “sacred” and should not expose itself to the “impudent attacks” of individuals. If the state is sacred, then there must be censorship. The political liberals acknowledge the former and deny the consequence. But in any case, they concede re­pressive penalties to it, because—they insist that the state is more than the individual and practices a justified revenge, called punishment.

Punishment only has a meaning when it is to grant atonement for the violation of a sacred thing.

Weitling lays the blame for crime on “social disorder” and lives in the expectation that under communist institutions crimes will be­come impossible because the temptations to them, such as money, will be removed. But since his organized society is also extolled as sacred and inviolable, he miscalculates in that kind-hearted opinion. Those who declared their support with their mouth for the commu­nist society, but worked underhandedly for its ruin, would not be lacking. Besides, Weitling has to continue with “remedies against the natural remainder of human diseases and weaknesses,” and “remedies” always announce at the start that one considers individuals to be “called” to a certain “well-being” [Heil] and will consequently treat them in accordance with this “human calling.” The remedy or cure is only the reverse side of punishment, the theory of cure runs parallel with the theory of punishment; if the latter sees in an action a sin against right, the former takes it for a sin against himself, as a wasting of his health. But the appropriate thing is for me to look at it as an action that suits me or that doesn't suit me, as hostile or friendly to me, i.e., that I treat it as my property, which I cultivate or destroy. Neither “crime” nor “disease” is an egoist view of the matter, i.e., a judgment coming from me, but from something else, namely whether it violates the right, generally, or the health in part of the individual (the sick one) and in part of the universal (society). “Crime” is treated implacably, “disease” with “loving kindness, compassion,” and the like.

Punishment follows crime. If crime falls because the sacred disap­pears, punishment must no less be dragged into its fall; because it too only has meaning in relation to something sacred. They have abolished ecclesiastical punishments. Why? Because how someone behaves toward the “holy God” is his own affair. But as this one punishment, ecclesiastical punishment, has fallen, so all punishments must fall. As sin against the so-called God is a person's own affair, so is that against every sort of so-called sacred thing. According to our theories of penal law, with whose “timely improvement” people are struggling in vain, they want to punish people for this or that “inhumanity” and make the foolishness of these theories especially clear by their consequences, in that they hang the little thieves and let the big ones go. For violation of property, you have the penitentiary, while for “forced thought,” sup­pression of “natural human rights,” only—presentations and petitions.

The criminal code has continued existence only through the sacred, and falls to pieces by itself if they give up punishment. Now every­where they want to create a new penal law without having reserva­tions about punishment. But it is precisely punishment that must give way to satisfaction, which again cannot aim at satisfying right or justice, but at procuring a satisfactory outcome for us. If one does to us something we won't put up with, we break his power and bring our own to bear; we satisfy ourselves on him and don't fall into the folly of trying to satisfy right (the phantasm). The sacred isn't to defend itself against human beings, but rather the human being is to defend himself against human beings; as, of course, God too no longer de­fends himself against human beings, that God to whom once and in part, indeed, even now, all “God's servants” offered their hands to punish the blasphemer, as still to this very day, they offer their hands to the sacred. That devotion to the sacred also brings it about that without any lively interest of one's own, one only delivers malefactors into the hands of the police and the courts: an apathetic giving over to the authorities, “who will, of course, best administer sacred things.” The people goes utterly nuts, sending the police against everything that seems immoral, or even only unseemly, to it; and this popular rage for the moral protects the police institution more than the mere government could possibly protect it.

In crime the egoist has up to now asserted himself and mocked the sacred; the breaking with the sacred, or rather of the sacred, can be­come general. A revolution never returns, but an immense, reckless, shameless, conscienceless, proud—crime, doesn't it rumble in the dis­tant thunder, and don't you see how the sky grows ominously silent and gloomy?