Zarathustra’s Discovery of the Apostates

Zarathustra’s Discovery of the Apostates is a scene of recognition and rebuke: Zarathustra discovers that people who once responded to his teaching with energy and freedom have returned to prayer. Their change is not presented as a hard-won spiritual insight but as a retreat into comfort and cowardice. The scene then turns from their confession to Zarathustra’s laughter at their supposed doubts about God, culminating in a comic account of how the old gods themselves answered a jealous god’s claim to be the only one. Set in Pied Cow Town on the way back to his cave, the episode joins the disappointment of failed influence to the anticipation of homecoming.

The Return to Piety

Zarathustra measures the apostates’ change against the vivid promise they once represented. The meadow that had recently been green and varied now lies faded and grey; the honey of hope he carried away from it has become an image of a harvest that has withered. The contrast makes their reversion feel like more than a shift in belief: the place that once nourished expectation now displays its exhaustion. He describes the young hearts as having grown not truly old but weary, ordinary, and comfortable, and their own account of the change is that they have become pious again.

That confession follows a remembered period of movement. Zarathustra had seen them run out in the early morning with bold feet, and recalls how laughter in his wisdom beckoned them into a dancer’s step. They had once fluttered around light and freedom like flies and young poets. Now, a little older and colder, they have become mystifiers, mutterers, and stay-at-homes. Most sharply, those who once lifted their legs like dancers are now bent down to creep to the Cross. The bodily contrast gives the reversal its force: open, buoyant movement has contracted into a posture of submission.

Zarathustra wonders whether despair at his solitude, or the long and unanswered wait for his trumpet and herald calls, may have contributed to their retreat. The passage raises this possibility without establishing it as the cause. What it does make plain is the change in their relation to the boldness they once displayed: their knowledge has grown tired, and they now slander their former morning courage. The apostasy is therefore also a repudiation of their own past, not simply a return to a religious practice.

Confession and Rebuke

The phrase that names their reversal becomes the scene’s repeated confession: they have grown pious again. Some say it openly; many, Zarathustra observes, are still too cowardly even to admit it. He looks into their eyes and tells them directly that they are praying again, marking the recognition as a face-to-face confrontation rather than a distant judgment. Their blushes make the accusation visible even where speech falters.

Zarathustra’s rebuke is pointedly limited. Prayer is a disgrace, he says, not for everyone, but for those addressed, for himself, and for others who keep their conscience within themselves. The qualification matters: the passage does not present his condemnation as a universal rule against prayer. It is directed at people whose earlier commitments make their return an evasion of themselves. He identifies the motive as the cowardly devil within them, wishing to clasp its hands, fold its arms, and take things easier. That impulse, he says, persuaded them that there is a God. In this account, belief serves the desire for rest: piety offers relief from the effort and risk of the freedom they had once welcomed.

The scene’s movement from confession to accusation also sharpens its dramatic irony. The apostates’ phrase sounds like a sober declaration, but Zarathustra interprets it as an admission of retreat. He does not treat their return as evidence that his teaching has been disproved; instead, he reads it through the contrast between their former boldness and present comfort. Their own words disclose the change, while his response names the weakness he believes lies beneath it.

Laughter and the Old Gods

Zarathustra’s attention then shifts from the apostates’ prayer to people who still doubt God. At the sight of asses intoxicated and the hearing of night-watchmen doubting God, his heart writhes with laughter, so intensely that it seems on the verge of breaking and sinks into his midriff. The bodily excess of this laughter answers the apostates’ bent posture: where they have contracted into solemn piety, he is overcome by an irrepressible, almost painful amusement. He declares that the time for such doubts about old, sleeping, light-shunning things has long since passed.

He rejects the claim that the old gods merely faded away in twilight. Their end, he says, was merrier: they laughed themselves to death. The story turns on the declaration of a jealous god, “There is one God! You shall have no other gods before me!” By proclaiming exclusive divinity, this god forgets himself; the other gods respond by rocking in their chairs and asking whether godliness does not consist precisely in there being gods but no God. The joke dismantles the authority of the singular claim from within the imagined company of the gods themselves. Rather than staging a solemn dispute over whether God exists, Zarathustra presents the old gods’ laughter as the answer to a demand for exclusive worship.

This comic myth also reverses the scene’s initial terms. The apostates have returned to prayer under the pressure of fear and ease, while Zarathustra’s laughter refuses the solemnity that would make their return appear profound. His ridicule is not simply directed at belief in the abstract: it exposes the mismatch between their earlier openness and the comfort they now seek in a God. The old gods’ laughter gives that refusal a mythic form, replacing an account of divine disappearance by an irreverent story of divine self-destruction.

Pied Cow Town and the Return Home

The episode closes by locating Zarathustra in Pied Cow Town, the town he loves. He is only two days from reaching his cave and his animals, and his soul continually rejoices as home draws near. The placement gives the rebuke a transitional setting: Zarathustra is looking back at the people whose hope he once carried with him while moving toward the solitude that awaits him again. His homeward anticipation does not erase the disappointment of the apostates; it stands beside it, turning the scene from failed fellowship toward return.

The next movement begins with an address to solitude as home, accompanied by tears after too long among wild and strange lands. That transition makes the preceding episode resonate as part of a larger homecoming, not as a reconciliation with the apostates. They remain bent toward the Cross, while Zarathustra’s path leads toward his cave. The episode’s decisive contrast is therefore between a retreat disguised as renewed piety and a return to solitude that Zarathustra welcomes, even with tears.