Lil Nas X is a guest on the latest episode of TS Madison’s podcast, Outlaws.
We say “latest,” but the episode was recorded back in February 2025. For some reason, Madison is only dropping it now as the finale of the season.
We’re not sure why she’s been sitting on it for so long. We’re guessing that perhaps it was due to go out late last year, but then events took over when Lil Nas X ran into legal trouble. The history-making rapper was arrested in August and has spent the past few months dealing with the fallout.
He was stopped by police late one night while walking in just his underwear on Ventura Boulevard, Los Angeles. Authorities subsequently charged him with attacking the police officers.
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Earlier this month, a California judge ruled the case would be dismissed on the condition that Lil Nas X enter a mental health diversion program. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder following the run-in with cops.
Given when it was recorded, Lil Nas X’s chat with Madison doesn’t touch upon his legal woes. However, he discusses navigating his sudden rise to fame and his subsequent career. He also talks about his personal life.
Gold-star gay
In one segment, he revealed that something he cares passionately about is monogamy.
“I do, one million per cent, believe in monogamy,” he told Madison.
“I’m not against people that are against it, but I think it’s a powerful thing to say, ‘Okay, this is what I want. I don’t want this other stuff.’ I feel like trying to dabble into too many like bowls … When it comes to people, when it comes to love, I think that’s a lot. I’m not here for it. Maybe it’s insecurity in me or something.”
He went on to recall hooking up with a couple once, and it did not end well.
“This couple, they invited me to join them, right?”
However, one of the boyfriends then got upset when they got down to business.
“I was there, and it was really awkward.”
“Were you all naked?” asked Madison.
Lil Nas X says they were, and suggests that the man was upset because, “You don’t want to see somebody who’s like yours being somebody else’s. You know what I mean?”
He says he has nothing against people who are into group sessions, but says he finds sex can be a spiritual experience.
“Whether you want to admit it or not, when you do that, when you have sex with somebody, you’re having sex with everything they’ve been through and everybody they’ve been through.”
He clarifies that he’s not advocating abstinence or wishing to sound like a pastor.
“I don’t mean don’t have sex with a lot of people. F–k as many people as you want.”
Watch that part of the conversation below.
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“I 99% lean towards men”
In another part of the podcast, Lil Nas X also talks about his sexuality.
In 2023, he posted a series of tweets asking how people would react if he came out as “a little bisexual”.
Talking to Madison, he said, “I’m gay, but if something happens, I’m not going to stop myself,” before adding: “But mostly I 99% lean towards men.”
He went on to say he’s “never had sex with a girl”, but has had “feelings” for women, which were mostly emotional and “not sexual”.
He went on to say he’d struggled with the attention paid to his sexuality when he first became famous.
Madison asked him if he had LGBTQ+ people in his life that he could lean on.
“If I’m being like super honest, like for like the past seven, eight, nine, I don’t know how many long months, I kind of got away from everybody,” he replied. “Even like my team and everything, I kind of got rid of everybody. And I’m just now bringing people like back on board.”
Watch the whole interview below.
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David Hudson is a contributing editor to Queerty who specializes in film, music, health, travel and queer culture. Connect with him on X and Bluesky and DM him with potential story ideas.
“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
― Ernest Hemingway
American journalist, short-story writer, and novelist who became a highly influential 20th century writer. He was known for his simple, powerful, and economical writing style, which influenced other writers. His works, including A Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, often explored themes of courage, resilience, and human struggles. (Wikipedia.org)
• This cycle is based on empirical data meaning enough data was observed and recorded to make it possible to suggest attitudes and reactions. Keep in mind that we all have free will and thus results will vary from one individual to another. • The graph shows the energy high at the beginning of the cycle (not unlike any other astrological aspect) followed by a slow down before it gets strong and again this reflects years of tracking and noting feedback from our many students. • If you are making a decision during this time you might want to let it set for a day or two then check your decision again to see if it still makes sense. However, you can feel into the ebb and flow and find good times to work on self emotionally in both the low and high points. Impatience, emotion and acts without thinking are common. • With practice you can feel when the energy is there to help bring completion to tasks, goals and projects you may be working on.
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Apr 22, 2026 Richard Reichbart, JD, PhD, is a training and supervising psychoanalyst. For thirty five years, he has maintained a private practice for the treatment of adults, adolescents and children in Northern New Jersey. In addition, he is a short story writer, a parapsychologist, and a poet. He is author of The Paranormal Surrounds Us: Psychic Phenomena in Literature, Culture, and Psychoanalysis. Prior to his career in psychology, he worked as an attorney focusing on civil rights and native American issues. Here he suggests that great writers portray psychic phenomena in a realistic manner. This fact is generally ignored by both parapsychologists and literary critics. He focuses on Shakespeare’s Hamlet in which Hamlet applied parapsychological principles in order to determine whether the ostensible ghost of his father was real and whether the information conveyed by the ghost was accurate. He also describes shared dream experiences in both Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and James Joyce’s Ulysses. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on November 21, 2020)
“The Law of Assumption” “Assume a virtue, if you have it not.” These famous words from Shakespeare’s Hamlet point the way to one of the most powerful resources available for activating the talents we wish to express in our lives — the Law of Assumption. In this lesson, the second in the “Greater Freedom” series, Thane explains that by assuming — that is, constantly practicing — a virtuous behavior, we eventually form a new habit, and thus internalize that virtue.
Please note that this lesson is an hour and twenty minutes long, thus the meeting will last about an hour and a half. We trust you’ll be able to join us for the entire meeting — we look forward to seeing you there!
On April 26th, 2026, Uranus enters Gemini. Uranus only changes signs every 7 years, so this is BIG.
The internet is already full of predictions: AI will take over everything, communication will be revolutionized, and the world will move faster than we can keep up with.
But understanding how Uranus in Gemini influences us goes beyond “Innovation” + Gemini = AI, online learning and drones.
Let’s look at Uranus in Taurus 7-year chapter we’re just leaving behind to understand how Uranus really operates.
Uranus in Taurus Recap
Uranus entered Taurus in 2018. Back then, everyone predicted Uranus would completely transform the financial system – that everything would digitize, that cryptocurrencies would replace global currencies and so on.
Now it’s 2026, we’re at the very end of the transit, and your morning coffee is still not being paid for in Bitcoin.
In fact, the asset that saw the highest growth during Uranus in Taurus was gold – the ‘boring’ safe haven everyone had written off.
The irony is that Uranus – the planet of innovation and disruption – in Taurus, the sign of material resources and tradition, ended uprewarding the oldest form of money, not the newest.
Has the financial system been disrupted? To an extent – but not necessarily in the ways we imagined.
If anything, we could argue that financial markets have become more immune to volatility, responding in less dramatic ways to economic shocks, world events, or geopolitical moves.
Uranus in Taurus simply didn’t seem to ‘care’ that much about what happened in the world – the financial system kept moving to its own internal rhythm.
So what does this tell us about how Uranus actually operates?
Uranus’s role is not to impose the ‘new’ – but to stress-test existing systems, so that what’s genuinely solid survives, and what’s built on narrative or speculation gets exposed.
Uranus doesn’t necessarily bring the future people imagine – it dismantles the fantasies people project onto the future.
The crypto bet was a narrative about escaping old power structures. Uranus in Taurus may have simply shown us that we can’t Uranus our way out of Taurus realities – matter, time, and accumulated value still win.
Uranus comes, shuffles things around, creates chaos, and in doing so makes us aware that change is the only constant in life.
And as a result of this awareness, we become more resilient, and better equipped to withstand volatility and crisis.
Many people who lost their jobs during Covid retrained, pivoted, or started their own businesses. In many ways, Uranus in Taurus pushed us to become more self-reliant – and with that came more freedom than before.
Not without friction, not without stress – and for many of us things still don’t look good – but overall, society is now more resourceful.
Now that people have given up on the idea that “I’ll retire and live on my state pension” – they have started building more options and more security on their own terms.
So the question we’re really trying to answer when we look at a Uranus transit is not what kind of ‘innovations’ or ‘progress’ Uranus will deliver.
Uranus doesn’t care for innovation for the sake of innovation.
Uranus is not here to bring Tech to Earth. The fundamental role Uranus plays is to help us shed what’s outdated – so we can live more freely, more authentically, and more aligned with what’s real.
And that sometimes what we call progress or innovation – while it might solve some of our problems – can pretty much create new ones.
Uranus And Progress: Something Is Gained, Something Is Lost
Uranus is almost synonymous with the word progress.
Progress is good because it solves problems and limitations – we only call something “progress” if it helps us move beyond something that is not working as it should.
But progress doesn’t come without trade-offs.
Electricity gave us light at night, but it also disconnected us from nature’s rhythms. We no longer wake with the sunrise – we now need alarm clocks.
The smartphone put the whole world at our fingertips, but it also brought more isolation, less connection, and shorter attention spans.
With progress, we win something, we lose something. Yes, AI agents will take over our repetitive, daunting tasks. Robots will do the cleaning instead of us. This is freeing, right?
But it also means we will no longer touch the earth, scrub the floors, and engage with the world in the way that keeps us grounded and present in our bodies.
That part of us that rejoices in the senses – in the physical experience of actually touching, maneuvering, interacting with the 3D world – will miss something under Uranus.
Because progress is not just machines doing work for us. It changes our everyday lives and shifts our priorities. Something is found. Something is lost. And things are never the same.
In ‘The Wizard of Oz’, the Tin Man longed for one thing: a heart. The antidote to Uranus’ detachment and alienation is to remember why we create in the first place – to feel, to connect, and to be alive.
The New Air Era – Uranus in Gemini, Pluto in Aquarius
With Pluto in Aquarius and now Uranus in Gemini, we are officially in a new Air era.
The new Air era started back in 2020, when Jupiter and Saturn conjuncted at 0° Aquarius, starting a new 200-year air cycle. This Air era has accelerated rapidly since 2023-2024, when Pluto entered Aquarius.
And the developments the Air era has brought – technology, AI – can feel less ‘real‘, and harder to grab onto.
But Air is one of the 4 elements of physical reality, alongside fire, earth and water. Air might feel less ‘real’ because it’s invisible. We can’t ‘see’ Air.
Yet Air is a conductor – it carries the waves that make electricity, broadcasting, and the internetpossible.
When we communicate and exchange with others, nothing tangible changes hands – we’re not planting a tree, we’re not building a wall – yet that exchange matters. The idea we share, the connections we make are pretty much real.
But this Air dimension or reality is different from the Earth/Water reality we’ve come from when Neptune was in Pisces and Pluto in Capricorn. In that era, the physical product was the real thing. We’d go on Amazon and buy something we could hold, unwrap, and put on a shelf.
In the new Air era, which we’ll be living in for the next 200 years – the new ‘real’ is the immate-rial – the abstract, the invisible network, the idea, the connection.
And this can be disorienting for most of us, at least in the first phase.
Which brings us to the big buzzword in the room: AI.
AI – Gemini’s Evil Twin
As we settle into the new Air Era, it’s becoming increasingly clear that AI is not going anywhere.
Some love it, some hate it, most have mixed feelings.
There are undeniable benefits to AI technologies – developments in research, medicine, education, and areas that were previously less accessible to many of us: translation, legal advice, or creative tools. The democratisation of expertise is real and meaningful.
But there’s one thing using AI for research or medical queries, and quite another using it as your voice. From YouTube videos to emails to social media, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish what’s authentic and what’s not.
And with Uranus’ ingress into Gemini – the sign of self-expression and communication – authentic communication will become the defining tension of the next 7 years.
Sure, Saturn conjunct Neptune early this year has something to do with the blurring of lines between physical reality (Saturn) and what’s … umm…. not operating under the same rules of physics (Neptune). Reality has been getting slippery!
But there’s one particular way of using AI that’s becoming increasingly uncomfortable, no matter what your relationship with AI is.
That is no longer knowing whether we’re communicating with a real person or a script, whether that’s someone’s genuine self or their AI alter ego.
Gemini is the sign of the twins. In myth, Castor and Pollux were twin brothers who took turns between 2 worlds: one in the realm of the living, the other in the underworld. They were never both in the same place.
When we are using AI as a substitute for our own voice and identity, we simply can’t be both “us” and “AI’ at the same time. The Gemini either/or, Castor/Pollux, Jekyll/Hyde dynamic gets activated.
We’re either ourselves and we communicate as we’ve always done, OR we put the script ‘on’ which means we are no longer ourselves. The 2 versions can co-exist but can’t be ‘on’ at the same time.
This duality – while confusing and uncomfortable to navigate at first – will eventually help us better understand who we are – which part of ‘us’ is really ‘us’.
Paradoxically, Gemini’s shadow twin may end up making us more authentic, more distinct, more genuinely ourselves than we were before – because we now have a mirror – the alter ego – that reflects back at us.
But to get there, we have 7 years of experimentation ahead – and the slow learning that there are no shortcuts to freedom. Not even when it comes to Uranus.
Uranus and Saturn – Freedom Is Earned
Whether we use progress and AI to free ourselves or enslave ourselves is entirely up to us – and to our own relationship with Saturn. Yes, Saturn: Uranus’ preceding planet, and its necessary foundation.
Saturn is the guardian of reality – the last planet visible to the naked eye. Saturn represents the effort we put in so we can achieve long-lasting results in the real world.
–> If we want to become a doctor, we go and study medicine, and that is hard.
–> If we want to figure out how to use a tool properly, we have to sit with it, try things out, get frustrated, and keep going.
— > If we want to make an important purchase, we have to save money, and that means saying no to more immediate gratifications.
If we do Saturn first, then Uranus – the planet that liberates what Saturn has built – comes as the natural next step, bringing with it a freedom that is authentic and genuinely earned.
But if we skip Saturn and use Uranus or AI to cheat on our exams (ouch), write a proposal quickly without taking the time to understand what the client actually needs, or perform expertise we haven’t yet developed – then that’s not progress. That’s alienation from life and from our own path.
Plagiarism, shortcuts, cutting corners – have all been here before AI. But as the natural order of the planets reminds us, the only way to Uranus is through Saturn.
Of course, using AI to automate tasks that don’t require learning, don’t build skill, and don’t improve our lives in any meaningful way – that’s entirely on brand with Uranus’ gift of progress. Outsource the copy paste work – yes please!
But many times, what appears to be a time-saving shortcut is actually robbing us of the process of learning and becoming.
Uranus – No Shortcuts To Freedom
The difference between arriving at Uranus through Saturn, or shortcutting our way there, is the difference between real, hard-won confidence and an imposter life.
Whether we use AI as a substitute for the real us – or shave a few years off our age on our dating profiles, or perform a version of ourselves we think the world wants to see – we are not showing the world who we really are.
We send inauthentic signals, and as a result, we end up with inauthentic lives.
There’s a study from a dating website that found that there are 2 categories of people on their site, and whether or not they succeeded in finding a lasting relationship depended on one thing: how honestly they presented themselves.
People who presented themselves authentically – quirks, flaws and all – got polarising reactions: some people loved their profile, others didn’t connect with it at all.
Their average rating was lower. But they were far more successful at actually finding the right person, because the people who responded to them were responding to the real person.
The second category optimized their profiles – softened the edges, presented the most universally appealing version of themselves. They got higher average ratings and more attention.
And yet they were far less successful at finding a real relationship, because the signal they sent out wasn’t specific enough to attract the right person. When you appeal to everyone, you connect deeply with no one.
With dating, social media, AI and everything else – the question is the same: do we go for the likes, or for the connection?
Uranus at its highest expression is radical authenticity. It’s who we are behind the masks, behind the roles we play, behind the identities we’ve inherited or constructed to keep ourselves safe.
At its best, Uranus in Gemini’s goal is to free us from the outdated concepts and inherited scripts that define how we make sense of the world, how we express ourselves, and what we believe we’re allowed to say and be.
This won’t happen overnight.
Uranus will spend 7 years in Gemini, and at first, themes around authenticity and the lack of it, the AI’s role in our lives, the blurring of what’s ‘real’ and what’s not will all intensify, forcing us to learn from the discomfort of not yet having the answers.
But ultimately, these iterations, trials and errors, contradictions and paradoxes will help us find our own voice – more clearly and more freely than before.
Uranus In Gemini Trine Pluto In Aquarius
One of the most exciting things about the Uranus in Gemini transit is the incoming Uranus-Pluto trine. This is one of the best long-term transits we’ve had in a long time.
Neptune is also sextile Uranus and Pluto, which means that in the coming years we will have rare windows when all the outer planets are in agreement with each other.
Of course, outer planetary transits speak of underlying trends and slow developments – it doesn’t mean that if Uranus trines Pluto our everyday life will automatically feel better – we still have to deal with the Moon, Mars, and the rest of the planets doing their thing.
Still, when the forces that shape the world are in alignment, things simply work better. The flow of the trine will create openings and momentum that will make it easier for us to do what we need to do.
Let’s put it like this. Whether it’s sunny or raining outside, you still have to do the work. But when the sun is out, you’re more likely to leave the house. You’ll notice more opportunities, do your work better, and simply feel more alive while doing it.
This auspicious alignment activates as soon as Uranus enters Gemini and will remain active through 2029. A detailed report on the Uranus trine Pluto transit will follow soon.
Disclaimer, Salon Calvin will not have you sitting through a full production of the play, nor quoting Shakespeare that evening, worry not about that!
Calvin is offering a fun-filled and insightful conversational evening to engage you in a play that explores the powers of Anger /Revenge; Mercy/Forgiveness or what we call in the Prosperos “Give-For”; Compassion/[Love – through the devices of magic, dreams, and love.
This Certainly will not a dry reading of Shakespeare, but a fun participatory experience.
We will start with a DVD on the Tempest,presenting viewpoints from the cast members, historical records, and tidbits about Shakespeare writing of the play. The DVD gives a grasp and understanding of the play as told by cast members from their relationship with the play.
Note: the Prosperos School obtains its name from this play.
Followed by a Segue into a fun-filled discussion, with insights and comments from the Salon members about the presentation.
Event: Salon Calvin evening
Date: Friday, May 01, 2026
Time: 4:30 pm to about 7 pm Pacific Time (check your time zone for your correct time)
One fact that never fails to astound me: Despite the immense cultural changes and leaps in knowledge over the epochs, the human brain — that crucible of consciousness, roiling with the psychologies that govern the behaviors we call human nature — has remained virtually unchanged for the past hundred thousand years. How humbling to consider that what is cognitively true of our ancestors — who, lacking a knowledge of astronomy as the correct frame of reference for planetary motion, explained eclipses as acts of god and comets as omens of ill fortune — is as true of us.
The explanatory contexts in which this tendency manifests today may be different, but it manifests just the same — especially in our interpersonal relationships, where so much of the correct frame of reference that is the other person’s inner reality is invisible to us. It helps to remember that between our feelings and anything in the external world that causes the ripples of consciousness we call feelings — any difficult situation, any painful event, any hurtful action of another — there lie myriad possible causal explanations.
One fact I have learned about life through the empiricism of living: When we are hurt in a relationship, when we are spinning in the blooming buzzing confusion of sensemaking, the explanation we elect as correct usually has more to do with our own fears and vulnerabilities than it does with the reality of the situation; almost always, that explanation is wrong; almost always, the true explanation has more to do with the fears and vulnerabilities roiling in the other person invisibly to us.
The Dreaming Horses by Franz Marc, 1913. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
And so, sensemaking and storytelling creatures that we are, we move through the real world in a self-generated dream, responding not to reality but to the stories we tell ourselves about what is true — stories at best incomplete and at worst injuriously incorrect, stories about what we do and don’t deserve, stories the cost of which is connection, trust, love. This is why without charity of interpretation and without candor — the vulnerability of it, the courage of it, the kindness of it — all relationships become a ricochet of unspoken resentments based mostly on misapprehended motives, and crumble.
Much of our suffering comes from wrong perceptions. To remove that hurt, we have to remove our wrong perception.
Whenever we see another person take an action, he notes, we must remain aware that there could be a number of invisible motive forces behind it and we must be willing to listen in order to better understand them — not only out of the vain self-referential transactionalism masquerading as the Golden Rule, in the hope that others would be just as willing not to misunderstand our own motives by their perception and interpretation of our actions, but because correcting our wrong perceptions is a basic and vital form of caring for ourselves:
When you make the effort to listen and hear the other side of the story, your understanding increases and your hurt diminishes.
Half a century after the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm detailed the six rules of listening and unselfish understanding, Hanh offers a three-step process for correcting wrong perception in relationship conflict and emerging victorious with deeper love:
The first thing we can do in these situations is to acknowledge internally that the pictures we have in our head, what we think happened, may not be accurate. Our practice is to breathe and walk until we are more calm and relaxed.
The second thing we can do, when we are ready, is to tell the people who we think have hurt us that we are suffering and that we know our suffering may have come from our own wrong perception. Instead of coming to the other person or people with an accusation, we can come to them for help and ask them to explain, to help us understand why they have said or done those things.
There is a third thing we need to do, if we can. The third thing is very hard, perhaps the hardest. We need to listen very carefully to the other person’s response to truly understand and try to correct our perception. With this, we may find that we have been the victim of our wrong perceptions. Most likely the other person has also been a victim of wrong perceptions.
Part of why this is so challenging to the Western mind, with its individualistic ideal of self-reliance that too readily metastasizes into self-righteousness, is that we grow incredibly insecure at the prospect of being wrong and feel incredibly unmoored by the fact of having been wrong. In a culture conflating who we are with what we know and what we stand for, the Eastern contemplative traditions can be so salutary with their gentle, steady practice of releasing the clutch of selfing and unclenching the fist of righteousness into an open palm of receptivity.
Drawing on two powerful Buddhist practices that effect this release — deep listening and loving speech — Hanh writes:
If we are sincere in wanting to learn the truth, and if we know how to use gentle speech and deep listening, we are much more likely to be able to hear others’ honest perceptions and feelings. In that process, we may discover that they too have wrong perceptions. After listening to them fully, we have an opportunity to help them correct their wrong perceptions. If we approach our hurts that way, we have the chance to turn our fear and anger into opportunities for deeper, more honest relationships.
This, he observes, applies to romantic relationships, to politics, to family and workplace dynamics — in other words, to all possible configurations of one consciousness embarking on the touching, terrifying endeavor of being known and understood by another.
With an eye to the ultimate aim of this process, he adds:
The intention of deep listening and loving speech is to restore communication, because once communication is restored, everything is possible, including peace and reconciliation.
[…]
We are all capable of recognizing that we’re not the only ones who suffer when there is a hard situation. The other person in that situation suffers as well, and we are partly responsible for his or her suffering. When we realize this, we can look at the other person with the eyes of compassion and let understanding bloom. With the arrival of understanding, the situation changes and communication is possible.
Any real peace process has to begin with ourselves… We have to practice peace to help the other side make peace.
teaches at a secondary school in England. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Birkbeck College, University of London and writes about religion, ethics and pedagogy. His work has appeared in academic journals, popular theological magazines and the book Friendship: Philosophical Explorations (2026).
Friedrich Nietzsche said a great deal about himself. He was the self-styled ‘Antichrist’, the herald of the ‘death of God’, a thinker who prided himself on disclosing the ‘human, all-too-human’ origins of morality, the soul and religious belief. He despised Platonism, regarded himself as history’s most formidable opponent of Christianity, and often wrote with a fiercely materialist agenda. Given these credentials, Nietzsche appears to be one of the least likely figures to merit the title ‘mystic’. But he was precisely that.
One reason it might seem odd to call Nietzsche a mystic is that he himself went to great lengths to oppose certain forms of mysticism. Nietzsche contrasted his relationship to mystical thought with that of his predecessor, the German pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer. Whereas Schopenhauer idolised the mystic as someone capable of intuiting the secret, inner oneness of all things, Nietzsche considered such a train of thought to be deeply pathological. To even countenance the possibility of a deeper, truer layer of reality beyond appearances – as Schopenhauer did – is to deny the value of this world in favour of something imaginary. Nietzsche argued that Plato was the original progenitor of this mystical perspective and that, because of this, he was ultimately to blame for the world’s greatest blight: Christianity. Platonism, Christianity, Schopenhauer’s philosophy and similar forms of mysticism all constitute an unhealthy flight from reality. They share the same life-negating view that there is some other, more perfect reality beyond appearances. But for Nietzsche, appearance is all there is. As he put it in The Gay Science (1882): ‘Mystical explanations are considered deep; the truth is, they are not even shallow.’
The kind of mysticism Nietzsche opposed is often called apophatic mysticism. As the contemporary theologian Celia Kourie outlines, apophatic mysticism is about ‘stripping away … attitudes and concepts and imagery … in order to lead to the abyss, or the void – the blinding brilliance of the divine darkness.’ Apophatic writers view God as that which cannot be named or even conceived of. The closer you are to freeing yourself of ideas and conceptions, the closer you are to God. It is a negative attempt to understand God; one grasps Him by grasping what He isn’t. Apophatic mysticism dominates the mystical tradition through spiritual writers as varied as Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart and St John of the Cross. It also finds a strong presence within Buddhist thought. The apophatic is the everyday understanding of mysticism, and it is the mysticism Nietzsche ascribes to Plato and Schopenhauer. It is the attitude of moving beyond the world of fleeting, contingent material appearances to some inner oneness, to the divine handiwork behind the created universe.
The apophatic isn’t, however, the only form of mysticism. It can be contrasted with a rival ‘cataphatic’ tradition. Cataphatic mysticism, according to the spiritualism scholar Janet Ruffing, is typified by ‘wonder, amazement, appreciation … for the earth itself.’ This form of mysticism sees reality as inherently revelatory. Rather than flying from speech and negating appearances, the cataphatic, Kourie holds, ‘indicates a moving towards speech, and effects affirmative mysticism, approximating aspects of divinity [to nature]; it is luxuriant, profound and full of splendour, rejoicing in the beauty of God’s creation.’ This form of mysticism neither rejects reality nor negates the self. The cataphatic delights in haecceity – in the ‘this-ness’ of every object. It is this form of mysticism that Nietzsche embraced, minus the God part.
A recurring instance of Nietzsche’s cataphatic spirituality is in his characteristic elevation of the quotidian. He begins Book Four of The Gay Science with a new year’s resolution to bless all things:
I want to learn more and more to see the necessity of things as the beautiful: – thus I will be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that from now on be my love! I want to wage no war against the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not even want to accuse the accusers. Let looking away be my only negation! And, all in all and on the whole: some day I just want to be a Yes-sayer!
It is no surprise that the same book that begins by celebrating the extraordinary beauty of mundane things culminates in Nietzsche’s ‘most dangerous’ idea, an idea that shapes his cataphatic mysticism: the doctrine of eternal recurrence. The story of Nietzsche’s discovery of the eternal recurrence is essential to his development as a mystical thinker.
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It is August 1881, in the Upper Engadine, near Sils-Maria in Switzerland. Nietzsche is 36 years old, yet illness and near-blindness have already ended his academic career. Like most days this summer, he is taking a hike in the mountains, a brief escape from the migraines and stomach problems that plague him. During these walks, he does his best thinking. Near the hamlet of Surlej, beside Lake Silvaplana, Nietzsche approaches an unusual pyramidal boulder. He stops. The lake is motionless. There, Nietzsche would later write in Ecce Homo (1908), a thought came to him like a ‘lightning flash’.
Nietzsche called this thought an ‘inspiration’, something that ‘overtook’ him. His language parallels Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus: the experience is described in multisensorial terms, as something utterly irresistible, effecting in him a radical change of perspective:
If you have even the slightest residue of superstition, you will hardly reject the idea of someone being just an incarnation, mouthpiece, or medium of overpowering forces. The idea of revelation in the sense of something suddenly becoming visible and audible with unspeakable assurance and subtlety, something that throws you down and leaves you deeply shaken – this simply describes the facts of the case. You listen, you do not look for anything, you take, you do not ask who is there; a thought lights up in a flash, with necessity, without hesitation as to its form, – I never had any choice … All of this is involuntary to the highest degree, but takes place as if in a storm of feelings of freedom, of unrestricted activity, of power, of divinity … This is my experience of inspiration; I do not doubt that you would need to go back thousands of years to find anyone who would say: ‘it is mine as well’.
A logical proof in mathematical terms would never convey the ineffable nature of his mystical insight
The insight into the eternal recurrence – the flash of lightning – is that everything, every item of existence, has always recurred and is destined to recur ad infinitum. This is not a claim about some other world. It concerns precisely what we see, touch, smell and taste. All things, all experiences, all events, all thoughts will recur in the very same way they have come to pass. You have lived this life exactly this way countless times before. You have read this essay, contemplated these notions, woken on this day an infinite number of times previously and will do so incalculably more times again. Because of this cosmic repetition, every parcel of reality gains an ‘infinite depth’, an infinite gravity – for its story is destined to be re-lived, re-experienced, again and again, through endless ages. This is the idea that Nietzsche came to believe with the same force that Paul discovered his faith in Jesus.
Personal testimonies from the time of his inspiration dispel any possibility that he was being hyperbolic or romantic. One of Nietzsche’s friends, Resa von Schirnhofer, described how he shared his life-changing discovery:
As Nietzsche rose to leave his manner suddenly changed … glancing around as though in danger of being overheard, he confided the ‘secret’ Zarathustra had whispered in Life’s ear … There was something uncanny in the way he spoke of the ‘eternal return’ … Another Nietzsche had suddenly stood there … Then, without further explanation, he returned to his usual self.
And in a letter to his friend Heinrich Köselitz, written at the time of the experience, Nietzsche confided:
The intensity of my feelings makes me tremble and laugh at one and the same time … I have not been able to leave my room … my eyes were inflamed … These were not tender tears of pitiful emotion, but tears of jubilation … possessed as I was by a new vision that I am the first of men to know.
Since Nietzsche considered himself to have discovered a cosmological truth, he planned to devote a number of years to scientific study in order to rigorously defend the doctrine. But after some early attempts at formulating a proof for his theory, he abandoned this course. A relic of this brief moment in Nietzsche’s thinking is a collection of ‘proofs’ found in his notebooks that he never intended to publish – and which have been almost universally ridiculed by the scientific community ever since. But what he soon realised was that his experience was incapable of being grounded in scientific thought. A logical proof in mathematical terms would never adequately convey the ineffable nature of his mystical insight. Nietzsche’s brief attempt at a scientific formulation was a post hoc attempt at rationalising what he was already committed to. Just as a theologian’s attempts to ‘prove’ God presuppose their conclusion, primarily acting as an intellectual bolster to what they already believe, Nietzsche’s passing scientific formulation of his eternal recurrence can be seen as a similar exercise. Theologians call this fides quaerens intellectum – faith seeking to provide a rational understanding for what is already embraced as true.
But there still seems to be something distinctly odd about a profoundly atheistic thinker like Nietzsche holding convictions based on something akin to a religious experience. Atheism per se doesn’t preclude beliefs based on powerful numinous or unexplainable experiences, even if many atheists have historically doubted their epistemic reliability. An interesting recent work on this subject is Dale Allison’s Encountering Mystery: Religious Experience in a Secular Age (2022), which presents a number of case studies of modern-day atheists and agnostics, who take the epistemic reliability of profound but unusual experiences very seriously. A striking example comes from the author and activist Barbara Ehrenreich, who experienced an overwhelming numinous experience during a walk through a mountain town in California when she was 17 years old. ‘It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once,’ she later wrote, ‘too vast and violent to hold on to, too heartbreakingly beautiful to let go of … I felt ecstatic and somehow completed, but also shattered.’ Through the succeeding 50 years, Ehrenreich remained a steadfast atheist, but she never denied her enigmatic experience – much like how Nietzsche’s atheism didn’t diminish his experience at Sils-Maria.
For Nietzsche, accepting eternal recurrence isn’t a ‘faith’ in the negative way he characterised that term – that is, of believing in something imaginary or otherworldly that can’t be verified. Nietzsche considered eternal recurrence to be a quality of this world, not some other world. Moreover, he considered eternal recurrence itself to be verifiable; he took his own experience at Sils-Maria to be evidence in its favour. Nietzsche also thought that others had experienced it before. In a late notebook entry he exclaimed: ‘I have discovered the Greeks: they believed in eternal recurrence! That is the mystery-faith!’– referring to the cult of Dionysus, whose mythic dying and resurrection he viewed as symbolising this cosmological belief. In fact, the rationale of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), Nietzsche’s most enigmatic work, was as an imagistic, poetic, musical ‘proof’ of eternal recurrence, a pathway by which a receptive reader might gain a new perspective on the eternal nature of all things.
The atheist has become, through his encounter with the eternal recurrence, strikingly close in his language to that of the religious contemplative
Nietzsche’s response to his insight was a distinct form of mysticism. He came to view everything around him as endowed with its own privileged status as eternal. While Nietzsche certainly rejected pantheism – nature is not divine – the eternality that he attributes to all things is nonetheless a traditional attribute of God. There is a new non-theistic and non-religious sacrality in Nietzsche’s new perspective. In the language of mystical theology, it constitutes a form of the ‘cataphatic’ tradition, which finds its chief expression in the ‘night song’ in Zarathustra:
It is night: now all fountains speak more loudly. And my soul too is a fountain. It is night: only now all the songs of the lovers awaken. And my soul too is the song of a lover. An unstilled, an unstillable something is in me; it wants to be heard. A craving for love is in me, which itself speaks the language of love. I am light; oh that I were night! But this is my loneliness, that I am girded by light. Oh that I were dark and nocturnal! How I would suck at the breasts of light! And even you I would bless, you little twinkling stars and glowworms up there! – And be blissful for your gift of light.
Nietzsche’s language is replete with logic-defying symbolism, multisensory and erotic imagery, confessions of ineffability, and recourse to an incantatory rhythm. These are all classic markers of the language of mysticism. The atheist who lamented God’s lingering ‘shadow’ over Europe and its culture-sapping, genius-frustrating consequences has become, through his encounter with the eternal recurrence, strikingly close in his language to that of the religious contemplative. Consider the resemblances of Nietzsche’s ‘night song’ to the celebrated ‘dark night’ of the 16th-century mystic St John of the Cross:
On a dark night, kindled in love with yearnings – oh, happy chance! – I went forth without being observed, my house being now at rest. … In the happy night, In secret, when none saw me, Nor I beheld aught, Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart. This light guided me … Oh, night more lovely than the dawn, Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover, Lover transformed in the Beloved!
Does this mean, then, that through something akin to a religious experience, Nietzsche emerges as a type of mystic? Reading Nietzsche is always a hazardous journey. Just when you think you have him, a provocative aphorism comes along, and he slips through your fingers. Nietzsche did not drop his atheism because of his strange experience of eternal recurrence, or the perspective on reality it granted him. Instead, he charted a new pathway of secular, atheistic mysticism, an alternative to Schopenhauer’s equally atheistic celebration of the world-negating saint-figure.
Many 20th-century scholars argued that Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence was really just a thought experiment that he proposed, not something he actually believed. They have done so largely out of embarrassment, hoping to rescue Nietzsche from esotericism and slot him comfortably into the family of early sceptical and naturalistic thinkers. In doing so, these interpreters overlooked the way Nietzsche characterised his own experience, and the testimonies of those who knew him. There is, however, a kernel of truth in the thought-experiment interpretation. The most important implication of eternal recurrence for Nietzsche was the dramatic impact he anticipated it would have on the life of the person who discovered it. The first time eternal recurrence makes an appearance in Nietzsche’s published works is in The Gay Science. Here, Nietzsche presents the eternal recurrence as provoking a challenge to his audience to reconsider their lives from the perspective of eternal recurrence:
The heaviest weight. – What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
Does your life have such splendour that it deserves an infinite number of encore performances?
Rather than a simple thought experiment, however, I argue that this text is more akin to a spiritual examen. The examen is a genre of spiritual writing perfected by authors like Thomas à Kempis and St Ignatius of Loyola. Nietzsche was acquainted with this type of meditative life-assessment, and he had practised a Christian version of it in his adolescence, at a point when he still hoped to become a Lutheran minister.
In the Christian examen, a divine figure poses a question to the reader based on their conduct and choices (à Kempis often refers to a question from the Gospel of Mark: ‘What doth it profit a man, to gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’). This is followed by a moment of critical decision as the reader carefully reflects on the possible implications of each choice. Nietzsche’s examen is a deliberate counter to the Christian examen. He invites you to reconsider your life before the prospect of its endless repetition: would you affirm your choices if your present life possessed eternal depth? For Nietzsche, this is not a test of moral action. Rather, the only criterion for a life worthy of repetition is its aesthetic quality: whether your life has such splendour that it deserves an infinite number of encore performances. While such a prospect might be a source of despair for some, for those who truly love their life, the thought of replaying it all over again leads to an ecstatic joy: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine …’
Eternal recurrence is the basis for continual self-transformation as you attempt to craft a life that warrants repetition. Shaping your life through the certainty of eternal recurrence is to transfigure it into something compelling and dramatic – like a Homeric epic, worthy of its own endless echo. Nietzsche’s unusual experience at Sils-Maria gave him, as he saw it, a new, ‘graced’ perspective on reality. From then on, he viewed everything in the universe as having an awe-inspiring, eternal quality, which underpins Nietzsche’s language and imagery in Zarathustra, a text that sits comfortably alongside the classics of Western mysticism. Even if most philosophers have long regarded Zarathustra with a mixture of bemusement and scorn, this cannot be said for artists. From Frederick Delius’s cantata A Mass of Life to Richard Strauss’s tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra, the poetry of W B Yeats and Rainer Maria Rilke, and the prose of D H Lawrence and Thomas Mann, Zarathustra has been an immense source of inspiration.
Nietzsche’s discovery of eternal recurrence was not only the fountain of his cataphatic mysticism, it was also a moment of dramatic personal conversion. To grasp the infinite echo of one’s own life is to be placed under a new and terrible demand: to live in such a way that one could will its every detail again and again. Life becomes not something to be endured, but something to be crafted – an aesthetic whole worthy of its own repetition. Even if Nietzsche was mistaken about the truth of eternal recurrence, the challenge it poses remains. It confronts us with the question of whether our lives are merely being lived, or whether they are being affirmed – not once, but eternally.
(Contributed by Gwyllm Llwydd)
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Much of our suffering comes from wrong perceptions. To remove that hurt, we have to remove our wrong perception.