Nietzsche, a Thomas the Apostle among Wild Boars

Abstract

In the sixteenth century, Europeans believed they saw certain Christian elements in indigenous myths. They took this as proof that Thomas the Apostle had preached in South America. Today, in the same tradition of interpretatio romana, some anthropologists think they find Nietzsche in indigenous myths. In the first part of this treatise, I give an example of how to interpret two indigenous texts on the basis of their non-European historical context. I show how difficult they are to digest unless distorted for easier consumption, be it Christian or Nietzschean. In the second part, I take the opposite approach: how can we overcome the strangeness of a text until it is rendered as universally accessible as a hamburger. This is the project of a perspectivism which, although called indigenous (amerindio in Brazil), adopts a perspective that is not so much indigenous as Nietzschean, in a fascistoid approach to Nietzsche. In the third part, I return to the indigenous text as seen through the facts.