Abstract
This article distinguishes Nietzschean origins and genealogies from alternative mythical, rationalist, and scientific concepts of origins. Four types of origins that share family relations are analyzed: Mythical, Rationalist, Genealogical, and Scientific. I distinguish between them according to six criteria: The ontology of the origins and what they transfer; how they transfer what they transfer; whether what they transfer is path-dependent on the origin; teleology, do origins have a manifest destiny; value judgments about the origins, positive, negative, both, or neither; and finally, the epistemology of the inference of origins. The article examines then the question of realist vs. anti-realist interpretations of origins. I argue that Nietzsche offered a mirror image of mythical origins, atheistic and with mirror values. Still as a mirror image of Christianity the epistemology of Nietzsche’s genealogies and origins did not transcend mythical retrojection. Rabbinical Judaism ordered its adherents to remember origins that had probably never happened, slavery, the exodus from Egypt, the forty years in the desert and so on. Nietzsche recommended to remember mirror images of these origins that also never happened, in order to forget them.
