It consists of a preface and three interrelated treatises ('Abhandlungen' in German) that expand and follow through on concepts Nietzsche sketched out in Beyond Good and Evil (1886).

The priests, and all those who feel disenfranchised and powerless in a lowly state of subjugation and physical impotence (e.g., slavery), develop a deep and venomous hatred for the powerful.

To slave morality, justice is a deferred event, ultimately taking the form of an imagined revenge that will result in everlasting life for the weak and punishment for the strong.

Slave morality grows out of impotence, world-weariness, indignation and envy; it purports to speak for the oppressed masses who have been wronged, deprived of the power to act with immediacy by the masters, who thrive on their subjugation.

They say: "he is good who does not outrage, who harms nobody, who does not attack, who does not requite, who leaves revenge to God, who avoids evil and desires little from life, like us, the patient, humble, and just.

The deeds of the powerful man, known to themselves as "good", are re-cast by the men of ressentiment as "evil", taking on a mystical moral-judgemental element entirely absent from the aristocratic "bad", which to the noble was simply a descriptor for the inferior qualities of the lower classes.

Beyond the metaphorical lion, Nietzsche expressively associates the "blond beast" with the Aryan race of Celts and Gaels which he states were all fair skinned and fair-haired and constituted the collective aristocracy of the time.

Thus, he associates the "good, noble, pure, as originally a blond person in contrast to dark-skinned, dark-haired native inhabitants" (the embodiment of the "bad").

Nietzsche insists that it is a mistake to hold beasts of prey to be "evil", for their actions stem from their inherent strength, rather than any malicious intent.

According to Nietzsche, what we call "the conscience" is the end product of a long and painful socio-historical process that began with the need to create a memory in the human animal.

'Law' and 'justice', a society's codes, judgements and commands in relation to individual and inter-personal rights and obligations, are formed in the context of this contractual-evaluating conceptual paradigm.

The strength of one's 'conscience', one's ability to make promises and not break them, to personally guarantee one's future actions, to fulfil ones obligations to others, is thus a vital factor in determining individual social status.

Its logic is not related in any way to considerations about the free will, moral accountability etc, of the wrong-doer: it is nothing more than a special form of compensation for the injured party.

Such punishment was a legally enforceable right of the creditor, and some law books had exact quantifications of what could be done to the debtor's body relative to the debt.

As a community's security and self-confidence increases, the harm of one individual's transgressions decreases correspondingly, and the continuance of the more harmonious state requires that excessively violent responses be controlled and regulated.

The feeling of guilt, the bad conscience, had quite different origins and had no place whatsoever in the institutions of crime and punishment for the greater part of their history.

The criminal was dealt with merely as something harmful, as an "irresponsible piece of fate", and the person upon whom punishment was administered, though his body encountered something shocking and violent, was entirely unacquainted with 'moral' pain.

"(§15) In Nietzsche's theory, the bad conscience was the serious illness that the animal man was bound to contract when he found himself finally enclosed within the walls of a politically organized society.

Thus the human animal became subjected, enclosed within a system of externally imposed functions and purposes, and its outward-pressing drives and impulses were turned inward: "the instinct for freedom pushed back and incarcerated within and finally able to discharge and vent itself only on itself".

The tribe's very existence is thought to depend on a continued acknowledgement and repayment of the ancestor, whose powerful spirit is still present in all customs and daily activities.

Christianity's expedient, its "stroke of genius" in the shadow of this looming eternal nightmare, was to proclaim that God himself, in the person of Jesus, sacrificed himself for the guilt of mankind.

Thus guilt, which originally merely signified debt in a contractual sense, attained an essential moral-metaphysical significance in mankind’s understanding of itself and its relation to God.

Nietzsche's purpose in the "Third Treatise" is "to bring to light, not what [the ascetic] ideal has done, but simply what it means; what it indicates; what lies hidden behind it, beneath it, in it; of what it is the provisional, indistinct expression, overlaid with question marks and misunderstandings" (§23).

[citation needed] This opening aphorism confronts us with the multiplicity of meanings that the ascetic ideal has for different groups: (a) artists, (b) philosophers, (c) women, (d) physiological casualties, (e) priests, and (f) saints.

He sets himself up as the "saviour" of (d) the physiologically deformed, offering them a cure for their exhaustion and listlessness (which is in reality only a therapy which does not tackle the roots of their suffering).

He further has a number of strategies which are guilty in the sense that they have the effect of making the sick sicker (although the priest applies them with a good conscience); they work by inducing an "orgy of feeling" (Gefühls-Ausschweifung).

By dismantling church claims to the theological importance of man, scientists substitute their self-contempt [cynicism] as the ideal of science.

[4] Some of the contents and many symbols and metaphors portrayed in On the Genealogy of Morality, together with its tripartite structure, seem to be based on and influenced by Heinrich Heine's On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany.

In epistemology, it has been first used by Nietzsche and later by Michel Foucault, who tried to expand and apply the concept of genealogy as a novel method of research in sociology (evinced principally in "histories" of sexuality and punishment).