Tribute to Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) - 3. Paganism and Occultism of Pessoa (& His Heteronyms)

by Sean Jobst

25 June 2020

One of many captivating scenes
I experienced at the magical Quinta
da Regaleira, Sintra, 30 June 2017

I ended Part 2 alluding to the multiplicity inherent within Nature. This reality may be unintelligible for either the monotheism of the traditional Abrahamic religions or the rigid mechanical thinking of modern "rational" ideologies (primarily offshoots of the former), but its a reality innate to how peoples the world over viewed themselves and the landscape immediately around them. Such is the foundation of Paganism - a broad term describing the Animistic worldview rooted in Polytheism and Ancestor veneration that was unique to specific tribes and landscapes around the world (intricately connected to tribes) but stemmed from remarkably similar basic observations of cosmic and natural forces. Its free from the dogmas and rigid belief systems of monolith religions and ideologies, being more about a worldview although there were definitely ritualistic elements. Pessoa was inspired by the Hellenistic and Roman Paganism that impacted Portugal, as well as native Lusitanian archetypes and worldview.

Pessoa definitely explored spiritual matters beyond doctrinaire forms, certainly beyond the Church whose power he lamented. The Portuguese spiritual writer Pedro Teixeira da Mota observes that even while Pessoa was pursuing "the hidden meaning of Christianity, his work was in transcendental pantheism and higher paganism, culminating in March 1914 in the intense discovery or creation of a master, the flock keeper Alberto Caeiro."(1) As a "disciple" of Caeiro, who represents the most overtly Pagan thoughts of the poet, Pessoa created another heteronym, Álvaro de Campos, in whose words he said: "My master Caeiro wasn't a pagan: he was paganism. Ricardo Reis is a pagan, António Mora is a pagan, I am a pagan, Fernando Pessoa himself would be a pagan if he weren't a ball of yarn rolled up inside himself. But Ricardo Reis is a pagan in character, António Mora is a pagan intellectually, I am a pagan by virtue of my rebelliousness, that is, my temperament. In Caeiro, there is no explanation for his paganism; there's consubstantiation."(2)

Caiero being a "flock keeper" represents a basic animist connection to Nature, something innate which cannot be philosophized in words (much like Saudade, innate to a alma portuguesa). He is the ideal to which Campos the social critic aspired - the same criticism of Abrahamism and its role in political and social systems that those of us who come to Paganism initially develop (which is truly awakening to our Ancestors and thus innate selves). So it was for me, that it was when finally getting out into the forests, hiking, gardening, and generally connecting to the land outside the confines of four walls really unlocked a world of intuition and synchronicities. As we consciously make sense of theological questions(3), there is this tendency to philosophize as represented by Ricardo Reis, which is why despite being a Lusitanian, Pessoa in a letter said that Reis was "a Latinist by schooling and a semi-Hellenist by virtue of his own efforts."(4) Caeiro represents going full circle along this journey, where an initial phase of seeking Pagan "groups" to join and a "book" with all the answers to replace the Abrahamic congregation wears off (just because one still has vestiges of the old thinking), and one realizes what its truly about - highly individual, unique down to the tribal level, and not dogmatic. 

For Pessoa himself, the pseudo-esoteric trends within the Western countries of searching for spiritual wisdom within "the East" (or elsewhere outside our own lands) "removes from the direct apprehension of the truth," which is why he preferred to look "for access to the Master, the Spirit and the Truth, deep down the intimate superior and divine connection, in Western sources, instead of receiving it from the Eastern tradition, second or third hand vulgarizing and fatally distorting." It also explains his studies "on the pagan origins of Christianity, and above all in higher paganism, in the return of the Gods."(5) José Saramago in O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis) has the latter pondering how "innumerable people live within us"(6), as we personify growth and thus multiplicity: "We are multiple. It follows that as multiple we cannot accept a universe in which there is only one god."(7) 

Thought-inducing graffiti on a
Lisboa street, 1 July 2017

Polytheism of Self. Pessoa was multiplicity personified through his heteronyms, his body and conscious mind being vessels for these other levels of self. Campos wrote a "manifesto" during the poet's Grupo de Orfeu period: "Science teaches that each of us is an assembly of subsidiary psyches, a badly-made synthesis of cellular souls. An artist should work towards an abolition of the dogma of artistic individuality. The greater the artist, the less definable he is, and he will write in more genres with more contradictions and dissimilarities."(8) Ricardo Reis mused: "I have more selves than myself [Há mais eus que eu mesmo]. There are more 'I's' than myself. And still, I exist Indifferent to all. I silence them: I speak." Speaking as yet another voice within a voice, Pessoa wrote in the words of Frederico Reis, the "brother" of Ricardo whom he linked to the ancient Greek philosophy of Epicurus:

"Each of us - the poet believes - ought to live his own life, isolating himself from others and searching, to the extent that he takes these things to heart, for what gives him joy and pleasure. He should neither seek violent pleasures nor flee painful sensations as long as they are not extreme....This is the doctrine the poet offers temporarily. As long as the barbarians (Christians) dominate, this should be the pagan stance. Once the barbarian empire disappears (if it does), the pagan perspective can be different. For the time being, it cannot be otherwise."(9)

Bernardo Soares was Pessoa's "detached" heteronym(10), whose work as an accountant on Rua dos Douradores coincided with Pessoa's own real life work in the same area as a freelance translator.(11) Through him, Pessoa described his own consciousness as a "confused series of intervals between non-existent things."(12) And here we come across some of the poet's own Occult studies, accepting the classic definition of Magic as the projection of one's Will and to effect change in one's Consciousness: "I'm the bridge between what I don't have and what I don't want."(13) Quite simply, Pessoa was affecting changes within his own consciousness with his various heteronyms, which reflected back to himself what was necessary for growth. He was author of his own monomyth: "I want to be a creator of myths; it is the supreme mystery a human being can make."

Rossio train station, Lisboa, 29 June 2017. This
site figured throughout Pessoa's life, and one can see
how he would be inspired by the moon and lights. 

Pessoa on Nature of the Divine. Throughout his writings, Pessoa was alluding to being guided by some deeper spiritual force, similar to how the ancient Greeks viewed the daemonae. By doing so he rejected the rigid mechanistic thinking then in vogue that reduced all reality to only the quantifiable. This "guidance" was expressed in his automatic writing attempts in 1916 and 1917, as he wrote in a letter to his close friend and Grupo de Orfeu associate, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, whose untimely death on 29 April 1916 intensified Pessoa's look into spiritual and occult matters: "The higher senses called to me for some purpose are being awakened in me, that the unknown Master, who thus initiates me, by imposing this higher existence on me, will give me much greater suffering of what I have had until now, and that profound disgust of everything that comes with the acquisition of these high faculties."(14) His views on initiation and this unspecified "Master" will be examined later.

As the Epicurean Ricardo Reis, Pessoa accepted the views of Epicurus, a Greek philosopher who lived from 341 to 270 BCE and turned against the Platonist domination of Athen's philosophical schools. Whereas the latter were more legalistic, Epicurus championed the view that one can better perceive the world through one's senses - a perspective Pessoa took to heart, such as the imagery used by Bernardo Soares throughout The Book of Disquiet. Foreshadowing Jung's work with Archetypes, Epicurus primarily saw the deities of his Hellenic pantheon as perfect models to emulate but themselves largely detached from human affairs. Eschewing the beliefs in "reward" and "punishment" then present with the Axial Age (later an essential part of Abrahamism), Epicurus saw the ultimate goal as attaining ataraxia, a peace and freedom from fear, requiring people to live a self-sufficient life and not fear death.(15) Pessoa's view of the divine was more about senses and intuition - a detachment he carried over to his political worldview which was metapolitical, preferring cultural and philosophical matters, much like Julius Evola's cavalcare la tigre "ride the tiger". Soares was likewise stoic: "We must remember that tragedies, for the aesthete, are interesting to observe but disconcerting to experience."(16)

Just a few examples of the historic,
esoteric, and aesthetic syncretisms
throughout Quinta da Regaleira,
Sintra, 30 June 2017

Pessoa's Syncretic Paganism. The great poet himself mused: "More than the paganism of the Neoplatonists properly speaking, mine is the syncretic paganism of Julian the Apostate."(17) As a syncretic worldview able to absorb different threads, Pessoa's view parallels modern efforts towards a "Chaos Paganism" which would fit in with Pessoa's various heteronyms who personified the different perspectives that ultimately arrived at the same goal. Yet these threads were not drawn together from disparate peoples and thus losing the authenticity of all, for they were those that were part of the history and heritage of Portugal. Thus his Mensagem (The Message) - a modern Portuguese epic - effortlessly combined Hellenic, Roman, and native Lusitanian Archetypes. 

Pessoa began with Ulysses, the wandering Greek hero who was the mythic founder of Lisboa after his journey home from Troy. Indeed the Greeks knew Pessoa's hometown as Ulyssipo, the Romans and the Visigoths as Olisipo, and over the centuries "Lisboa" emerged as an expression of this name. He then mentioned the 2nd century BCE Lusitanian hero Viriato, whose fierce resistance kept the Romans at bay until after his death, and then mentioned the Age of Exploration. All these heroes and archetypes were personified in the country facing outwards over the Atlantic: "On elbows propped Europa lies, Outstretched and staring. Sheltered in romantic hair, Greek eyes reminiscing. Left elbow backward cast, The right, an open angle. One tells where Italia rests, The other where Britannia distantly, Supports the hand that holds the face. Sphinxish the fatal stare, Westerly the future of the past, The face that stares is Portugal."(18) 

Sunset upon the cliffs of Cabo da Roca, 30 June 2017. 

Westernmost point of Portugal and continental Europe

"La muerte de Viriato" (1807) by the Spanish painter José de
Madrazo (1781-1859). Now in Museo del Prado in Madrid,
it was intended to rally Iberian-wide resistance to Napoleon.
Notice the Greek-style helmets and clothes. The Lusitanians
would have actually worn Celtic-style trousers and tunics.

The formative element of Portugal were the Lusitanians, yet so too did the Greeks, Romans, and the Germanic Suebi and Visigoths contribute important threads. Such a syncretism was repeated throughout Europe. For example, the combination of Iberian and Celt in the rest of the Peninsula. Or what I documented in my series "Roots of Proto-Celtic/Germanic Mythos, folk faith in prehistoric Swabia" earlier this year, wherein I expanded on the research showing the absorption of Danubian and Hallstatt Celtic culture by the Suebi and Alemanni, to also link both to a continuation from prehistoric times. So it was that Indo-European peoples absorbed the blood and culture of both the Neolithic and Megalithic, making us truly indigenous to our respective regions. Pessoa was aware of the continuity as well as close links through all Indo-European traditions, such as when Soares saw the Tejo River transform into a "blue hill" he compared to Switzerland, or comparing the Lusitanian and Vedic traditions when he observed "The Ganges River also passes through Rua dos Douradores."(19)

Pessoa and his compatriots in the Grupo de Orfeu were inspired by the Greek myth of Orpheus, like them a man of music and the arts who, to save his wife Eurydice from the underworld Hades, had to travel there with the only stipulation that he would look back yet at the very last moment he could not resist looking upon his beloved and she was lost forever. So it was that the Grupo de Orfeu saw their own task as looking forward to the future ahead while still having that element of "Saudade" for the past. One such past glory that inspired Pessoa was the Portuguese myth of Sebastianismo, which expected the "return" of Sebastian, the 16th-century king who was presumed dead while fighting the Moroccans although many a Portuguese poet wove their mystical musings around his disappearance. Its easy to consider this a Christian-inspired messianism, but I see more parallels with an Indo-European myth of a slumbering hero - in the vein of the German Barbarossa - and more distantly to ancient dying-and-rising Archetypes such as the god Balder.

His imagery of Arthurian themes like the Excalibur can be seen in the same vein, the Grail legends having Indo-European origins as noted by such scholars as Otto Rahn and Julius Evola. Through Sebastianismo, Pessoa envisioned the future for Portugal not as head of an empire but a literary and artistic renaissance, achieving cultural renewal in that process. Honoring the Greek goddess of wisdom, Pessoa founded the literary journal Athena in 1924. Showcasing the Horace-inspired classical odes of Ricardo Reis, the animism of Alberto Caeiro, and translations from the Greek Anthology, Athena represented "a denial of the old querelle des Anciens et des Modernes [the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns], and an impressive attempt to find an ancient form of dramatic art in modern times."(20) Penning a "Programa geral do Neo-Paganismo Português" in 1917, Pessoa's spiritual worldview was "based on a transformation of an external plurality into an internal multiplicity, which is described as sensationism."(21) As he said through António Mora: "Reality, when it first appears to us, is multiple. By referring all received sensations to our individual consciousness, we impose a false unity (false to our experience) on the original multiplicity of things."

Castelo dos Mouros and the town of Sintra, 30
June 2017. What secrets are contained in its hills?

Portuguese Folklore and Quadras. Rather than keeping within his literary circle, the eccentric and introverted Pessoa nevertheless drew inspiration from the folk traditions of the common Portuguese people as carrying a primal ancestral wisdom. In 1908, he began studying the works of António Nobre, the Porto poet who called himself "poor Lusitanian, the wretched," reveled in writing in colloquial form, and "revived interest in medieval themes and traditional verse."(22) Around 1912, Pessoa made contact with the "Saudosista" group led by Teixeira de Pascoais, "poets interested in recovering and defining a national soul." The resulting period in Pessoa's own poetry was "another paganism, perhaps representing the possibilities of a national, secular poetics of nature and folk origins, contrasting with Alberto Caeiro's pre-Hellenic revivals."(23) Through this new heteronym, "Pessoa intended Caeiro to be at the center of his literary works, representing the return of a pagan Weltanschauung into the modern world."(24)

In 1914, Pessoa collaborated with Augusto Cunha and António Ferro in the preface to Missal de Trovas, in which he argued for the popular folk quatrains as part of a national soul: "Quem faz quadras portuguesas, comunga a alma do povo, humildemente de todos nós e errante dentro de si próprio" ("Whoever makes Portuguese quatrains communes with the soul of the people, humbly for all of us and errantly within his own self"). Two decades later, Pessoa was inspired by Greek initiatory traditions and broader Indo-European popular chivalric romances as conveyed in fairy tales and legends.(25) The most ancient European spiritual traditions survived as various allegories in fairy tales and patterns in folklore, despite the later veneer. Carrying on the work of such scholars as the folklorist José Leite de Vasconcelos(26), coinciding with his Mensagem Pessoa not only gathered the quadras folk songs but wrote some of his own:

"In the 'Quadras' of 1934-1935, Pessoa returned to the medieval oral tradition, which he had revived in one of his earliest works, the 1913 play ['The Mariner']. Rather than providing Pessoa with a new heteronym, it would perhaps be more plausible to consider that Pessoa composed the folk quatrains as an extension of his Cancioneiro, through the adverse conjunction of the folk truths of the quatrains with the philosophical and aesthetic concerns of Pessoa's 'great number of small poems.' The incongruities of the cantigas, in which descriptions of folk life and nature supported ironic, humorous, or aphoristic syntheses, would allow him to incorporate the singular, often absurd, paradoxes of the poetic self. Rewritten into folk quatrains, Pessoa's poetic philosophy would become part of Portugal's traditions in song, dance, and verse."(27)

Padraõ dos Descobrimentos, Belém, 29 June 2017.

At the very edge of land and facing the Tejo River,

Pessoa was inspired by many of these Mariners.

Cabo da Roca, 30 June 2017

Spiritual Power of Sea and Light. Everything, including bodies of water, contain a consciousness according to Pagan worldviews, including the Lusitanian, Iberian, and both Celtic and Germanic. This includes folk legends about sea nymphs and river spirits. Known for his strange blend of Greek Paganism and Christianity(28), seen for example in his citing Virgil's Aeneid and having the Olympian deities discussing Vasco da Gama's voyage, Luís Camões invoked the Tejo river nymphs in his Os Lusíadas: "And you, O nymphs of Tagus, ever dear...". Centuries later, Pessoa compared the trials encountered by the soul with the storms encountered by a ship, navigating even if inconvenient, for true growth cannot come from always taking the easy route in life. In the verses of Mensagem, Pessoa personified the sea nymphs as Portugal herself: "The sea with an end can be Greek or Roman: the endless sea is Portuguese"("Padrão," verses 11-12). "Ó mar salgado, quanto do teu sal. São lágrimas de Portugal!" - "Oh salty sea, how much of your salt are tears of Portugal!"("Mar Português," verses 1-2).

Being an active mariner himself, Camões personified the Cape of Good Hope as "Adamastor" - symbolic of the maritime dangers overcome by the Portuguese. Along with Adamastor, Ricardo Reis mentioned Thetis, a Greek sea nymph and water goddess who was daughter of the sea god Nereus(29), in meditating on the gas lamps around Lisboa's Alto de Santa Catarina: "A man bearing light, he is Hailey's comet with a star-spangled trail, this is how the gods must have seen Prometheus when they looked down from on high....The lamplighter appears, then each lamp is left with its glow and aura. A pale light covers the shoulders of Adamastor, the Herculean muscles of his back glisten, perhaps from the water descending from the sky or perhaps it is the sweat of his agony as Thetis smiles derisively and mocks him, What nymph could offer enough love to satisfy the love of a giant. Now he knows what those promises of riches were worth. Lisbon is a great murmuring silence, nothing more."(30) The "lamplighter" could also be a veiled reference to either the Tarot's Hermit archetype, whose "lamp" is as much about lighting an internal journey as the outside, or the common Indo-European motif of the Lightbringer. And as noted in my article about Ostara, her Lusitanian form was the goddess Ataecina.

This Lightbringer represented not only the bringing of dawn, but also "lighting" up one's own internal journey and cutting through falsehood and obscurity with pure, unadulterated truth. So it was that Pessoa appreciated the biting satire of the folkloric cantigas de escárnio, viewing himself as such a dizidor "truth-teller", as he said through the words of António Mora: "What relationship can an age like this one have with a spiritual heir to the race of constructors, with a soul inspired by paganism's glorious truths? None, except one of instinctive rejection and automatic scorn. We, the only dissenters from decadence, are thus forced to assume an attitude that, by its nature is likewise decadent. An attitude of indifference is a decadent attitude, and our inability to adapt to the current milieu forces us to just such an attitude. We don't adapt, because healthy people cannot adapt to a sick milieu, and since we don't adapt, it is we who are sick. This is the paradox in which those of us who are pagans live."(31)

Reflecting over the waters of the Tejo, the land
which forms its appendages, and the Sun and
clouds which reflect its glorious expanses.

The famed lighthouse of Cabo da Roca, like Ricardo Reis'
lamplighter, illuminating dark Atlantic shadows, 30 June 2017

Initiation and Ceremony. Steeped within the mystic landscape and spiritual history of Portugal, Pessoa increasingly sought an initiatory "Spiritual Order of Portugal" as he was approaching death. Cognizant of the role that the Templars, the mysterious order of knights whose outer Christianity was a mask for their inner "heresy", had in Portuguese history he advised his fellow "adepts" of this Order in 1935: "Always remember the martyr Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Templars, and fight, always and everywhere, his three assassins - Ignorance, Fanaticism and Tyranny."(32) He counseled them to embrace suffering as a necessary signpost along the road to Initiation: "The neophyte knows that the new soul is only regained with suffering and longing. The sage knows what the neophyte knows. The Master applies what the sage knows." The goal is to be a "Master" as it is the ultimate freedom over one's own soul, not as a master over others: "To be a Master we have to imitate the Masters and we have to suffer and therefore 'die.'" This is the esoteric "dying to oneself" so as to truly know the Gnosis within, to begin the next cycle of death and rebirth.

This was a lifelong initiation for Pessoa, going back consciously to 1920 when he wrote a text on three levels of initiation: Exoteric, Esoteric, and Divine. "Then there is esoteric initiation. It differs from the first one in which it has to be sought by the disciple, and desired and prepared by himself." As a prerequisite for any initiation Pessoa stressed a dissipation of darkness and ignorance, to receive from the "higher spirit" the three elements of "light, heat and life." Like the Hermit, he went alone into the labyrinth of his psyche, lighting up the darker aspects within himself so as to attain the real transformative growth that can only come with Shadow Work. As Bernardo Soares, Pessoa had criticized "the worship of Humanity, with its rituals of Liberty and Equality" that denied natural hierarchies (while actually solidifying its fake hierarchies). Any initiation required accepting the reality of such hierarchies, as Pessoa wrote in a letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro in January 1935: "According to our spiritual attunement, we will be able to communicate with ever higher beings."

Pessoa corresponded with the British occultist Aleister Crowley, translating his "Hymn to Pan" and publishing it in the Coimbra magazine Presença in 1931. Crowley visited Portugal with his girlfriend, Hanni Jaeger, in September 1930. After Jaeger suffered an emotional breakdown, the trickster Pessoa helped Crowley stage a fake suicide and create an international furor.(33) So it was that they staged Crowley jumping off the Boca do Inferno (Mouth of Hell) seaside cliff in Cascais, inspired by the Greek philosopher Empedocles who had thrown himself into a volcano. Pessoa helped to write the "suicide" note, with its Thelemic symbols and mangled Portuguese he helped "decipher" for the media: "Não Posso Viver Sem Ti. A outra ‘Boca De Infierno’ apanhar-me-á não será tão quente como a tua" ("Can’t live without you. The other mouth of hell that will catch me won’t be as hot as yours"). Rather than laying low, Crowley showed up at an exhibition of his paintings in Berlin on 11 October 1930.(34) A controversial figure, Crowley actually taught that magic should be used to affect changes in one's own consciousness, not to control others; certain things he did or said were often for the "shock value". Nevertheless, he did incorporate some elements of Kabbalah which have absolutely no value for one who seeks to tap into the indigenous European magical tradition.

The energetic forces and opportunities behind "magic" have likewise expanded to such a level that ceremonial magic is unnecessary - and Pessoa was a visionary in this regard. For example, around the same time Crowley was visiting Portugal, Pessoa criticized any ceremony that would subjugated oneself, such as bending knees in front of oneself, "as forms that kill or stifle the true master and spirit in us, as well as his superior connections."(35) This has special meaning for the modern virtue signal of bending knees for "social justice" - whereas its actually a profane sign of submission to a political dogma; these political dogmas and trends are truly magic rituals seeking to bind and control others rather than truly affect one's own growth. History repeats itself even in its symbols. Even in an esoteric and spiritual purpose, indigenous European forms did not have "submission" to deities. But Pessoa did see some role for ritual within initiation: "It was individual, because (even when initiation is collective, as it was in the great pagan Mysteries) it is always the individual who is initiated and not the group; it was social, because initiation was communicated in ritual and ritual is social."(36)

In a crucial passage about "the three processes of liberation or ascension," Pessoa condemns three negative spiritual trends: (1) "The asceticism that hates the personality," which sums up forms that stifles the ego in favor of the collective and some unrealistic quest for "love and light" that is a recipe for stagnation. (2) "The mysticism that hates intelligence," which sums up forms that seek an escapism from the world and any reason. (3) "The voluntarism that hates the law," which sums up with those who would ignore the innate, natural laws and cosmic order: "[The] most complete being is the one who manages to bring together the three aspirations, and achieve the ascension all the ways at the same time, albeit in one way. What, abstaining, subliminating and taking advantage, becomes divinized because it is canceled, exceeded and transformed. This is truly the Master, who, free from evil and good, knows the law."(37) To be the master of ourselves is to be truly balanced; such a spiritual master who achieved this was the great poet Fernando Pessoa.

At the bottom of the Initiation Well,
Quinta da Regaleira, 30 June 2017

Notes and References:

(1) Pedro Teixiera da Mota, "Fernando Pessoa e os Mestres," 22 December 2017, <https://pedroteixeiradamota.blogspot.com/2017/12/fernando-pessoa-e-os-mestres.html>.

(2) Álvaro de Campos, "Notes on the Memory of My Master Caeiro"; quoted in Always Astonished: Selected Prose by Fernando Pessoa, ed. Edwin Honig. San Francisco: City Light Books, 1988, p. 25.

(3) Such as I was doing throughout 2018, trying to make sense of it all after leaving monotheism behind but not fully knowing what next. For example, my article "Julian on Problems of the Universalist God Concept," <https://sjobst.blogspot.com/2018/10/julian-on-problems-of-universalist-god.html>. There is still an important place for philosophy, but some matters are truly to be kept as "spirit" and intuitive. 

(4) Quoted in Paul Buck. Lisbon: A cultural and literary companion. Oxford, England: Signal Books, 2002, p. 75.

(5) Teixiera da Mota, op. cit.

(6) José Saramago. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. San Diego/New York/London: Harvest Books, 1991, p. 13.

(7) Quoted in Zbigniew Kotowicz. Fernando Pessoa: Voices of a Nomadic Soul. Exeter, England: Shearsman Book, 2008, p. 55.

(8) Álvaro de Campos, "Ultimatum," Portugal Futurista, November 1917. This was a remarkable magazine of only one issue that ran articles by Pessoa and several other distinguished artists and poets. For more information, see: <https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portugal_Futurista>.

(9) Frederico Reis,  "The Sad Epicureanism of R. Reis"; quoted in Poems of Fernando Pessoa, eds. Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998, p. 125.

(10) Ricardina Guerreiro. De Luto por Existir: a melancolia de Bernardo Soares à luz de Walter Benjamin. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 2004, p. 159.

(11) João Rui de Sousa. Fernando Pessoa Empregado de Escritório. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 2010.

(12) Pessoa. Livro do desassossego / The Book of Disquiet. Lisboa: Edições Ática, 1982, p. 442.

(13) ibid., p. 232.

(14) Cited in Teixiera da Mota, op. cit.

(15) George K. Strodach, "Introduction", The Art of Happiness. New York: Penguin Classics, 2012, pp. 39-40.

(16) Livro do desassossego, p. 113.

(17) "A Heterodox Paganism: Pessoa's Vision of Neopaganism"; quoted in Fernando Pessoa. Páginas Íntimas e de Auto-Interpretação, eds. Georg Rudolf Lind and Jacinto do Prado Coelho. Lisboa: Edições Ática, 1996.

(18) Pessoa, Mensagem, I. The Fields, Verse 1 "The Castles"; quoted in ibid., p.179.

(19) Livro do desassossego, p. 420; quoted in Bernat Padró Nieto, "Disquiet Lisbon: Literary representation as an experience of an invisible city in Livro do Desassossego," DEBATS - Annual Review, 3, 2018, p. 211.

(20) Steffen Dix. Portuguese Modernisms: Multiple Perspectives in Literature and the Visual Arts. New York: Routledge, 2011.

(21) Steffen Dix, "The Plurality of Gods and Man, or 'The Aesthetic Attitude in All Its Pagan Splendor' in Fernando Pessoa," The Pluralist, University of Illinois Press, Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring 2010, p. 74.

(22) K. David Jackson. Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 60.

(23) ibid., pp. 61-62.

(24) Jorge Uribe, "Pessoa's Walter Pater: Archival Material from a Reading Story," in Fernando Pessoa as English Reader and Writer, eds. Patricio Ferrari and Jeronimo Pizarro. Dartmouth, MA: Tagus Press, 2015, p. 195.

(25), Pessoa, "Eros e Psique," Presença, Coimbra, May 1934.

(26) The man who did the most reviving knowledge about the customs and traditions of the ancient Lusitanians. I first became aware of his work and vision at the remarkable Museu Nacional de Arqueologia, part of the vast Jerónimos Monastery complex I highly recommend to any visitor to Lisbon. 

(27) Jackson, op. cit., p. 69.

(28) "Camoens, Luis Vaz De," 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 5, p. 119.

(29) There could be a possible Indo-European etymology link between Nereus and Nerthus, the Germanic fertility goddess of the earth mentioned by Tacitus and probably related generally to Mutter Erde or Frau Holle/Holda; as well as to Nehalennia, the goddess of the North Sea that was venerated by the tribes of the Netherlands and northwest Germany.

(30) Saramago, op. cit., p. 188.

(31) António Mora, "The Return of the Gods"; quoted in The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, ed. Ricard Zenith. New York: Grove Press, 2001, p. 150.

(32) Teixiera da Mota, op. cit.

(33) See "Aleister Crowley and Fernando Pessoa," <http://50watts.com/Aleister-Crowley-and-Fernando-Pessoa>.

(34) "Boca do Inferno," <https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/boca-do-inferno>.

(35) Teixiera da Mota, op. cit.

(36) Pessoa, "The Essay on Initiation," <http://arquivopessoa.net/textos/650>; citing Fernando Pessoa e a Filosofia Hermética: Fragmentos do espólio, ed. Yvette K. Centeno. Lisboa: Presença, 1985.

(37) Quoted in Teixiera da Mota, op. cit.

Tribute to Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) - 2. Psychological Lessons from Pessoa's Work and Life

by Sean Jobst

17 June 2020

Illustration by Colombian graphic designer 
Carolina Zambrano that excellently conveys
Pessoa's allusions to psychology and growth

In Part 1, I examined the metapolitics and philosophy of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. We can also learn much about psychology from his life and writings, wisdom that can be applied for our own daily adversities, and important elements of myth and ritual. Pessoa made it clear that the seventy-five heteronyms he created, were all different facets of his own identity - how he related to himself and various situations - not a superficial escapism to temporarily cope: "These imaginary personae were not a disguise, an attempt to conceal the author, the way a pseudonym would. At any rate, it was known in literary circles right from the beginning that Pessoa was behind them. He called them heteronyms, a word he seems to have coined."(1) Each day he viewed as offering lessons and potential, so that these heteronyms were broadly part of his lifelong journey as he wrote: "What I am one hour, I am not the next hour; what I've been one day, the next day I've forgotten."

Introduction to His Heteronyms. A mirror image of Pessoa was Bernardo Soares, through whom he expressed his most direct and conscious thoughts. He was the Pessoa who moved around various translation and publishing jobs, at times melancholic and always his mind wandering through the reflections of his beloved Lisboa, so that through him Pessoa found ultimate purpose even amidst the mundane. So it was that he wrote on 30 December 1932: "Each of us is more than one person, many people, a proliferation of our one self. That's why the same person who scorns his surroundings is different from the person who is gladdened or made to suffer by them. In the vast colony of our being there are many different kinds of people, all thinking and feeling differently."(2)

Beneath this immediate reflective self of Soares, Pessoa constructed three primary heteronyms through whom he was resolving deeper issues within himself and harmonizing the different aspects of himself - a very effective Shadow Work. One of these, Álvaro de Campos, was "born" in Tavira on 15 Oct. 1890 and lived for awhile in Scotland - a reflection of Pessoa's own youth in South Africa. This saudade for Portugal and the outside world simultaneously is a metaphor for reconciling various emotions to arrive at a contentful soul. Like a Lusitanian xamã, Campos occupied liminal places: "I am the interval between what I am and what I am not, between what I dream and what life has made of me, the abstract, carnal halfway house between things."(3)

Ricardo Reis - the "oldest" of Pessoa's heteronyms, "born" in Porto in 1887 - was heir of the Stoic and Epicurean paganism which overcame both love of life and fear of death; and Alberto Caeiro represented Pessoa's simple nature and direct intuition, "our spirit only as the preceptor of that reality."(4) Caeiro was "born" in Lisboa in 1889, lived most his life in the countryside, and "died" in 1915. In a letter, Pessoa said that Caeiro "appeared" in him on 8 March 1914, "the triumphant day of my life."(5) Calling him his "Master" who personified "wisdom of the senses": "Pessoa said in the letter that the emergence of Alberto Caeiro meant the non-existence of Fernando Pessoa. This makes perfect sense. Caeiro, the sensationist poet, is the antithesis of Pessoa, the Sebastianist with mystical leanings. There is an unbridgeable gap between the doctrine of sensationism and the occult, which seeks meaning beyond the visible."(6) Caeiro defined his intuitive "philosophy of non-philosophy" thusly: "The main thing is knowing how to see / To know how to see without thinking."(7)

Scene from the mirador near the Carmo Convent
ruins, 30 June 2017. Such a scene would have
engendered self-reflection for Pessoa, who lived
most of his life in the adjoining streets.

Everything contains lessons. Through the character of Bernardo Soares, who reveled in the mundane and trivial details of his life(8), Pessoa conveyed the idea that everything contains lessons, no matter how small or insignificant. This he did in his most well-known work, Livro do desassossego (The Book of Disquiet), a journal written over two decades. "It is a rule of life that we can and must learn from everyone. There are serious matters in life to be learned from charlatans and bandits, there are philosophies to be gleaned from fools, real lessons of fortitude that come to us by chance and from those who depend on chance. Everything contains everything else."(9) 

Through the heteronym of Soares, Pessoa was asserting the human personality through the functions set by society, a duality where Soares was both fulfilling his role but transcending it at the same time through his limitless imagination. Among the themes Pessoa was exploring was the existence of deeper realities that can't be quantified, and the value within escapism - not excessive thinking all the time, but a true balance of the left and right brains. Even seeing the value within the "stupid": "Only one thing surprises me more than the stupidity with which most men live their lives and that is the intelligence inherent in that stupidity."(10) Pessoa saw the development of human cognition in the same way:

"No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it. Collective thought is stupid because it's collective. In youth we're twofold. Our innate intelligence, which may be considerable, coexists with the stupidity of our inexperience, which forms a second, lesser intelligence. Only later on do the two unite. That's why youth always blunders - not because of its inexperience, but because of its non-unity."(11)

View from above the Padrão dos Descobrimentos,
29 June 2017. The glistening waters of the Tejo
reflected Pessoa's imagination, and the expanses
of Lisboa mirrored his conscious thoughts.

Pessoa on Myth and Ritual. Successive thinkers like Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell have lamented the loss of myth, ritual and initiation in modern Western societies, and the value in recapturing those elements that were always part of our cultures. As Max Weber observed: "The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world."(12) Through his heteronyms, Pessoa was exploring his own "Hero's Journey" and writing his own "Monomyth" to borrow two of Campbell's terms. He invested even the "mundane" with spiritual meaning, such as his interest in Alchemy - Soares conveying the idea that even something like commerce could be seen in light of transmutation. One symptom of this loss of Myth is the modern tendency to reduce that term to a symptom of something "untrue", whereas Pessoa held to the original definition of Myth in his epic poem Mensagem: "O mito é o nada que é tudo" ("Myth is the nothing that is everything").(13) 

If ritual is truly about "the ancient technology of transition between identities" as noted by Jonathan Cook in his business-oriented analysis of Pessoa(14), then the great poet through his heteronyms was like a modern Lusitanian form of "shaman"(15) who traversed and integrated the various aspects of his personality - As Within, So Without - as he wrote on 18 June 1931: "Beneath the great blue canopy of the silent sky, I will always be a page caught up in some incomprehensible ritual, clothed in life in order to take part in it, and blindly going through the different gestures and steps, poses and mannerisms, until the party or my role in it ends and I can go and eat the fancy food."(16) He advised on a different occasion: "We should bathe our destines as we do our bodies, change our lives just as we change our clothes - not to keep ourselves alive, which is why we eat and sleep, but out of the disinterested respect for ourselves which can properly be called cleanliness."(17)

My own descent down the nine spiral levels of 
the Initiation Well, Quinta da Regaleira, Sintra, 
30 June 2017. A place laden with esoteric and
symbolic meaning that also inspired Pessoa.

Cultivating a Second Self. Using what Jung later personified as "Archetypes" - certain allegories for psychological, cosmic and natural forces contained within the world's mythologies - many a writer or artist explored their own multifaceted personalities through a parallel self. The Roman Cicero advised cultivating a "second self" after studying the lives of historical heroes one can emulate not to run away from one's own identity but enhance one's own potentials. The Florentine political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli used to do this after a day's work in the fields and now assuming the role of the philosopher: "A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savor of it."(18)

This ties in with ritual, involving an actual transformation into this second self. We have lessons from our own indigenous European mythologies, for example when the Germanic god Wodan transformed himself after his ordeal for nine days and nine nights on the World Tree to obtain not just the Runes but truly the enlightenment within. Pessoa was especially fond of the Greco-Roman hero Odysseus, whose ordeals as immortalized by Homer in The Iliad can be allegories for the tests each one of us will face within our lifetime - it depends on how we learn from the trials, how we deal with the adversities, if we will rise when the occasions call for it or not. To emulate an Archetype is the antithesis of running away from internal problems through illusory behaviors, and so too did Pessoa approach his various heteronyms in such an inspiring way.

Even literary figures can shape us as Archetypes, such as I wrote in relation to what Miguel de Cervantes conveyed through the Castilian Archetype of Don Quixote. German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer saw him as allegorical: "Don Quixote is an allegory of the life of every man who, unlike others, pursues an objective, ideal end that has taken possession of his thinking and willing; and then, of course, he stands out as an oddity in this world."(19) The eccentricities of Pessoa were also reflections of this deeper ideal, such as the specific rituals he was known to take when writing (he tended to stand rather than sit), the way he would sit at the cafe with a certain number of books and a specific drink, and a general sense of symbolism. For example, his heteronyms were each inspired by the four astral elements - air, fire, water, and earth - and designed according to their astrologies(20), each involving the "planet of literature" Mercury(21).

Performing embodied actions inspired by these Archetypes can be truly transformative, but only if structured in a way affirming one's own innate qualities. Pessoa foreshadowed the advice of the American psychologist George Kelly, "to realize here and now that our innermost personality is something we create as we go along rather than something we discover lurking in our insides or imposed upon [us] from without."(22) It calls for accepting that which cannot be changed but still being inspired to deal with adversities and overcome challenges. A character sketch of this "second self" can be done, such as the elaborate personalities and horoscopes that Pessoa created for his heteronyms. For these were representations of the multifaceted aspects of ourselves - our higher and lower self, our subconscious and conscious minds, etc. - as much as they convey the multiplicities inherent within Nature. Such a task we will further explore in the third and final part.

Parque Eduardo VII, Lisboa, 1 July 2017.
Both the cultivated gardens and the spiral
meandros on the streets contain personal
metaphor as they would have for Pessoa.

Footnotes and References:

(1) Zbigniew Kotowicz. Fernando Pessoa: Voices of a Nomadic Soul. Exeter, England: Shearsman Book, 2008, p. 41.

(2) Pessoa. Livro do desassossego / The Book of Disquiet. Lisboa: Edições Ática, 1982, p. 20.

(3) Álvaro de Campos, "Começo a conhecer-me. Não existo" / "I'm beginning to know myself. I don't exist."

(4) Pedro Teixiera da Mota, "Fernando Pessoa e os Mestres," 22 December 2017, <https://pedroteixeiradamota.blogspot.com/2017/12/fernando-pessoa-e-os-mestres.html>.

(5) Poems of Fernando Pessoa, eds. Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998, pp. 3, 7.

(6) Kotowicz, op. cit., p. 47.

(7) Alberto Caeiro, "The Keeper of Flocks," XXIV.

(8) Ellen Sapega, "Contemporary Responses to the Fragments of a Modernist Self: On the Various Editions of Fernando Pessoa's Livro do Desassossego," in Homenagem a Alexandrino Severino: Essays on the Portuguese Speaking World, eds. Margo Milleret and Marshall C. Eakin. Austin, TX: Host Publications, Inc., 1993,  p. 45.

(9) Livro do Desassossego, p. 182.

(10) ibid., p. 344.

(11) ibid., p. 104.

(12) Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation," 1917.

(13) Pessoa, Mensagem, 1934, II. The Castles, Verse 1 "Ulysses".

(14) Jonathan Cook, "The 5 Strange Truths Fernando Pessoa Brings To Business," Oct. 10, 2017, <https://medium.com/@JonathanCCook/the-5-strange-truths-fernando-pessoa-brings-to-business-52af6454ae69>.

(15) I use this term generally, as the ancient Lusitanians had their own form of "shaman" that were closely parallel to the Druids of Celtic peoples. 

(16) Livro do Desassossego, p. 482.

(17) ibid., p. 146.

(18) Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter VI, p. 1.

(19) Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1818-1819.

(20) Paulo Cardoso. Fernando Pessoa, cartas astrológicas. Lisboa: Bertrand editora, 2011.

(21) Pessoa's own birth coincided with Wednesday, symbolically and linguistically related to the god Wodan in Germanic countries, and to the Greco-Roman god Mercury throughout southern Europe. These two gods, and their equivalent Lugus whose veneration was widespread among the ancient Lusitanians, Celtiberians, and Gauls, all contain qualities related to poetry, inspiration, literature, words as a powerful medium, and arts and crafts generally.

(22) See "Using a Second Self to Promote Self-Transformation," <https://academyofideas.com/2020/03/using-a-second-self-to-promote-self-transformation/>.

Tribute to Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) - 1. His Metapolitics and Philosophy

by Sean Jobst

13 June 2020

(Updated 15 June 2020)

On 13 June 1888, the watchful eyes of the Dioscuri(1) welcomed into this world a man whose words bounded him to his homeland while also admitting him amongst the immaterial. He was the Portuguese poet and writer Fernando Pessoa, whose interests ran from philosophy and metapolitics, to the esoteric and occult. Far more than a typical man of letters, he gave life to dormant aspects within himself and, doing so, can serve as a model for individual spiritual and psychological growth. From his writings we can also glean observations about his own time and place that can extend to our current realities. (All pictures in this three-part Pessoa series were taken by me either in his hometown Lisboa or nearby Sintra, except for paintings or pictures of Pessoa himself.).

My own awareness of Pessoa was spawned by travels to Portugal that left me a Lusophile. I being a descendant of both the Suebi tribe, some of whose members left our native Schwaben (while my own ancestors remained in Schwaben) and settled in northern Portugal, where they merged with the Celtic castro heritage of that region (the Suebi having earlier absorbed the Hallstatt Celts so it came full circle); and also of the Celtiberians, a cousin people of the Lusitanians. At the time of writing, I was planning on being in Portugal including a pilgrimage in the footsteps of this great poet, but the global shutdowns scrapped those plans for the time being. In any case, his poetry often sparked moments of reflection and inspiration in me in the years following these travels. Among these are his philosophical and spiritual views, including his call for a return to the indigenous European esoteric-magical tradition.

Fate bestowed upon him the surname Pessoa, which happens to be the Portuguese word for "person, individual, persona, being", for merged without effort all aspects of himself and these poured forth through his consciousness. Rather than being mere letters set to page, his words embodied different levels of the self in a way harmonized by few. Through all these aspects he truly found himself, yet was also chasing an illusive Saudade through which he tried to find meaning but learned that life was more about the journey itself. As he wrote through one of his heteronyms, Alberto Caiero, on 8 Nov. 1915: 

"Se, depois de eu morrer, quiserem escrever a minha biografia, Não há nada mais simples. Tem só duas datas—a da minha nascença e a da minha morte. Entre uma e outra coisa todos os dias são meus." - "If, after I die, they should want to write my biography, There's nothing simpler. I've just two dates - of my birth, and of my death. In between the one thing and the other all the days are mine."(2)

Statue of Pessoa with a book as a head, across
from the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos in Lisboa, 
a favorite site of Pessoa near his birth-home

The Unconscious working through his writing. Pessoa was tapping into what psychologists term the Unconscious through his writings, for he would listen to the clues from his intuition weaving throughout his conscious mind. Likewise his various heteronyms were Archetypes as much as they were also aspects of himself as we will see later. He achieved balance through his words, exploring various thoughts that most others would simply suppress or ignore, such as when he wrote through the mild-mannered office worker Bernardo Soares (the passive and melancholic aspects of himself) that it went beyond either "good" or "bad": "For me, to write is self-deprecating, and yet I can't quit doing it. Writing is like the drug I abhor and keep taking, the addiction I despise and depend on."(3)

Tapping into the ancient perceptions that attached more significance to word and breath than modern societies tend to do, Pessoa saw language as more real than conscious thought for the insights into one's self that it provides - the pure self as opposed to the masks one may consciously adopt for whatever reason: "The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart."(4) He found ultimate expression through his writing, as he observed on 2 Sept. 1931: "In successive images I use to describe myself - not untruthful but not truthful either - I become more image than me, talking myself out of existence, using my soul as ink, whose sole purpose is to write."(5)

Embodiment of a língua portuguesa. Aside from a likely infusion of Cristão-Novo or "New Christian" blood on one side of his ancestry(6), Pessoa was of Portuguese blood, and was a staunch defender of its culture and the purity of its language. He was a new Lusitanian bard, carrying on the tradition of the great 16th-century epic poet Luís de Camões as much as he was forging a place for himself within the dynamic culture: "Pessoa seemed serious in his intention to produce poetry that would surpass Camões. And since he predicted the arrival of several poets that would remove the Bard from the pedestal he also seemed to quite literally take upon himself the creation of several poets whose task it would be."(7)

Yet it would be a mistake to not see Pessoa as very much a traditionalist, for he was doing his work to safeguard culture such as when he opposed the government's orthography reforms that replaced the "y" with "i" in many words, whereas the former was more an expression of indigenous Lusitanian and Iberian forms: "I have no political or social sense. In a way, though, I do have a highly developed patriotic sense. My fatherland is the Portuguese language [Minha Pátria é a língua portuguesa]. It wouldn't grieve me if someone invaded and took over Portugal as long as they didn't bother me personally. What I hate, with all the hatred I can muster, is not the person who writes bad Portuguese, or who does not know his grammar, or who writes using the new simplified orthography; what I hate, as if it were an actual person, is the poorly written page of Portuguese itself."(8)

The Portuguese flag of five escutcheons fluttering under the
warming rays of Sol, above Parliament in Lisboa, 1 July 2017

Pessoa's views on Nation and the Individual. He saw culture as a deeper reality that was more lasting than political systems and trends, as the above passage shows. Except for a formative decade in South Africa as an adolescent and teenager that was crucial for his development(9), Pessoa never left the soil of his beloved Portugal, moving throughout Lisboa which contained all the world for him. He produced a new Portuguese epic in the vein of Camões' Os Lusíadas, called Mensagem (The Message), which excellently captured Lusitanian heroic archetypes as we will see later. In his "Notes to Mensagem," Pessoa extolled a "fraternal individualism" he defined as "respect for the dignity of mankind and freedom of the spirit."(10)

He referred to three interconnected realities: The Individual, the Nation, and Humanity. "The Individual is the supreme reality because it has a material as well as mental shape - it is a living body and a living soul." While the Individual is a biological notion: "Humanity is essentially a zoological notion - neither more nor less than an animal species created from all individuals of human form. Both are root-realities." Forming a crucial intermediary between the two is Nation, in whose embrace one can be secure enough to be at peace with other cultures (unlike Globalist utopian ideologies hiding under "humanitarianism"): "The Nation, by virtue of its being a social reality, is not material; it is more a stem than a root. The Individual and Humanity are places, the Nation being a passage between them. It is from the sense of a patriotic fraternity, easy to feel for those who are not degenerate, that we gradually subliminate our feelings until we feel fraternal with all mankind."(11) 

Parallels have been drawn between Pessoa and William Butler Yeats, a contemporary Irish poet with similar mystical and cultural interests: "Pessoa's concept of the 'Portuguese soul' is analogous to what Yeats calls 'the permanent character of the race' in 'First Principles.' Not only that, but he also attributes the same characteristics to it as those which Yeats attributed to the Celts in 'The Celtic Element in Literature,' namely an adventurous, tragic and mystical nature. The similarities extend to Pessoa's characterization of the 'Portuguese soul' as originating from ancient dreams, which recalls Yeat's depiction of his ideal of 'Unity of Culture' as 'a nationwide multiform reverie.' Yeats believed that by drawing on his country's legends and folklore, a poet could reveal the Anima Mundi, or rather 'a Great Memory passing on from generation to generation.' Pessoa also believed that poets should derive their inspiration from 'o que has almas há de superindividual' [that which is supra-individual in souls]."(12)

Jerónimos Monastery and the Lisboa skyline, as seen from
atop the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, 29 June 2017

The Metapolitics of Pessoa. He considered himself "a British-style conservative, that is to say, liberal within conservatism and absolutely anti-reactionary," influenced by the individualist and libertarian tradition.(13) At the age of 16, while still living in South Africa, Pessoa wrote the sonnet "Joseph Chamberlain" which criticized the British Empire's treatment of the Afrikaneers. He followed this up with work criticizing Kitchener and supporting Irish independence.(14) "But no state ever pleased him, and it never could, maybe because there was always the other Pessoa around, the poet who needed free air to breathe."(15) For he was an individualist focused more on cultural matters; more metapolitician than political. Pessoa was generally on the "Right" politically, in that he opposed parliamentarism and egalitarianism, viewing the ideal structure as an "aristocratic republic" guided by a natural hierarchy of merit rather than unnatural hierarchies of birth. Opposing monarchy was not always a "leftist" position within Iberia, as my tribute to Spanish Falange leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera attests.

This opposition to outdated monarchy led him to initially support the revolution that ushered in the First Portuguese Republic on 5 October 1910, eagerly bestowing the title of "Presidente-Rei" ("President-King") upon Sidónio Pais, the charismatic leader of the Partido Nacional Republicano.(16) The populist Pais reversed many of the strict anti-clerical measures, tried to keep Portugal out of World War I, and admitted his mistakes in public.(17) Pais was assassinated by a leftist radical in 1918, after which the Republic failed to produce anyone of the same caliber. Pessoa was part of the "Portuguese Renaissance" movement of artists and intellectuals who sought to give the Republic some cultural legitimacy, such as his involvement in the Geração de Orpheu (Generation of Orpheus) group which employed the Greek heroic myth of Orpheus to relinquish the past while focusing on the journey ahead, seeking nothing less than the "edification of Portugal in the twentieth century."(18)

While Pessoa spent most of 1919 focused on his romance with Ofélia Queiroz, between May and August he wrote two political essays, "Public Opinion" and "How to Organize Portugal," for the pro-Sidónio magazine Acção. Pessoa's disillusionment with the Republic following Pais can be seen through his heteronym of "Ricardo Reis," who self-exiled in Brazil on 13 February 1919 after the defeat of the monarchist insurgents in his "hometown" of Porto.(19) Although he was personally anti-monarchist, this indicates Pessoa's disillusion with a Republic that failed to produce the order and higher culture he sought. He thus supported the military coup of 28 May 1926 that established the Ditadura Nacional (National Dictatorship) under the leadership of General Óscar Carmona.(20) 

On the grounds that desperate times called for desperate measures, Pessoa felt that the new regime was a necessary temporary measure to reinvigorate national consciousness, as he argued in a 1928 pamphlet. However, he soon became disillusioned after the rise of António Salazar and the Estado Novo, given the dictator's symbiotic relationship with a moribund Catholic Church, cracking down on esoteric groups, and lack of interest in cultural matters. Pessoa was openly hostile to the new state's corporatism and censorship efforts.(21) Before his death in 1935, Pessoa's work was banned by the regime which suppressed his two articles condemning Benito Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia and Fascism as an infringement upon human liberty.(22) He remained throughout an outspoken elitist more concerned with metapolitical and cultural matters, while consistently opposing all the dialectics of Communism, Socialism, Fascism, and Political Catholicism.(23)

Painting of Pessoa by José de Almada Negreiros (1893-1970),
one of his compatriots in the Orpheu Group

Nature of the State and Reasons for Portugal's Decline. He turned against the Republic when it failed to improve on the flaws of monarchy, and he turned against the Dictatorship when it began infringing on culture which he felt should be safeguarded from politics. Among the causes for Portugal's decline he identified the corrupt moribund monarchy and church, but also "foreign influence, the oligarchy of political bosses, and the decline of Western civilization itself."(24) In his unfinished manuscript "History of a Dictatorship," Pessoa was studying the causes for the nation's decline. He tapped into the same Collective Unconscious as other contemporary European metapolitical thinkers - Julius Evola, Oswald Spengler, Otto Strasser, and the German Conservative Revolution - when he conceived of the state as a living organism with a natural tendency towards disintegration as part of the same cycle as other life-forms:

"Let us apply to the organism called the state the general law of life. Which are the elements (composing the cells) of this organism? Obviously the people, that is, the individuals composing the nation. Which is then, in the state, the force that integrates, which is the force that disintegrates? There is an exact analogy - how could there not be, since both are living 'bodies'? - with the individual organism. Thus, in the state, obviously, the disintegrating force is that which makes the people many - their number - and the integrating force is that which makes them one, a people - the unification of sentiments, of character brought about by identity of race, of climate, of history, etc."(25)

Archetype of the "Anarchist Banker". In May 1922, Pessoa wrote O Banqueiro Anarquista (The Anarchist Banker) which gives us a penetrating analysis into political ideals vis a vis social realities. In the novel, the narrator meets an old friend in a Lisboa cafe, who is now a wealthy banker while revealing he still regards himself as an Anarchist. The resulting dialogue conveys the idea that modern Capitalism and Classic Liberalism are intricately connected, that so often behind slogans of "liberty" and "equality" are a mere rhetorical "social fiction". Through his words, Pessoa was eviscerating the inherent realities behind hollowed political dogmas, looking at the actual motives of "revolutionaries" and "activists" beneath the ideological masks.

This Anarchist Banker Archetype sees modernity as the end goal, so that he should be allowed to pursue pure self-interest: "We should all work for the same end, but separately." He is more honest than those who mask their own selfish interests under false "social" concerns. He pointed out that natural disparities in talent and willpower will always arise to the surface with every social change, regardless of political system. Pessoa was also alluding to the power of banking interests, that pursued business as usual regardless if the political system was monarchical or republican.(26) I see this "Anarchist Banker" Archetype as a perfect explanation for the fact that Marxist movements and other efforts at "social justice" are nearly always led by individuals who come from upper economic backgrounds themselves, and their revolutions financed by shadowy oligarchs and banking interests.

Grave of Pessoa inside the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos,
near the Rio Tejo in the Belém area, 29 June 2017

Footnotes and References:

(1) Pessoa, who placed great significance to astrology such that he constructed charts for his heteronyms, was born under the sign of Gemini and had Scorpio as a rising sign.

(2) "Poemas Inconjuntos," Athena, no. 5, Lisboa, Feb. 1925; in Pessoa. Poemas de Alberto Caeiro. Lisboa: Ática, 1946, p. 88.

(3) Fernando Pessoa. Livro do desassossego/The Book of Disquiet. Lisboa: Ática, 1982, p. 152.

(4) ibid., p. 466.

(5) ibid., p. 316.

(6) See "Laços ancestrais do poeta Fernando Pessoa á Beira Baixa," <http://www.redejudiariasportugal.com/images/downloads/judpessoa.pdf>. They generally did not have quite the same inimical role in Portuguese society as the Conversos did in Spanish history.

(7) Zbigniew Kotowicz. Fernando Pessoa: Voices of a Nomadic Soul. Exeter, England: Shearsman Book, 2008, p. 16.

(8) Livro do desassossego, p. 15.

(9) Fernando Pessoa. Correspondência 1905–1922, ed. Manuela Parreira da Silva. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 1999, p. 258.

(10) Cited in Poems of Fernando Pessoa, eds. Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998, p. 223.

(11) Pessoa, "Explanation of a Book," 1935.

(12) Patricia Silva-McNeill. Yeats and Pessoa: Parallel Poetic Styles. New York: Routledge, 2010, p. 94.

(13) José Barreto, "Salazar and the New State in the Writings of Fernando Pessoa," Portuguese Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2, 2008, p. 169.

(14) Carlos Pittella, "Chamberlain, Kitchener, Kropotkine - and the political Pessoa," Pessoa Plural, Vol. 10, Fall 2016.

(15) Kotowicz, op. cit., p. 25.

(16) Darlene Joy Sadler. An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa: Modernism and the Paradoxes of Authorship. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1998, p. 45.

(17) Douglas L. Wheeler. Republican Portugal: A Political History, 1910-1926. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978, p. 142.

(18) Orpheu 3, preparação do texto, introdução e cronologia de Arnaldo Saraiva. Lisboa: Edições Ática, 1984.

(19) Fabrizio Boscaglia, "One century later: what was Fernando Pessoa doing and writing in 1919?," Jan. 30, 2019, <https://pessoa.luxhotels.pt/blog/?p=228&lang=en>.

(20) Darlene Joy Sadler, "Nationalism, Modernity, and the Formation of Fernando Pessoa's Aesthetic," Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol. 34, No. 2, Winter 1997, p. 110.

(21) Barreto, op. cit., pp. 170–173.

(22)  José Barreto, "Fernando Pessoa e a invasão da Abissínia pela Itália fascista," Análise Social, Vol. XLIV, No. 193, 2009, pp. 693–718.

(23) Joel Serrão and Maria Paula Morão. Fernando Pessoa, Ultimatum e Páginas de Sociologia Política. Lisboa: Edições Ática, 1980.

(24) José Barreto, "'History of a Dictatorship': An Unfinished Political Essay by the Young Fernando Pessoa," trans. Mario Pereira, in Fernando Pessoa as English Reader and Writer, eds. Patricio Ferrari and Jerónimo Pizarro. Dartmouth, MA: Tagus Press, 2015, p. 132.

(25) Pessoa, "The Portuguese Regicide and the Political Situation in Portugal."

(26) For example, the influence of the London-based Stern and Goldsmid banking families; Hermann de Stern and David de Stern were even made barons by the Portuguese kings while continuing their activities with the Republic: "The Sterns and the Goldsmids have financed Portugal exclusively for the last hundred years - and not a very good job have they made of it, either, from the Portuguese point of view." (E. Alexander Powell, "Masters of Europe: The Unseen Empire That Governs the Governments," The Saturday Evening Post, June 19, 1909, p. 46)