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)
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| 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)
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| 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)
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| 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)
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| 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.
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| 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)
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