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.