Fernando Pessoa’s neopagan works

Antonio Cardiello

Postdoctoral Project sponsered by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) - SFRH/BPD/119592/2016 

Fernando Pessoa wrote, between 1913 and 1918, many works about "Neopaganism". As an authentic aesthetic-religious movement, Neopaganism corresponded to a theoretical attempt to restore a polytheistic cult under the civilizational model of Ancient Greece, extolling the pluralist dimension of the forces of Nature, responsible for the balance between the world and human actions. Written in his own name, sometimes by the names of Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, António Mora or Álvaro de Campos, many of these works were published in partial and incomplete anthologies, while others remain unpublished. This project aims to cover three convergent paths: (i) to gather and critically establish, for the first time in one book, all the works that reconstruct Pessoa’s Neopaganism; (ii) to locate, transcribe and annotate the aforementioned and unpublished section of his archive; (iii) to write three essays on Pessoa’s Neopaganism and its influence.