Pessoa and the Occult: Selected Poems

PESSOA AND THE OCCULT: SELECTED POEMS by José I. Suárez University of Northern Colorado FOR several decades, much has been said and written about Fernando Pessoa’s dalliance with the occult. However, little has been done to establish to what extent his fascination with the esoteric influenced his poetry. Before addressing this issue, I must ask whether his interest in occult doctrine stemmed from a personal, philosophical interest, or was it one of his many aesthetic concerns intended to expand the themes of his poetry? I share the views of those critics who believe in Pessoa’s earnestness regarding the occult. However, I would like to state that I, like Denis Saurat avers about European philosophical poets in his old but veritable study, cannot affirm that Fernando Pessoa was a practicing occultist.1 He might or might not have been – regardless of his own admission that he was not – a member of any secret society that could provide him with “ready-made” ideas. He, undoubtedly , was well acquainted with the arcane sciences and made full use of them. The occult offered him a plethora of artistic possibilities from which to derive inspiration. Yet, how much was Pessoa involved with it? According to occultist precepts, the creation of the world came about from a subdivision of the substance that is God. Consequently, the world is divine and humans, as its central beings, are of divine substance, but cannot achieve self-realization unless they become aware of their divinity. Because humans are akin to God, they are thus immortal. They are continually undergoing a series of reincarnations to recover the essence of divine unity with God, a unity lost when Hell, the “world below,” was created. The world above is the mirror of the one below. Our task, as humans, is to ascend again, to the absolute unity represented by the “world above before creation.” The question thus arises 83 083-93 Suárez, J.I. 13/9/10 11:11 Página 83 about why creation if humans are still considered divine on this world. The occultist ’s response is that creation is God’s means of self-expression of his unlimited power (Saurat 71-73). As we know, much has been written on Pessoa’s theory of heteronyms. No one, however, can go beyond what our poet reveals in a 1931 letter to Gaspar Simões, as to the origins of the alter egos:2 O ponto essencial da minha personalidade como artista é que sou um poeta dramático; tenho, continuamente, em tudo quanto escrevo, a exaltação íntima do poeta e a despersonalizacão do dramaturgo. [ . . .] Desde que o crítico fixe, porém, que sou essencialmente poeta dram ático, tem a chave da minha personalidade, [ . . .]. Munido desta chave, ele pode abrir lentamente todas as fechaduras da minha express ão. Sabe que, como poeta, sinto; que como poeta dramático, sinto despegando-me de mim; que como dramático (sem poeta), transmudo automaticamente o que sinto para uma expressão alheia ao que senti, construindo na emoção uma pessoa inexistente que a sentisse verdadeiramente, e por isso sentisse, em derivação, outras emoções que eu, puramente eu, me esqueci de sentir. (Obras 66) Assuming someone else’s personality also attracted W.B. Yeats, Pessoa’s Irish contemporary, to the idea of dramatic poetry. Yeats states that he found the following in an old diary: “I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a rebirth as something not one’s self, something created in a moment and perpetually renewed; [. . .].” (27). The speaker in the diary goes on to praise depersonalization in a dramatic sense: “If we cannot imagine ourselves from different as what we are, and try to assume that second self, we cannot impose a discipline upon ourselves though we may accept one from others. Active virtue, as distinguished from the passive acceptance of the code, is therefore theatrical, consciously dramatic, the wearing of a mask [. . .].” (27-28). The coincidence of Yeats’s thought with that of Pessoa goes even further, for Yeats too had an avid interest in the occult. He states that in November 1917...