The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (20 page)

26.

15 June 1917

You will be celebrated and adored in 1918. †

In this year you only make progress. You are to make money and love, in this year. Now is monastic life to end; then money comes—a legacy from your woman’s aunt, † Only in 1918 can you assume Fame. Owing to many answers to a question you are in a worried state. Listen: When you are in a worried state, make this question to me: Are you the Master?
...

27.

...
Each soul is a demon. No man is a soul until he is a demon. 3†. Love is the monster. Love under mastery.

Love is a mortal sample of immortality.
...

28.

A man is the mask of a star, and the soul is the face of the star.

29.

3 January 1930

Lend me a moment of your attention.

* * *

You mark now soon a marvelous stage in the least of your careers. You will further your martial tendencies* now. Yet many ages will pass, and you with man will work sowing[?] messages of wisdom lost, and found again, until these ages are past, and earth ... Σon.
...
Lest the only sense should be a mask, make the mask a sense.
...

30.

13 June 1930

You must separate yourself from mortal thoughts and feelings and show no more to the world than the world can see.

Now no more.

There are many Kabbalas, and it is hard to believe that we cannot attain to union with God, whatever that may mean, unless we are acquainted with the Hebrew alphabet.

There are Errors of the Path, Errors of the Inn and Errors of the Cave. Those are errors of the Path where the path itself is taken for its purpose. Those are errors of the Inn where halfway is taken for all the way. Those are errors of the Cave where the cave, which is at the base of the Castle, is taken for the Castle itself.

These errors are common to all paths, and that of gnosis is no more free from them than the mystical and the magical paths.

I can dispense with asceticism, but not with truth, nor will I believe that God will not be manifest to me unless I can sit still for five hours or can breathe naturally through either nostril at will.

The fact is, however, that whatever the path taken,* it should not be taken before the preparatory grades, the neophyte grades, have been traversed. Mysticism seeks to transcend the intellect by intuition, magic to transcend the intellect by power; gnosis to transcend the intellect by a higher intellect. But to transcend a thing rightly you must first pass through that thing. The advantage of the gnostic path is that there is less temptation to reach the higher intellect without passing through the lower, since both are intellect and there is a difference of quantity between the one and the other, than in the mystic and the magic paths, where there is a difference of quality, not quantity, between emotion and intellect; between the will and intellect.

But the real meaning of initiation is that this visible world we live in is a symbol and a shadow, that this life we know through the senses is a death and a sleep, or in other words, that what we see is an illusion. Initiation is the dispelling—a gradual, partial dispelling—of that illusion. The reason for its secret is that most men are not adapted to understand it and will therefore misunderstand and confuse it if it be made public. The reason for its being symbolic is that initiation is not a knowledge but a life, and that man must therefore think out of himself what the symbols show, for thus he will live their life and not only learn the words in which they are shown.

...

Identified in a letter by Pessoa as an astrologer with a long beard, the heteronym Raphael Baldaya was conceived in late
1915.
He produced some pages for a
Treatise on Astrology
and was also supposed to write a small book
, A New Theory of Astrological Periods,
which Pessoa planned to
sell through English newspapers. The advertisement drafted for the book promises that with the Baldaya method, costing just
£5.00
postpaid, “the native’s fate may be read without directions.” Natal horoscopes were also available by mail for
£5.00.
“Absolute satisfaction guaranteed.”

The few works of Baldaya that actually got written are all in Portuguese and include philosophical as well as astrological writings
.

1. The World is composed of two types of forces: forces that affirm and forces that negate.

2. The forces that affirm are the world’s creative forces, emanating successively from the One and Only, the center of Affirmation.

3. The forces that negate emanate from beyond the One.

4. The One and Only—of which God, i.e. God the Creator of the Universe, is merely a manifestation—is an Illusion. The whole of creation is fiction and illusion, even as Matter is a proven illusion of Thought, Thought an illusion of the Intuition, Intuition an illusion of the Pure Idea, and the Pure Idea an illusion of Being. And Being, in its essence, is Illusion and Falseness. God is the Supreme Lie.

5. The forces that negate are those that proceed from beyond the One and Only. To our Mind there is nothing outside the One and Only. But since it is possible to think that this One and Only doesn’t exist, since it is
possible
to negate it, it is therefore
not
the One and Only, the Supreme, the utterly Supreme (here terms are lacking). To be able to deny it
is
to deny it, and to deny it means it doesn’t exist.

6. The supreme negation is known as non-Being. Non-Being is unthinkable, since to think of non-being is not to think. And yet, since we employ the term non-being, it can in a certain way be thought of. Once we think of it, it becomes Being. This is how Being emerges: in opposition to Non-Being. Non-Being, speaking in human language,
precedes
it.

7. Matter, which is the greatest negation of Being, is for this reason the state closest to Non-Being. Matter is the least false of all the Illusions, the weakest of all lies. Hence its
evident
character. To
the extent it manifests itself, Being negates itself; to the extent it negates itself, it creates Non-Being. Since Non-Being precedes Being, Being’s negation of itself is, if we may so speak, a
creation
.

8. We should be creators of Negation, negators of spirituality, makers of Matter. Matter is Appearance; Appearance is at once Being and Non-Being. (If Appearance is not Being, it is Non-Being. If it is Non-Being, it is not Appearance. To be Appearance, therefore, it must be Being.)

9. Negation consists in helping the Manifested to manifest itself yet more, until it dissolves into Non-Being.

10. There are two opposing principles: that of Affirmation, Spirituality, Mysticism, which is Christian (in our present civilization), and that of Negation, Materiality, Clarity, which is Pagan. Lucifer, the bearer of Light, is the nominal symbol of the Spirit that Negates. The revolt of the angels created Matter, the return to Non-Being, freedom from Affirmation.

11. All the worlds affirmed by theosophists do really exist, but they are within Illusion, which is, for as long as it lasts, Reality. God, from his point of view, exists, but God
is deceived
. Just as we think we exist, but for God have no existence except as part of him, meaning that we don’t exist in the absolute, so God thinks he exists but doesn’t. Being itself is but the Non-Being of Non-Being, the mortal affirmation of Life.

The following is the unfinished draft of a letter (written in French) to Messrs. Hector and Henri Durville, Paris-based practitioners of therapeutic hypnotism. Hector Durville
(1849–1924)
was a professor at the Ecole Pratique de Magnetisme et Massage, an editor of the
Journal du Magnetisme,
and the author of numerous works on magnetic therapy, including one that was translated into English and published in Chicago:
The Theory and Practice of Human Magnetism
(undated). His son Henri also published books, most notably
Cours de magnetisme personnel, magnetisme experimental & curatif, hypnotisme, suggestion
(5th ed. Paris
, 1920).

Lisbon, 10 June 1919

Gentlemen,

Would you please be so kind as to send me—by return of post, if possible—your complete catalogues, as well as information about the Institut du Magnétisme et du Psychisme Expérimental and specifically about your correspondence course in animal magnetism and self-hypnosis?

So that you can supply me with the right information, perhaps it will be helpful if I clarify at once what it is I’m looking for, and why. I will endeavor, therefore, to provide you with the necessary preliminary data. Needless to say, everything I write here concerns only my request for information on the above-mentioned correspondence course.

I would like to develop, as much as I can, whatever animal magnetism I may possess, and to develop it so as to give, if possible, an
outer directional orientation
to my life. Expressed in this way, it sounds complicated, but I hope to make it clear through the explanations that follow. I will first of all describe my temperament, and then explain what I know (not much, in fact) about the subject of magnetism.

From the psychiatric point of view, I’m a hysterical neurasthenic, but fortunately my neuropsychosis is rather weak. The neurasthenic element dominates the hysterical element, such that I exhibit no outwardly hysterical traits—no compulsion to lie, no emotional instability in my relationships with others, etc. My hysteria is a strictly inner phenomenon, affecting only me; in my life with myself I have all the instability of feelings and sensations and all the emotional fickleness and fluctuation of will that characterize protean neurosis. Except in the intellectual sphere, where I have arrived at what I take to be sure conclusions, I change my mind ten times a day; I can only feel certain about things that involve no emotion. I know what to think about such-and-such philosophical doctrine or literary problem, but I’ve never had a firm opinion about any of my friends or about anything concerning my outward activity.

A mental introvert, therefore, like most born neurasthenics, I nearly always suppress the outer—or dynamic—expression of these inner manifestations. I have to be very tired, or excited, for my emotionalism to spread to the outside. I am
outwardly
even-tempered: I’m nearly always calm and cheerful around others. As such, and since I have it under control, my emotionalism causes me no problem; in fact I quite like it, since it’s useful to the literary life which I lead alongside my practical life. I even cultivate, with quasi-decadent loving care, these charged yet subtle emotions that make up my inner life. I have no desire to change that aspect. My trouble lies elsewhere.

You have no doubt already spotted my weak point; a temperament like mine is cut to the quick not in the emotions and not in the intelligence, but in the will. This will suffers by way of the emotions and the intelligence, such as they exist in me. My extreme emotionalism unsettles my will; my extreme rationalism—fruit of an overly
analytical and logical intelligence—crushes and debilitates this will that my emotions had already unsettled. Hence my abulia and parabulia. I always want to do three or four different things at once, but I ultimately do none of them and, what’s more, don’t want to do any of them. The thought of action oppresses me like a curse; to perform an action is to do violence to myself.

Everything in me that’s exclusively intellectual is quite strong and quite healthy. My inhibitory will, which is the intellectual will, doesn’t waver; even when my emotions urge me on, I have the power of
not doing
. What I lack is the will to act, the will to influence the outside;
doing
is what’s hard for me.