“Nature is parts without a whole” was, according to Pessoa, Caeiro’s greatest, truest verse (from the forty-seventh poem of The Keeper of Sheep), and in a Reis ode he proposed that “as each fountain / Has its own deity, might not each man / Have a god all his own?” The phenomenon of heteronymy reflects Pessoa’s conviction that even at the level of the self there is no unity, and if he championed the resurgence of paganism with its myriad gods, it is because he rejected the vision of an ultimate, otherworldly unity propounded by Christianity and other monotheistic religions. Which isn’t to say that he did not desire unity. In the heteronymy of his fragmented self Pessoa, paradoxically, endeavored to construct a small but complete universe of interrelated parts forming a coherent whole. And his literary creations were all attempts to achieve a moment of unity, an instance of perfection, in the midst of the general chaos of existence.

Perhaps because of his nagging awareness of that chaos, Pessoa, notwithstanding his compulsion to doubt everything, believed or wanted to believe in a spiritual dimension. His religious attitude seems to be well expressed in the opening verses of a poem by Álvaro de Campos, whose later work tended to speak directly from his maker’s heart:

 

I don’t know if the stars rule the world
Or if tarot or playing cards
Can reveal anything.
I don’t know if the rolling of dice
Can lead to any conclusion.
But I also don’t know
If anything is attained
By living the way most people do.

5 January 1935

Though he didn’t know what, if anything, is behind or beyond what we are and see, Pessoa was clearly not interested in “living the way most people do.” He spent his entire life searching for the Truth, when he wasn’t inventing it, and this search led him into a whole panoply of esoteric disciplines and occult practices. As far as the stars were concerned, he was an avid astrologer, having cast hundreds of horoscopes for friends, family members, historical and cultural figures, and for himself. More significantly, he read dozens of books and wrote hundreds of pages on mysticism, on hermetic traditions such as the Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, and Freemasonry, and on theosophy, alchemy, numerology, magic, and spiritism.

This interest in the occult combined with Pessoa’s patriotic bent to produce what he called “mystical nationalism,” expressed in his Fifth Empire doctrine and immortalized in Mensagem (Message), a kind of esoteric rewriting of Camões’s The Lusiads. The only book of Pessoa’s Portuguese poetry to see print in his lifetime, in 1934, Mensagem was not a mere exercise in nostalgia for Portugal’s glory days during the Age of Discovery. Those glory days were to be Portugal’s future as well as past destiny, and that future was now, according to the book’s final verse: “The Hour has come!”

When we put all the pieces together—heteronymy, the New Renaissance, the Great Poet, the Fifth Empire, mystical nationalism, and neopaganism, with Master Caeiro as its avatar—we arrive at a bizarre ultimate vision: Portugal as the hub of a cultural empire masterminded by Pessoa and radiating out to the rest of Europe, with neopaganism having replaced Catholicism, Alberto Caeiro having replaced Jesus as a new, different kind of Messiah, and perhaps Álvaro de Campos (who always dreamed of being Caesar) sitting on the emperor’s throne. Pessoa, surely, did not believe in this vision in any kind of literal way. But he did believe in it poetically, metaphorically. He did stake his life and his poetic name on it. For him and in him, in his world of heteronyms, the New Renaissance, the Fifth Empire, and neopaganism existed. And according to the literary history of twentieth-century Portugal, the Great Poet (as great as, if not greater than, Camões) was indeed born in 1888.

The essence of Pessoa’s nationalistic ideal, and the means for its realization, is expressed in a passage from The Book of Disquiet that he published in a magazine, in 1931:

 

I have no social or political sentiments, and yet there is a way in which I’m highly nationalistic. My nation is the Portuguese language. It wouldn’t trouble me at all if Portugal were invaded or occupied, as long as I was left in peace. But I hate with genuine hatred, with the only hatred I feel, not those who write bad Portuguese . . . , but the badly written page itself . . . .

 

The Book of Disquiet was attributed to Bernardo Soares, a fictional bookkeeper whom Pessoa considered a “semi-heteronym,” since his personality was similar, though not identical, to his own. Pessoa, writing under his own name, would never have said that he had no political sentiments; but for him, as for Soares, the well-written page was his passion, and the well-written page in Portuguese was his nation, his nationalism. Pessoa was in fact actively engaged in the society and the politics of his day, but it was through the written word that he took his stands, which included, in the last year of his life, 1935, a direct affront to the Salazar regime, when it passed a law banning secret societies such as Freemasonry.

 

And Pessoa’s private life? His family relations? His loves? Pessoa maintained close ties with his relatives, living as a young man with various aunts (when he wasn’t living in rented rooms), and with his mother and half sister after they returned from South Africa in 1920, following the death of Pessoa’s stepfather. And Pessoa was loyal to his friends, mostly literary sorts, whom he met regularly in Lisbon’s cafés. But with friends as with family, Pessoa remained resolutely private. He was a good conversationalist, witty, and in his way generous, but his inner life and emotions were channeled into his writing. He had one romantic liaison, which was also largely a written matter: a series of love letters exchanged in 1920 and again in 1929. Pessoa, especially in the second phase of the relationship, played some high literary sport, signing one of his letters as Álvaro de Campos, while in others he claimed to be going mad.