/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18829634]

>What are some pagan poets from the XXth century? Any neo-pagan writers worth a reading today?

Here's Ricardo Reis (one of the poets invented by Fernando Pessoa):

The god Pan isn’t dead.
In each field that shows
Ceres’ naked breasts
To the smiles of Apollo,
Sooner or later
You will see the god Pan,
Immortal, appear.

The Christians’ sad god
Killed none of the others.
Christ is one more god,
One that was perhaps missing.

Pan still offers
The sounds of his flute
To the ears of Ceres
Reclining in the fields.

The gods are the same,
Always clear and calm,
Full of eternity
And disdain for us,
Bringing day and night
And golden harvests
Not in order to give us
Day and night and wheat
But for some other, divine
And incidental purpose.

12 June 1914

(...)

Not you, Christ, do I hate or reject.
In you as in the other, older gods I believe.
But for me you are not more
Or less than they, just younger.
I do hate and calmly abhor those who want
To place you above the other gods, your equals.
I want you where you are, not higher
Nor lower than they—just yourself.
A sad god, perhaps necessary since there was none
Like you, now yet another in the Pantheon
And our faith, no higher or purer,
Since for all things there were gods, except you.
Take care, exclusive idolater of Christ, for life
Is multiple, all days differ from all others,
And only if we’re multiple like them
Will we be with the truth, and alone.

9 October 1916

(...)

(...)

I was born believing in the gods, I was raised in that belief,
and in that belief I will die, loving them. I know what the
pagan feeling is. My only regret is that I can’t really explain
how utterly and inscrutably different it is from all other
feelings. Even our calm and the vague stoicism some of us
have bear no resemblance to the calm of antiquity and the
stoicism of the Greeks.
(from Ricardo Reis’s unfinished preface to his Odes)

[Anonymous No.18829648]

Why is Christianity the only thing all those "neo-pagans" talk about?