ASTRAL INVESTIGATIONS
I donât know if the stars rule the world
Or if tarot or playing cards
Can reveal anything.
I donât know if the rolling of dice
Can lead to any conclusion.
But I also donât know
If anything is attained
By living the way most people do.
Ălvaro de Campos
(from a poem dated January 5, 1935)
On one of his frequent nights of insomnia the âsemiheteronymâ Bernardo Soares, repeating a ritual he no doubt learned from his inventor, finally gives up trying to sleep and walks over to the window, from where (as told in The Book of Disquiet, text 465) he gazes âat the countless stars, nothing, nothingness, but countless stars. . . .â We all occasionally thinkâwe think and we forgetâabout the smallness of our human life next to the vast, indifferent, and inscrutable stars, but Pessoa was haunted, if not possessed, by that consideration. Unable to accept the nothingness that his reason so often announced, he spent many hours pondering the truths that might lie hidden in and beyond the starsâ luminous hieroglyphics.
Pessoa owned dozens of books about spiritual matters ranging from ancient religions and astrology to the Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, and Freemasonry, and he wrote scores of pages on these same topics. He also cast several hundred astrological charts for historical figures (including Louis XIV, Napoleon, and Mussolini), literary figures (Milton, Goethe, Dickens, Baudelaire), his friends, himself, and his heteronyms. Pessoa, when writing on things spiritual and metaphysical, like Pessoa when writing on most things, couldnât avoid a degree of irony, trying out all positions to show that theyâre all correct, or all wrong, or all relative, but there was a definite evolution in his spiritual interests and attitudes. By tracing it we may not arrive at what Pessoa âreallyâ believed, but we will find out which, among the spiritual paths he explored, he at least respected, and which he rejected.
By his early twenties, Pessoa had become versed not only in Greek and German philosophy but also in orthodox and heterodox Christian theology, Judaism, and Eastern religions. Though not a believer of a specific creed, he recognized in himself a spiritual tendency, and he cultivated it. He was at the same time, and in seeming contradiction, an inveterate skeptic, having been deeply impressed as a teenager by the writings of Ernst Haeckel, a German biologist whose immensely popular Riddle of the Universe (1899) propounded a strictly materialist view of the world. Despite his doubts, Pessoa never abandoned his spiritual quest, presumably for the reason set forth in the Ălvaro de Campos poem cited in the epigraph.
In 1914 Pessoa, who was living with his aunt Anica and her daughter, Maria, organized sĂ©ances in which they all participated, and at the end of that year he began to study manuals of astrology and to cast his first charts. In 1915â16 he translated and published six books by Helena Blavatsky, Annie Besant, and other Theosophists, whose ideas prompted an âintellectual crisis,â according to the draft of a letter to MĂĄrio de SĂĄ-Carneiro. Though impressed by the concept of âhigher, superhuman knowledge that pervades Theosophical writings,â Pessoa could not reconcile Theosophyâs âultra-Christianâ character with his own âfundamental paganism.â He was also nonplussed by the new movementâs humanitarian aspirations. These reservations became two of the main reasons for the unqualified contempt of Theosophy expressed by Raphael Baldaya, Pessoaâs astrologer heteronym, in an unfinished essay titled âPrinciples of Esoteric Metaphysics.â While respecting the Hermetic traditions promoted by the Rosicrucians and other secret societies, Baldaya accused Theosophy of being âmerely a democratization of Hermeticism or, if you like, its Christianization.â
Pessoaâs own experiences as a mediumâdescribed in the letter to his aunt Anica included in this section and documented by several hundred sheets of automatic writing left among his papersâwere similarly discredited in an essay he titled âA Case of Mediumship.â Analyzing his âcaseâ from a clinical point of view, Pessoa attributes its origins to âhysterical neurastheniaâ and hypnotic suggestion, and narrates the mediumistic phenomena he experiencedâincluding his âso-called etheric visionâ and his âpretended communication with diverse spiritsâ through automatic writingâlike so many symptoms of a disease. His automatically received communications are found to be the product of his excited imagination (the case, weâre told, of the Margaret Mansel story in the group of automatic writings published here) or of mere delusion brought on by mental fatigue. One of the essayâs stern conclusions is that âspiritism should be prohibited by law,â or at least limited to a sect, as in ancient times.
âA Case of Mediumship,â like the Baldaya essay, was written before 1920, and while itâs true that Pessoa was his own best devilâs advocate, his interest in Theosophy and spiritism had definitely waned if not withered. He continued to pr...