Chabrias, ever preoccupied to offer the gods the worship due them, was disturbed by the progress of sects of this kind among the populace of large cities; he feared for the welfare of our ancient...

A row of trees far away, there on the hillside.But what is it, a row of trees? It’s just trees.Row and the plural trees aren’t things, they’re names.

And he feels hurt when he hears about wars,And commerce, and the ships leavingTheir smoke on the high seas.Because he knows all of this lacks the truthA flower has in its bloomingAnd which moves with...

He possesses the minimum sensibility necessary for his intelligence not to be merely mathematical, the minimum a human being needs so that it can be proven with a thermometer that he’s not dead.

There is a theory that men do not need Paganism because they have endless avenues of societal power available. Why use spells when one can get a bank loan with little trouble? The world already...

Lightly, lightly, very lightly,A wind passes very lightlyAnd goes away, always very lightly.And I don’t know what I thinkAnd I don’t want to know.

Nothing at all reminds us of something else when we pay attention to it.Each thing only reminds us of what it isAnd it’s only what nothing else is.The fact that it’s it separates it from...

One day I said to them, Where is the God you worship? They said he was like Chukwu, that he was in the sky. I asked then, Who is the person that was killed, the...

And since today’s all there is for now, that’s everything.Who knows if I’ll be dead the day after tomorrow?If I’m dead the day after tomorrow, the thunderstorm day after tomorrowWill be another thunderstorm than if...

Other times when I hear the wind blowI feel that just hearing the wind blow makes it worth being born.

The amorous shepherd has lost his staff,And his sheep are straying on the hillside,And he didn’t even play the flute he brought to play because he was thinking so much.No one came to him or...

Tis the witching hour of night,Orbed is the moon and bright,And the stars they glisten, glisten,Seeming with bright eyes to listenFor what they listen?

The man stopped talking and was looking at the sunset.But what does someone who hates and loves want with a sunset?

One day when God fell asleepAnd the Holy Ghost went off flying,He got into a box of miracles and stole three.With the first he made it so that no one would know he had run...

Why?” asked my master Caeiro.

I have heard that Paganism is for broken people, but life cracks everyone in some way. We are a religion of healing people.

But if God is the flowers and the treesAnd the hills and the sun and the moonlight,Then I believe in him,Then I believe in him all the time,And my whole life is an oration and...

I pass and I stay, like the Universe.

The sky is an enormous man.

Live, you say, in the present;Live only in the present.But I don’t want the present, I want reality;I want things that exist, not time that measures them.What is the present?It’s something relative to the past...

man” goes walking with his ideas, false and foreign,And his steps go with the ancient system that makes legs walk.I see him from a distance without any opinion at all.How perfect that he is in...

Nature is also God’s way of communicating with us. Jesus himself used nature to teach us about God. He used birds and flowers, the weather, precious stones…Looking at nature, we can come to understand God...

Christian morality (so called) has all the characters of a reaction; it is, in great part, a protest against Paganism. Its ideal is negative rather than positive; passive rather than action; innocence rather than Nobleness;...

Also at times, on the surface of streams,Water?bubbles formAnd grow and burstAnd have no meaning at allExcept that they’re water?bubblesGrowing and bursting.

He’s taught me everything.He taught me how to look at things.He shows me everything there is in flowers.He shows me how stones are pleasingWhen you hold them in your handAnd look at them for a...

Superior poets say what they really feel. Mediocre poets say what they decide to feel. Inferior poets say what they think they should feel.

When I lay down on my deathbed, I want to know that I have done all I could to be a first rate human, not a third rate pawn of the gods.

Let’s be simple and calm,Like brooks and trees,And God will love us by makingBeautiful things like the trees and brooks for us,And give us greenness in his spring,And a river for us to go to...

Things don’t have significance: they only have existence.Things are the only hidden meaning of things.

The nature of Paganism is that of exploring, evolution, and opening up.

Everything’s different from us. That’s why everything exists.

Now I sense the perfume of flowers like seeing a new thing.I know they smell just as well as I know I existed.They’re things known from the outside.But now I know with my breathing from...

When I’m depressed, I read Caeiro — he’s my fresh air. I become very calm, content, faithful — yes, I find faith in God, and in the soul’s transcendent living smallness, after reading the poems...

And if the earth Gods wreak vengeance on the sinless and the sinful alike, then this further destruction cannot be punishment for sins, but is in the way of all nature.

If they want me to have mysticism, okay, I’ve got it.I’m a mystic, but only in my body,My soul is simple and doesn’t think.

That lady has a piano.It’s nice, but it’s not the running of riversOr the murmuring trees make ..Who needs a piano?It’s better to have earsAnd love Nature.

the Great Vaccination — the vaccination against the stupidity of the intelligentsia.

Mythology didn’t cease to exist and be useful to Pagans when we gained digital watch technology.

I’m in no hurry: the sun and the moon aren’t, either.Nobody goes faster than the legs they have.If where I want to go is far away, I’m not there in an instant.(6/20/1919)

There’s enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything.

Magic is that paganistic reversal of the process of religion, in which man, instead of letting himself be used by God for the divine purpose, drags down his god to the level of a tool,...

If science wants to be truthful,What science is more truthful than the science of things without science?I close my eyes and the hard earth where I’m lyingHas a reality so real even my back feels...

Even so, I’m somebody.I’m the Discoverer of Nature.I’m the Argonaut of true sensations.I bring a new Universe to the UniverseBecause I bring the Universe to itself.

It’s the poet we love in Caeiro, not the philosopher. What we really get from these poems is a childlike sense of life, with all the direct materiality of the child’s mind, and all the...

On the conversion of the European tribes to Christianity the ancient pagan worship was by no means incontinently abandoned. So wholesale had been the conversion of many peoples, whose chiefs or rulers had accepted the...

Praise be to God I’m not good,And have the natural egotism of flowersAnd rivers following their bedPreoccupied without knowing itOnly with blooming and flowing.This is the only mission in the World,This—to exist clearly,And to know...

And sometimes if I wantTo imagine I’m a lamb(Or a whole flockSpreading out all over the hillsideSo I can be a lot of happy things at the same time),It’s only because I feel what I...

and the idea of nothingness — the most terrifying of all ideas, when thought of with feeling — has, in my dear master’s work and in my memories of him, something as high and luminous...

Having spent all of my decision-making years as a Pagan of one stripe or another, I have long found it condescending at best to assume one cannot worship the old gods or believe in magick...

If I could take a bite of the whole worldAnd feel it on my palateI’d be more happy for a minute or so…But I don’t always want to be happy.Sometimes you have to beUnhappy to...