On Being a Pagan

Edited by Greg Johnson
Translated by Jon Graham
Preface by Stephen Edred Flowers
Atlanta: Ultra, 2004
240 pages
paperback: $20

“In this small masterpiece, the great French thinker Alain de Benoist claims that only the pagan deities of ancient Europe offer a spiritual recourse to the present religious malaise. The guilt, the fear, the narrow petty-bourgeois obsession with well-being, and the self-loathing love of the Other that has left Western man defenseless before the destructive behaviors of our nihilist age derive from the alien belief system that Christianity introduced to the West. They are not part of the pagan spirit that lives still in the Rig Veda, the Illiad, or the Edda. Benoist helps us rediscover these ancient wellsprings and the fonts from which future greatnesses may again flow. But let the reader be warned, his On Being A Pagan proposes no folkloric or New Age ‘return to the past,’ but rather a Nietzschean recurrence in which the future bears all the promise of our distant origins—and thus of another great beginning.” —Michael O’Meara, author of New Culture, New Right

CONTENTS

Preface by Stephen Edred Flowers

1. Never Dying, Always Reviving
2. Time and History
3. The Sacred
4. False Contrasts
5. Dualism: For and Against
6. God: Creator and Father
7. Human Nature and Freedom
8. Fall or Rise?
9. The Primacy of Mankind
10. Beneath and Beyond Good and Evil
11. The Shapes of History
12. Messianism and Utopianism
13. Space and Time
14. Iconoclasm and Beauty
15. The Universal and the Particular
16. Monotheism and Polytheism
17. Tolerance and Intolerance
18. Universalism and Particularism
19. Politics and Anti-Politics
20. Man’s Place in Nature
21. Sex and the Body
22. Early Christianity and Late Paganism
23. Divine Immanence, Human Transcendence
24. The Coincidence of Opposites and the Problem of Evil
25. Tolerance and Inner Freedom
26. The Return of the Gods

Index

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alain de Benoist was born on 11 December 1943. He is married and has two children. He has studied law, philosophy, sociology, and the history of religions in Paris, France. A journalist and a writer, he is the editor of two journals: Nouvelle Ecole (since 1968) and Krisis (since 1988). His main fields of interest include the history of ideas, political philosophy, classical philosophy, and archaeology. He has published more than fifty books and three thousand articles. He is also a regular contributor to many French and European publications, journals, and papers (including Valeurs Actuelles, Le Spectacle du Monde, Magazine-Hebdo, Le Figaro-Magazine, in France, Telos in the United States, and Junge Freiheit in Germany). In 1978 he received the Grand Prix de l’Essai from the Academie Francaise for his book Vu de droite: Anthologie critique des idees contemporaines (Paris: Copernic, 1977). He has also been a regular contributor to the radio program France-Culture and has appeared in numerous television debates.