On Being a Pagan

On Being a Pagan
by
Alain de Benoist

Preface by Stephen Edred Flowers

In this 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 Iliad, 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 (First Books, 2004)


The work consists of 26 chapters.

    * Part One: Never Dying, Always Reviving
    * Part Two: Time and History
    * Part Three: The Sacred
    * Part Four: False Contrasts
    * Part Five: Dualism: For and Against
    * Part Six: God: Creator and Father
    * Part Seven: Human Nature and Freedom
    * Part Eight: Fall or Rise?
    * Part Nine: The Primacy of Mankind
    * Part Ten: Beneath and Beyond Good and Evil
    * Part Eleven: The Shapes of History
    * Part Twelve: Messianism and Utopianism
    * Part Thirteen: Space and Time
    * Part Fourteen: Iconoclasm and Beauty
    * Part Fifteen: The Universal and the Particular
    * Part Sixteen: Monotheism and Polytheism
    * Part Seventeen: Tolerance and Intolerance
    * Part Eighteen: Universalism and Particularism
    * Part Nineteen: Politics and Anti-Politics
    * Part Twenty: Man's Place in Nature
    * Part Twenty-One: Sex and the Body
    * Part Twenty-Two: Early Christianity and Late Paganism
    * Part Twenty-Three: Divine Immanence, Human Transcendence
    * Part Twenty-Four: The Coincidence of Opposites and the Problem of Evil
    * Part Twenty-Five: Tolerance and Inner Freedom
    * Part Twenty-Six: The Return of the Gods


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 50 books and 3000 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 Académie Française for his book Vu de droite: Anthologie critique des idées contemporaines (Copernic, 1977). He has also been a regular contributor to the radio program France-Culture and has appeared in numerous television debates.