Resacralization of the world versus materialism; folk/traditional culture versus mass culture; natural social order versus an artificial hierarchy based on wealth; the tribal community versus the nation-state; stewardship of the earth versus the “maximization of resources”; a harmonious relationship between men and women versus the “war between the sexes”; handicrafts and artisanship versus industrial mass-production.
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
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 (Copernic, 1977). He has also been a regular contributor to the radio program France-Culture and has appeared in numerous television debates.