Contrary to what is all too often claimed, voters do not wish the men they have elected to be in their image. Voters love greatness and are capable o… - Alain de Benoist

The opposite concept of the Latin religio should be sought in the Latin verb negligere. To be religious is synonymous with responsibility, not neglect. To be responsible is to be free — to possess the concrete means of exercising free action. At the same time, to be free is also to be connected to others by a common spirituality.

There is no need to ”believe” in Jupiter or Wotan... Contemporary paganism does not consist of erecting altars to Apollo or reviving the worship of Odin. Instead it implies looking behind religion and, according to a now classic itinerary, seeking for the “mental equipment” that produced it, the inner world it reflects, and how the world it depicts as apprehended. In short, it consists of viewing the gods as “centers of value” and the beliefs they generate as value systems: gods and beliefs may pass away, but the values remain.

In paganism, on the contrary, good cannot be separated from beauty, and this is normal, because the good is form, the consummate forms of worldly things. Consequently, art cannot be separated from religion. Art is sacred. Not only can the gods be represented, but art is how they can be represented, and insofar as men perpetually assure them of representation, they have a full status of existence. All European spirituality is based on representation as mediation between the visible and the invisible, on representation by means of depicted figures and signs exchanged against a meaning intimately tied to the real, the very guarantee of this incessant and mutual conversion of the sign and meaning. Beauty is the visible sign of what is good, ugliness the visible sign of not only what is deformed or spoiled but bad.