Introducing the magical world of the enigmatic Paulo Coelho

Who is Paulo Coelho?

While it’s not essential to know the background of Paulo’s life, it will assist in a greater appreciation of the influences of his upbringing and early life on his work before the publication of The Alchemist in English in 1993 - which was a pivotal and game changing moment for him at the age of 46 . The attention that book attracted catapulted him to global celebrity author status in a very short period of time. 

Everything that happened in his life up to that point had an impact on his writing. He was born Paulo Coelho de Souza on August 24th in 1947, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His father was an engineer, and wanted him to be one, too; his mother was a devout Catholic, and Paulo was sent to a Jesuit school. He hoped to be a writer from a very early age, and as a teenager he started hanging out all day at the beach with a troublemaking crowd, the poet among toughs. His parents, believing he’d gone crazy, sent him to a mental institution, where, in the course of three stays (he ran away twice), he was given electroshock therapy. He was released at the age of 20.

Coelho has remarked, "It wasn't that my parents wanted to hurt me, but they didn't know what to do. They did not do that to destroy me, they did that to save me.’  At his parents' wishes, Coelho enrolled in law school and abandoned his dream of becoming a writer. One year later, he dropped out and lived life as a hippie, travelling through South America, North Africa, Mexico, and Europe and started using drugs in the 1960s and started a short-lived underground magazine called 2001, which covered subjects like extraterrestrials and Carl Jung. 

Upon his return to Brazil, he worked as a successful songwriter, composing lyrics for Elis Regina, Rita Lee, and Brazilian icon Raul Seixas. In 1974, by his account, he was arrested for subversive activities and tortured by the ruling military government, who had taken power ten years earlier and viewed his lyrics as left-wing and dangerous.  He was released after a short time and worked as an actor, journalist and theatre director before pursuing his writing career.

Paulo married his fourth wife, artist Christina Oiticica in 1980. Together they had previously spent half the year in Rio de Janeiro and the other half in a French country house in the Pyrenees, but now the couple reside permanently in Geneva, Switzerland where they live today.

In 1986 Paulo walked the 500-plus mile Road of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. On the path, he had a spiritual awakening, which he described autobiographically in The Pilgrimage. In an early interview, Coelho stated, ‘I was very happy with the things I was doing. I was doing something that gave me food and water – to use the metaphor in The Alchemist, I was working, I had a person whom I loved, I had money, but I was not fulfilling my dream. My dream was, and still is, to be a writer.’ After the pilgrimage he left his lucrative career as a songwriter and to pursue writing full-time.

Publications

Since the publication of The Alchemist, Paulo has published a further 29 books (28 in English). For a full list of book titles see here.

Awards

He has received at least 33 international awards and nominations.

Interviews

Paulo has been interviewed by hundreds of journalists and has appeared in the world's media in countless languages, including a wonderful short series of interviews with Oprah Winfrey.

Foundation

Paulo and his wife Christina also run a foundation that holds artefacts from Paulo’s works and Christina’s art work.

Charity Work

Paulo has been engaged in numerous charity projects to provide new opportunities for the young and the elderly - especially in Brazil. He is also a United Nations messenger of peace.

Blog

Paulo’s blog has been around for years and is a fount of pearls of wisdom, insights from the man himself and a doorway into his mind and life.

BONUS MATERIAL - Paulo’s excursion into magic.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that Paulo was born and raised in Brazil - a land where religion and magic combine to infuse the culture in powerful ways. Paulo was drawn into the world of the occult very early on which included a growing interest in Alchemy - driven he says by the lure of the elixir of life and eternal youth. The influence of magic and a fascination with the human condition and psyche has infused all his books, giving them a unique character.

It was while he was researching a story for his ‘2001’ magazine he came across the writings of the English occultist Aleister Crowley, and then joined the Alternative Society, a sect that advocated drugs and practised black magic, and sought to embody Crowley’s principle ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.’ He met the record producer and singer Raul Seixas and began writing songs for him. He also initiated Seixas into the Alternative Society and introduced him to drugs.

In a few months, Seixas was a star, Coelho was relatively rich, and together they were setting aside money to form a Brazilian version of the utopia that Crowley had established in Cefalù in the nineteen-twenties. ‘I wrote the song  ‘Gitâ,’ and all of a sudden the whole of Brazil was singing it, Coelho has said. It was about the moment in the Bhagavad Gita when Arjuna asks Krishna, ‘Who are you?’ 

Roberto Menescal, a well-known bossa-nova musician, who, while working in A. & R. at Polygram, produced Coelho and Seixas’s collaborations, remembers that they dressed in combat boots and military garb, kept their hair long, and always wore dark glasses. When their rock-and-roll anthem ‘Sociedade Alternativa’ came out and kids all over Brazil were singing it—’Do what you want / because it’s the whole / of the law, of the law /. . . Long live the Alternative Society / Long live the Alternative Society / The number 666 is Aleister Crowley’—the military dictatorship in Brazil decided it was subversive and arrested Coelho. He was released, and immediately kidnapped by paramilitaries, who accused him of being a guerrilla fighter; they held him for a week and tortured him by applying electric shocks to his genitals. After that, Coelho gave up religion for several years.

‘I don’t regret my experience with black magic, and, of course, it gives me a kind of aura—it’s good for my biography,’ Paulo is on record as saying. But the only book he has ever destroyed was one about his two years in the sect. Christina, his fourth and last wife, asked him not to publish it. 

Coelho held various jobs in the music industry, wrote television bio-pics and soap operas, and travelled. In 1982, he and Christina went to Europe. They bought a Mercedes for a thousand dollars from the Indian Embassy in Yugoslavia, and drove it to Germany. They went to Dachau, and Coelho, terrified by what he saw there, had a vision of a man standing before him. Two months later, in Amsterdam, he saw what he took to be the same person, and approached him. This man, a Jewish businessman whom Coelho refers to in his writing (The Pilgrimage and The Valkyries)  as ‘J.’ and ‘my Master,’ inducted him into something he calls the Order of R.A.M. (Regnus Agnus Mundi), a society for the study of symbols. R.A.M. is surpassingly obscure—discounting the allusions Coelho makes to it—and has a curiously ungrammatical Latin name, though he says that it is part of the Catholic Church, and that it is more than five hundred years old. (Efforts to verify its existence have proved futile.) Not long after the encounter in Amsterdam, Coelho met J. in Norway, where, in a ritual beside three Viking ships, J. gave him a snake-shaped silver ring, which he wears to this day, on the fourth finger of his left hand.

Meeting J. marked Coelho’s return to Catholicism, but not to the Jesuit variety of his youth—rather, to a syncretic, self-invented form, with plenty of room for hocus-pocus.

(This bonus material Includes extracts from an article by Dana Goodyear in The New Yorker 2007.)