Classical education is associated in some quarters with an ideologically conservative outlook. This has been highlighted by an article that has recently been doing the rounds on social media. It is probably inevitable that some of our classical colleagues will dress to the right. We might mention in this regard the Classical Christian Education movement, as well as institutions such as Ralston College and the Paideia Institute. Here at Douglas Academy, we believe that this approach is profoundly mistaken. We have a different perspective on moulding young minds. We call it Classical Pagan Education. Our mission is to uphold the great tradition of Paganism: the source of the luminous eternal truths that are the foundation of Western culture.

Like Classical Christian Education, we emphasise proficiency in Latin and Greek — even though, as with Dwight Shrute, our students’ language skills are “pre-industrial and mostly religious”. The classical languages are spoken live in the classroom, as well as in the dining hall, on the sports field and behind the bike sheds. Only by thorough mastery of these tongues can we engage at close quarters with the perennial wisdom of the texts of Graeco-Roman civilisation. The curriculum is naturally centred on the Great Books (and I’m not talking about Critical Ancient World Studies!). The focus is on the enduring values and solid morality that are to be found in the literary masterpieces of the ancient world. Our students engage in close, rigorous textual study of such works as the Iliad for insight into the barbarity of war; the Homeric Hymn to Demeter for patriarchal violence; Aeschylus and Tacitus for authoritarian government; Thucydides and Caesar’s Gallic War for the evils of colonialism; and Juvenal for the iniquities of misogyny and anti-immigrant politics. We naturally also learn about the gods from the Theogony; and the Metamorphoses was recently added to the curriculum when we acquired a free crate of several thousand unsold copies of Llewellyn Morgan’s Very Short Introduction to Ovid.

But we do not teach only ancient texts. The Pagan classics are the source — the fons et origo, as our students would say — of a centuries-long tradition of reception and interpretation by later, post-classical Pagan writers and scholars. The field of philosophy offers an especially abundant harvest in this regard. Our students study not only Plato, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus and Emperor Julian the Based — but also the philosophy of the Byzantine Pagans Michael Psellus and George Gemistus Plethon, the Georgian Pagans John Fransham and Thomas Taylor, and the Victorian Pagan G. Lowes Dickinson. The limpid wisdom of these thinkers provides a valuable corrective to the moral and rational confusion that our students encounter from amoral postmodern relativist sources like Fox News, the Spectator, the National Review and Liz Truss’s book.

If philosophy feeds the speculative intellect, history feeds the practical intellect. Our history curriculum is based in the first instance on the great ancient historians — Herodotus, Thucydides, Homer and Livy — and what they can tell us about the shifting conceptions of what history is; the political uses of in-group narratives; and the inescapable tension between the objective and the subjective. We believe that history should not only be read and written about but also debated viva voce, in the great tradition of classical oratory and rhetoric. Last year saw us host a Platonic symposium on Roman history which involved a debate between Mary Beard, an expert on Roman history, and Professor Doctor Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an expert on financial trading. After an opulent dinner and a truly Demosthenic exchange of views, our insurance company was fortunately able to cover most of the damage to our furniture, windows and Attic red figure tableware.

As to later periods of history, we have a special focus on the Renaissance, which our students learn about through the contemporary Pagan writings of Michael Marullus and the later Pagan cultural histories of John Addington Symonds. They also carefully study the Pagan socialist theory of history put forward by Edward Carpenter, as well as Kenneth Grahame’s critical Pagan reflections on industrial capitalism. The reading list is further enriched by Algernon Swinburne’s Pagan poems extolling democracy and denouncing tyranny. Our GCSE class’s study of Swinburne culminated last year with a live performance of the ‘Litany of Nations’, which was chanted to the goddess Isis in the college chapel under the direction of the Ukrainian and Hungarian students.

Our passion for classical philology does not mean that we neglect modern languages. In French classes, the set texts include the Pagan poetry of Alfred de Vigny, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Gérard de Nerval, Théophile Gautier, Leconte de Lisle and Théodore de Banville. In German classes — as befits an altogether more serious language — our Schüler read the majestic Teutonic scholarship of Albrecht Dieterich and Otto Kern on the ancient esoteric mystery cults, the better to appreciate the roots of their own faith. They also study the Pagan legends in Wagner’s libretti in order to gain an understanding of a related polytheistic tradition. An end-of-term karaoke party last year culminated in a particularly moving rendition of Brünnhilde’s immolation by the Headmaster.

In music classes, our students learn to sing the Orphic Hymns to the gods while playing the lyre in the ancient style, just like the Renaissance philo-Pagan Marsilio Ficino. From time to time, there are more ambitious choral renditions of the Odes of Pindar and Catullus 31 and 62. Next year, we are hoping to stage live performances by Armand d’Angour (if we can afford his fees) and Bettina Joy de Guzman (if her agent starts answering our emails). Occasionally, if they have behaved particularly badly, one of our sixth-formers is nominated to improvise a performance of primary epic in front of the school, extolling the excellence (arete) of Douglas Academy and the glory (kleos) of its Headmaster. Who killed Homer, you ask? Not us, that’s for sure!

In English literature, our students read, with both pleasure and piety, the works of our great modern Pagan novelists and poets. On their bookshelves can be seen George Meredith on Mother Earth, Oscar Wilde on Pan, Walter Pater on the cults of the Roman Empire, and Robert Graves on the Great Goddess. Mention of Wilde and Pater — and indeed Carpenter, Symonds, Grahame and Swinburne — raises a sensitive issue. We make no apologies for promoting Pagan same-sex eroticism as an integral part of the timeless morality of the classical tradition. But we are careful to teach our students that the gods love heterosexuals just as much as normal people, and that they must never treat them with unjust discrimination.

In maths, our students are taught Pythagoras’ theorem of the triangle alongside Pythagorean theorems on the spiritual qualities of music and the fate of the human soul. The science curriculum is entirely modern, save for astrology classes, where the key texts of the discipline from Manilius and Firmicus Maternus onwards are studied. We teach both theoretical and applied astrology. In a gesture of interfaith openness to our Christian brothers and sisters, last year’s A Level class presented a reconstruction of the magical invocation of Venus and Jupiter that Tommaso Campanella carried out for Pope Urban VIII (who was memorably played on this occasion by our Visitor, Lord Stephen Fry). I understand that the head of department has since been recommended for a papal knighthood.

This brings us on to an important question. It is sometimes asked whether we are religiously exclusive. It is true that as an institution we teach and practice Pagan polytheism, as we feel that we would be failing in our mission to pass on the classical tradition to the next generation if we compromised on this essential point. But we also accept monotheists, as long as they are able to subscribe in good conscience to Arthur Rimbaud’s I Believe in One Goddess and its ringing affirmation of faith in the great goddess Aphrodite-Cybele-Astarte. Aspiring students who believe in patriarchal monotheism may be admitted at the special discretion of the Bursar (although they must hand in all copies of religious texts written in Koiné or Church Latin, lest their literary style be corrupted). All American applicants must submit a Diversity Statement explaining how they hold space for listening and learning from the lived experience of Christian bodies.

In any event, we insist on compulsory chapel attendance both for the daily morning libations to the twelve Olympian gods and for the weekly enactments of Dion Fortune’s Rite of Isis and Rite of Pan. While these practices are mandatory, the school authorities do not require students to adhere to a single orthodoxy in their belief. Indeed, just as Catholic seminary students may choose their own spiritual directors, our students are free to choose theirs from adherents of the different philosophical schools or haireseis that are represented among the teaching staff: Platonists, Peripatetics, Stoics, even Epicureans and Sceptics. We expect parents to support the Pagan ethos of the school in their home life, if only in a broad sense. As one parent rather beautifully put it: “I’m not a regular temple-goer — I only really go on the Anthesteria — but I do try to live my life in a Dionysian way, and I have passed those values on to my children.”

The school naturally enforces the most strict and demanding standards of discipline. A group of our drama students unfortunately became carried away after a particularly affecting school performance of Antigone last year, in which Dr Joel Christensen made a guest appearance as Creon, and decided to re-enact the pompe du bouc by stealing a goat from the nearby Peter Singer Memorial Farm and sacrificing it at the after-show party. The inspectors from the Department of Agriculture proved more difficult to fool than Ofsted, and so the ringleader underwent a severe restorative accountability process which was only brought to an end when his parents agreed to pay a liturgy to enable the construction of a new Mithraeum for members of the CCF. A more serious outbreak of disorder occurred a few months ago in response to events in the Middle East. I refer, of course, to the ongoing occupation of the VD Hanson Lavatory Block by a group of passionate young activists who were protesting against the sacking of Jerusalem by Vespasian and the settlercolonialapartheidstate of Aelia Capitolina. Romanes eunt domus!

Finally, there are extramural visits to sites of significance for our mission: not only the great monuments of ancient Greece and Rome, but also post-classical Pagan architecture such as the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini, where a party of students was able to venerate the image of Minerva just after attending Mass, and St Lawrence’s Church, West Wycombe, which was built on the model of the Temple of the Sun at Palmyra. This erection was the subject of a special trip on our last half-holiday for members of the fifth form’s Naughty Hellfire Club.

At Douglas Academy — which, by the way, is named after one of the great moral and spiritual giants of our time — we believe that we are doing more than simply preparing students to pass exams. We are sending them out into the world as products of an immemorial Pagan classical tradition. With a consistent 3.8 stars on Trustpilot, it is no wonder that we are receiving applications from across the civilised world and parts of France. Our campus, which is located 3 miles north of Cambridge, is currently expanding, and our grant applications for a new amphitheatre are shortly going to be considered by the Koch Brothers Foundation, the Dixie Tobacco and Toxic Waste Corporation, and the Sportula. We cannot rest on our laurels; but we may take some satisfaction in what we have achieved. As the second bottle of Falernian wine goes around the staff table and our students break into a spontaneous chant of Aleister Crowley’s Hymn to Pan to celebrate Pride month, we can take a moment to congratulate ourselves that we are preserving the very best of Western Civilisation.