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W. B. Yeats's "A Vision": Explications and Contexts
W. B. Yeats
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W. B. Yeats's "A Vision": Explications and Contexts, edited by Neil Mann, Matthew Gibson, and Claire Nally (Clemson, SC: Clemson
University Digital Press, 2012), xx, 374 pp. Paper. ISBN 978-0-9835339-2-4
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W. B. Yeats in New York City, 1920, posing with one of three volumes of The Works of
William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical, edited by Edwin Ellis and W. B. Yeats (1893).
Source: George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress.
Table of Contents
List of Figures and Diagrams .......................................................................................vi
Preface .........................................................................................................................vii
Contributors ............................................................................................................. xiii
Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................xv
Abbreviations .............................................................................................................xvi
Neil Mann • “Everywhere that antinomy of the One and the Many”: The
Foundations of A Vision ......................................................................................... 1
Rory Ryan • The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known: An Analysis
of the Four Faculties in Yeats’s System ................................................................... 22
Graham A. Dampier • “The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work”: A Discussion of
the Principles and A Vision’s Account of Death ..................................................... 55
Charles Armstrong • Ancient Frames: Classical Philosophy in Yeats’s A Vision ........ 90
Matthew Gibson • “Timeless and Spaceless”?—Yeats’s Search for Models of Interpretation in Post-Enlightenment Philosophy, Contemporary Anthropology and
Art History, and the Effects of These Theories on “The Completed Symbol,”
“The Soul in Judgment” and “The Great Year of the Ancients” ............................ 103
Matthew DeForrest • W. B. Yeats’s A Vision: “Dove or Swan” ............................... 136
Neil Mann • The Thirteenth Cone ........................................................................... 159
Colin McDowell • Shifting Sands: Dancing the Horoscope in the Vision Papers ..... 194
Wayne K. Chapman • “Metaphors for Poetry”: Concerning the Poems of
A Vision and Certain Plays for Dancers .............................................................. 217
Catherine E. Paul • A Vision of Ezra Pound ........................................................... 252
Margaret Mills Harper • Reflected Voices, Double Visions .................................. 269
Janis Haswell • Yeats’s Vision and the Feminine ...................................................... 291
C. Nicholas Serra • Esotericism and Escape ........................................................... 307
Claire V. Nally • The Political Occult: Revisiting Fascism, Yeats and A Vision ......... 329
Glossary .................................................................................................................... 344
Index ......................................................................................................................... 359
v
Preface
T
he essays collected in W. B. Yeats’s “A Vision”: Explications and Contexts offer exegesis and interpretation of this notoriously knotty and peculiar work, as well as
examining several of the contexts implicated in A Vision. However, the collection
as a whole is also an effort of advocacy that seeks to demonstrate and champion A Vision’s
interest and value. It is, perhaps surprisingly, the first ever volume of essays devoted to A
Vision. As such, it could be regarded as part of a third stage in approaches and attitudes to
this curious and underanalyzed part of the Yeatsian canon.
The first stage, which prevailed until the sixties, was characterized largely by incomprehension of the work itself and disdain for Yeats’s occult interests more generally, most
famously summarized in Auden’s comment “how embarrassing,” and his observation that
“though there is scarcely a lyric written to-day in which the influence of his style and
rhythm is not detectable, one whole side of Yeats, the side summed up in the Vision, has
left virtually no trace.”1 The comment may have had some justice with regard to creative
influence but says nothing of intrinsic worth.2 Those for whom Yeats’s thought was of
interest tended to show a more open-minded acceptance that this “side” was part of the
poet’s own particular make-up and had been important to his inspiration, and individual
critics wrote with varying degrees of personal sympathy. For many, it was a prominent
landmark in the terrain that had to be taken into account, with obvious links to some
of the most powerful lyrics that Yeats ever wrote, but one to be dealt with as cursorily as
possible. For others, including Richard Ellmann, Virginia Moore, Thomas Henn, F. A.
C. Wilson, A. G. Stock, and Morton Irving Seiden, A Vision had its place as a source and
epitome of Yeats’s creative ideas in the latter part of Yeats’s life. Increasingly, also, there
were others who were more in sympathy with that whole “side summed up in the Vision” and addressed such interests directly, including Birgit Bjersby, Hazard Adams, Helen
Vendler, H. R. Bachchan, T. R. Whitaker, Northrop Frye, Shankar Mokashi-Punekar,
Kathleen Raine, Harold Bloom, and A. Norman Jeffares, even if some of them disagreed
with Yeats’s particular approach
Most of these latter critics were writing during the sixties at a period that saw wider
interest, both general and scholarly, in unconventional spirituality and movements such
as Theosophy or the Golden Dawn, so that Yeats’s concerns were no longer self-evidently
ridiculous. This provided the context for the second stage, which centers around George
Mills Harper. In 1974, when Harper published his biographical work, Yeats’s Golden
Dawn,3 he was also editing both a volume of essays on Yeats and occultism and a critical
edition of A Vision A, with Walter Kelly Hood. Yeats and the Occult (1975) showed both
a wider engagement with Yeats’s otherworldly thinking than was dreamed of in Auden’s
philosophy and also the greater willingness of a new generation of scholars to address
Yeats’s occult interests.4 A Critical Edition of Yeats’s “A Vision” (1925) (1978), a facsimile of
A Vision A with introduction and notes, was a triumph of persuading publishers to listen
to scholars and also a major landmark in the study of A Vision, providing for the first time
an annotated commentary and index to the work. Up until this time readers had tended
to rely on the critics who had had access to one of the 600 copies printed, though they
could only give a partial picture. It also reminded readers that the two editions of A Vision
were in many respects two separate versions and raised further questions about the work’s
place in Yeats’s oeuvre.
vii
When Thomas Parkinson reviewed Harper and Hood’s critical edition, he noted that:
In the criticism of Yeats, a schism has existed from the very start between the
secular critics who took him primarily and sometimes only as a poet and those
who saw him as the voice of the perennial philosophy, creating an apparent
battle ground where no war was necessary. I hope that it may have special force
if one so firmly associated with the “secular” critics as I have been concedes that
recent work on Yeats has forced upon him a more comprehensive set of concerns.…My expectation is that continued work on the manuscripts associated
with “this extraordinary book” will subtilize and clarify the received sense of
Yeats as poet. (YA1 205).
The introduction to A Critical Edition of Yeats’s “A Vision” (1925) also gave a full chronology and a form of census of the automatic script, while the notes quoted some of the script
and early attempts at synthesis. If the wider availability of A Vision A made critics more
aware of the development of Yeats’s ideas over time, the snippets of the script included
in the notes indicated that the unrefined ore might provide further valuable clues about
the ideas of A Vision and deepen understanding. George Mills Harper went on to offer
progressively more direct versions of the script in The Making of Yeats’s “A Vision” (1987)
and Yeats’s “Vision” Papers (1992). The Making of Yeats’s “A Vision” traced the process of
the automatic collaboration between W. B. and George Yeats, and Harper focused on
the biographical element, the material that fed directly into the plays, such as The Only
Jealousy of Emer, and the drafting of A Vision A. During the eighties, the automatic script
and preparatory papers were transcribed in a more thoroughgoing manner through a
series of doctoral theses at Florida State University under George Mills Harper’s supervision,5 and their publication in the three volumes of Yeats’s “Vision” Papers opened a whole
new approach to the origins, development and meaning of A Vision, as well as revealing
new aspects of the Yeatses’ lives.6 A fourth volume of the Vision Papers by Harper and his
daughter, Margaret, appeared in 2001, publishing the early drafts.
During this second period there were also two books devoted to A Vision: one, “Stylistic Arrangements”: A Study of William Butler Yeats’s “A Vision” (1987) by Barbara L. Croft,
was the first doctoral thesis on A Vision to be published,7 while the other, The Book of
Yeats’s Vision: Romantic Modernism and Antithetical Tradition (1995) by Hazard Adams,
offered the consideration of a critic whose interest in the topic dated back to the fifties.
Croft sought to give a clear sense of the differences between the two versions of A Vision,
maintaining that, “Yeats was attempting in 1925 to create mythological truth in defiance
of fact; in 1937, he attempted to create artistic truth that included both myth and fact.”8
For Adams, A Vision’s purpose was even more artistic and “The occult in it is subordinate
to the book’s literary purposes, one of which is to dramatize the fate of the poetic way
of thinking as Yeats saw it in his age.”9 Both approach A Vision section by section and
to some extent even page by page, following the presentation of the ideas as set out by
Yeats himself, and seeking to draw out implications and ideas more in the form of commentary than conceptual analysis. There were also the lectures given by Graham Hough
that became The Mystery Religion of W. B. Yeats (1984), which addressed the book largely
in its own terms but, controversially, only after dismissing more than half of its contents.
viii
The Yeats Annual, which arrived in 1982, established a section dedicated to A Vision and
related areas, “Mastering What is Most Abstract: A Forum on A Vision,” while possibly
indicating a slightly marginal status by printing its articles in the smaller font used for
reviews. Within this forum and elsewhere, critics have increasingly attempted to come
to grips with the difficulties not by ignoring or dismissing them but by addressing them
directly and these have included James Lovic Allen, Colin McDowell, Neil Mann, Matthew Gibson and Rory Ryan.
The third stage is effectively the field opened up by the publication of the Vision
papers and, as Parkinson foresaw, “continued work on the manuscripts” is indeed in the
process of helping to “subtilize and clarify the received sense of Yeats as poet,” as well as
thinker. It will be more fully set out once both volumes of A Vision are available in annotated critical editions in the Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, edited by Margaret Mills Harper
and Catherine E. Paul, published by Scribner and Sons. The fact that the Collected Works
will contain both versions published separately speaks volumes, literally, about how the
work’s place is now viewed. Though the stages have been and will be defined by the texts
that are available, these texts reflect the interest of scholars to research, the willingness of
publishers to publish and the existence of an audience of readers and students. Thus the
attitudes and the material available continue to feed into each other. Few writers now feel
the need to deny Yeats’s occult interests nor, with the automatic script laid out in minute
detail, to deny that A Vision was, at least to the Yeatses themselves, a largely esoteric construct. It is “An Explanation of Life,” as the subtitle of A Vision A declared, encompassing
life after death as well, so that the section dealing with the afterlife is concerned with the
literal afterlife of the human soul and not simply a metaphorical or aesthetic process.
Once the literality of the primary level is acknowledged, however, the system in fact becomes far more flexible and useful a tool for approaching Yeats’s thought.
One element that is now universally recognized is the collaborative nature of the automatic script and the subsequent levels of refinement involved in creating A Vision, so that it
is by convention rather than conviction that the new editions in the Collected Works are put
under W. B. Yeats’s name without that of his wife, George, and to some extent critical writing follows a similar pattern. It is clear that most of the final form of words and explication is
in the voice of W. B. Yeats, all the more so in A Vision B, where it is his reading that informs
the philosophical dimensions,10 but it is also clear that the script itself is a complete collaboration of two minds, possibly involving further unconscious or incorporeal voices as well.
In general the vocabulary for dealing with A Vision is becoming clearer too. As with
any language, studying the etymology presented by the scripts and drafts has often provided a fuller sense of terms’ meanings and implications than was possible from the published works alone. That vocabulary is also becoming slightly more familiar. Until now
virtually every essay or study that deals with A Vision has had to include an element of
the primer, reiterating certain basic principles and terms, as well as whatever argument or
field it is approaching. While it is still important to help readers find their way through
the difficulties of Yeats’s terminology, guidance to the literal level is now more accessible
from a growing body of criticism, so that it is increasingly possible for critics to go more
quickly to the exploration of these concepts’ broader and deeper implications rather than
linger on their introductory definitions, thus enabling studies that are more thematic and
less simple commentary.
ix
A work that is so all-encompassing and varied has long invited a wide range of approaches. Even its most severe detractors now admit that it has a place as an indication
of Yeats’s personal concerns and creative sources, though they may also deplore the work
itself and the direction that it represents. Even Parkinson’s secularists find that the content
of the poetry can be elucidated by the thought of A Vision, and many find that Yeats’s
thought more generally, as expressed in essay and lecture as well as poetry, play and autobiography, is interesting of itself and that A Vision takes its place within that context. The
poet’s life is also central to an appreciation of the poetry, and here again the collaboration
with George and the strands of the Yeatses’ lives that the work represents have elicited a
number of books and essays, as have the genesis and evolution of A Vision itself. Those
who have engaged more or less directly with the system on its own terms have sought to
explicate and understand how it works as a whole, and in particular to consider in more
detail how particular aspects of the construct relate to the whole, to Yeats’s work and attitudes, and, to some extent, to reality. That said, it is generally regarded within its own
mythic framework, accepted for what it is in a very specific context, although there have
also been a few attempts to apply it more directly to experience or to astrological schemes
of personality and psychology.
Until relatively recently Yeats’s work has tended to be approached within the context of “single-author studies,” the predominant structure of academic literary studies in
twentieth-century universities. With the rise of cross-disciplinary studies, whether Irish,
feminist, political or areas tackling occultism and marginal belief, new and potentially
enriching avenues are opened up. Within these fields, the problems of authorship that
surround A Vision and the automatic script take on a new guise that is very different from
an approach centered on the concept of the lone creative genius, so that the collaboration
of W. B. Yeats with his wife, George/Georgie Hyde-Lees, and of both with questionable
spirit entities, is no longer seen as the winnowing of wheat from chaff or Yeats from externals, but allows all of the material to be seen as the manifestation of consciousness in
particular places, times and contexts.
Although this volume is subtitled “Explications and Contexts,” there is no clear division
between the two, since most of the essays contain elements of both. However, the first group
of essays presents what are mainly explications of certain broader themes in A Vision itself, and
adheres to some extent to the divisions that Yeats created, particularly those of A Vision B: the
system’s general principles; incarnate life and the Faculties; discarnate life and the Principles;
how Yeats relates his own work to other broadly philosophical approaches; and his consideration of the historical process. An intermediate group, taking an approach that is based less
directly in A Vision itself, but still largely textual, and includes an examination of a concept that
has remained rather elusive, the Thirteenth Cone; a consideration of astrological features in the
automatic script; and a view of the poetry within A Vision, related to certain plays. The final
group of essays looks more squarely at contextual themes, whether of collaboration and influence—between husband, wife, and spirits, or with another poet—or the gender perspective
within these interrelations, the historical context of Golden-Dawn occultism or the broader
political context of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout, the different contributors
take a variety of stances with regard to how they approach ideas of hierarchy in the different
kinds of text, and particularly with regard to how to treat the automatic script—whether as
quarry or textual foundation in its own right.11
x
At the beginning, we suggested that there have been perhaps three stages in the study
of A Vision but that is, of course, a convenient simplification. In terms of the material
available, there are definite boundaries, but in terms of people’s attitudes, A Vision’s very
nature always has provoked and will continue to provoke a broad spectrum of views: it is
the consensus that evolves gradually. There lingers a suspicion amongst many more “secularist” scholars that A Vision is an opaque failure and Yeats’s official biographer, Roy Foster,
declared that A Vision does not “establish a philosophical system, despite WBY’s claims
in his Introduction. It has found few followers since Frank Pearce Sturm, and it is hard
to believe that it deserves them” (Life2 606). Followers, perhaps not, but there are many
who appreciate the work’s fascination without following it. Until relatively recently even
the work’s advocates have tended to simplify A Vision in order to underline their claims to
the work’s relevance and to make its more relevant parts lucid, and this involved an avoidance of the more integral, central parts of the book and of the complexities of both the
geometry and of Yeats’s ideas, or a creative reinterpretation of the work’s subject. Generally
speaking this volume aims to show that A Vision, including most of the geometry and conceptual philosophy, is far more internally consistent than is usually surmised. Yet George
Russell (AE) recognized this in A Vision A’s very first review: “For all its bewildering complexity the metaphysical structure he rears is coherent, and it fits into its parts with the
precision of Chinese puzzle-boxes into each other. It coheres together, its parts are related
logically to each other, but does it relate so well to life?”12 That question probably has as
many answers as readers, all identifying different degrees and kinds of conformity to reality. Yeats himself proposed that it should be treated as a myth or “stylistic arrangements of
experience,” helping to reconcile “reality and justice” (AVB 25).
AE is commonly and rightly congratulated on his prophetic percipience with regard
to A Vision:
It is not a book which will affect many in our time. It is possible it may be
discussed feverishly by commentators a century hence.…I do not doubt that
though the seeds of his thought do not instantly take root and fructify in my
mind that they will have their own growth, and later I may find myself comprehending much that is now unintelligible.13
It is such a growing comprehension and greater intelligibility that the contributors to this
volume have themselves found and seek to share here.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
“Yeats as an Example,” Kenyon Review 10, no. 2 (Spring, 1948), in CH 344–351, at 345.
Whether through Yeats or alongside, the influence of Hermeticism and the esoteric in literature has gained
wider acknowledgement and appreciation: see, for instance, Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra
Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and the Occult (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993); Timothy
Materer, Modernist Alchemy: Poetry and the Occult (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); and ed.
Leon Surette and Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, Literary Modernism and the Occult Tradition (Orono, ME:
National Poetry Society, University of Maine, 1996). Mark Bauer has also, for instance, examined the importance of A Vision to James Merrill in This Composite Voice: The Role of W. B. Yeats in the Poetry of James
Merrill (New York: Routledge, 2003), esp. Ch.2.
It was dedicated to Kathleen Raine, who had worked with him on Thomas Taylor’s work, and in many ways
xi
held the torch for Yeats as exponent of the “perennial philosophy.”
It also showed a defiantly nineteenth-century sense of the meaning of “occult,” which had become somewhat tainted by the tendency to use it as a synonym for witchcraft and satanism, as in the works of Dennis
Wheatley.
5.
Robert A. Martinich’s “W. B. Yeats’s ‘Sleep and Dream Notebooks’” (1982); Steve L. Adams’s “A Critical
Edition of the First Two Months of W. B. Yeats’s Automatic Script” (1985); Barbara J. Frieling’s “A Critical
Edition of W. B. Yeats’s automatic script 11 March–30 December 1918” (1987); Sandra L. Sprayberry’s “A
Critical Edition of W. B. Yeats’s Automatic Script: 2 January 1919–29 March 1920” (1988). These were
revised and supplemented by transcription of the Card File index by Margaret Mills Harper.
6.
The number of volumes mentioned by Yeats (“some fifty copy-books” [AVB 17]) does not match the number found by Harper (39 according to CVA xviii), and there is some lost material, particularly from the
early stages where the pages were not perhaps kept so systematically, some of it known (extant questions
without answers and vice versa) and some uncertain. There are also parts and fragments of the automatic
script that were not transcribed and published, either because they were incoherent or unplaced (see McDowell in this volume, 201–2). More controversially the majority of diagrams are summarized in words,
so that precise details are lacking. Anyone examining the original automatic script can appreciate that it
would often be difficult to put into legible form what are sometimes only scrawled tracings and sometimes
the diagrams add or change very little, but to be told that something is not significant is never as convincing as being shown.
7.
This excludes those such as Helen Vendler’s Yeats’s “Vision” and the Later Plays (1963) and Stuart Hirschberg’s At the Top of the Tower: Yeats’s Poetry Explored through “A Vision” (1979), which yoked A Vision with
other works. Vendler’s book, though penetrating and giving A Vision major prominence, also chose to deal
with it as entirely metaphorical, translating all its formulations into terms of aesthetics.
8.
Barbara L. Croft, “Stylistic Arrangements”: A Study of William Butler Yeats’s “A Vision” (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1987), 26.
9.
Hazard Adams, The Book of Yeats’s Vision: Romantic Modernism and Antithetical Tradition (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1995), 4.
10. It may, however, have been George Yeats who read the actual words in the case of German or Italian
works—see Matthew Gibson’s essay in this volume, p. 128.
11. A working group of college and university teachers, sponsored by the U.S. National Endowment for the
Humanities in 2008, produced a report entitled “W. B. Yeats: A Reassessment,” including a section on “A
Vision and the System,” which among other things proposed its own view of three waves of study for the
automatic script:
4.
The earliest generation of serious Vision scholars was occupied of necessity with the task of
spadework, of assembling, transcribing, recording and archiving the raw material of the Yeats’s
own notebooks, card files, and related paper ephemera. It remained to the following generation
to move these materials toward definitive publication, and to continue the task of arguing for
their significance and validity.
This is probably a slightly false division, since both stages were largely undertaken with the pivotal figure
of George Mills Harper in control. The report then goes on to suggest:
It will fall to a “third wave” of researchers to move beyond the inherent fascination of the automatic script as gnomic genetic material for A Vision and to consider it more carefully as a rich
text in its own right, complicatedly metatextual down to its very bones, alive with experiments
in gender, tantalizingly mysterious for its performative context, a challenge to even the most
fundamental assumptions about narrativity. (“W. B. Yeats: A Reassessment–Final Report,”
[NEH, 2008], Section III, Part 3).
12
13
Whether the automatic script offers such riches is one of the key questions currently.
“A Vision,” Irish Statesman, 13 February 1926, 715. The full review is printed in CH 269–273. This and
the others are also available at www.YeatsVision.com/Reviews.html.
Ibid., 716.
xii
Contributors
Charles I. Armstrong is Head of the Department of Foreign Languages and Translation at
the University of Agder, in Norway. The chair of the Nordic Irish Studies Network and a
Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge, he has published Figures of Memory: Poetry,
Space and the Past (2009) and Romantic Organicism: From Idealist Origins to Ambivalent Afterlife (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and co-edited Postcolonial Dislocations: Travel, History and
the Ironies of Narrative (Novus, 2006) and Crisis and Contemporary Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). He lectured at the W. B. Yeats International Summer School in 2005 and 2011.
Wayne K. Chapman is Professor of English at Clemson University, South Carolina. He
is author of Yeats’s Poetry in the Making: Sing Whatever is Well Made (Palgrave Macmillan,
2010) and Yeats and English Renaissance Literature (Macmillan, 1991); editor of Edward
Dowden: A Critical Edition of the Complete Poetry (CUDP); and co-editor of Yeats Annual
No. 15, Yeats’s Collaborations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, with Warwick Gould). He wrote
The W. B. and George Yeats Library: A Short-title Catalog (CUDP, 2006). For the Cornell
Yeats Manuscripts Materials series he co-edited The Countess Cathleen (1999, with Michael
J. Sidnell) and edited The Dreaming of the Bones and Calvary (2003). He is also Editor of The
South Carolina Review and Executive Editor of Clemson University Digital Press.
Graham A. Dampier is an assistant researcher at the University of Johannesburg and
recently submitted his PhD thesis on “The Historical System of W. B. Yeats’s A Vision,”
which was written under the expert supervision of Prof. Rory Ryan. He works in Soweto,
Johannesburg, on various Educational Research projects, and is set to be father to a baby
girl in January 2012.
Matthew DeForrest is Associate Professor of English and interim Chair of the Department of Languages and Literature at Johnson C. Smith University, North Carolina. His
publications include Yeats and the Stylistic Arrangements of Experience and “The Otherworldly Debts of W. B. Yeats,” found in the proceedings of the Sixth International Conference of the Princess Grace Library of Monaco, The Princess Grace Irish Library 12: That
Other World, and articles in The South Carolina Review, Éire-Ireland, and The Canadian
Journal of Irish Studies.
Matthew Gibson has worked at universities in several countries and is currently an associate lecturer in translation for the University of Hull. He is the author of Yeats, Coleridge
and the Romantic Sage (Macmillan, 2000) and Dracula and the Eastern Question: British
and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth Century Near East (Palgrave Macmillan,
2006). He is presently completing a new monograph for the University of Wales Press,
called Nineteenth Century European Gothic: Vampires, Doubles and the French Revolution.
Margaret Mills Harper is Glucksman Professor of Contemporary Writing in English at
the University of Limerick, Ireland. She is the author of Wisdom of Two (Oxford, 2006),
on the occult collaboration between Yeats and George Hyde Lees, and The Aristocracy
of Art (LSU Press, 1990), examining the autobiographical fictions of James Joyce and
Thomas Wolfe. She has co-edited two of the four volumes of Yeats’s “Vision” Papers (Macxiii
millan 1992 and 2001). With Catherine Paul, she has edited A Vision: The Original 1925
Version (Scribner, 2008) and is now preparing A Vision: The Revised 1937 Version for The
Collected Works of W. B. Yeats.
Janis Haswell is a Professor of English at Texas A&M University—Corpus Christi, where
she teaches Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century British Literature and first-year writing. She is the author of Introduction to the Raj Quartet (1985), Pressed Against Divinity:
W. B. Yeats and the Feminine Mask (1997), Paul Scott’s Philosophy of Place(s): the Fiction of
Relationality (2002), Authoring: An Essay on Potentiality and Singularity for the English Profession (co-authored with Richard Haswell; 2010), and Behind Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet: A Life
in Letters, 2 vols. (2011), as well as some 35 articles on both literature and composition.
Colin McDowell recently took early retirement from the Australian public service. He
has written numerous articles on Ezra Pound’s Cantos and on Yeats’s A Vision. He still
hopes to complete a paper on Yeats’s annotations to Whitehead’s Science and the Modern
World, which he has worked on sporadically for about twenty years now.
Neil Mann has written a number of articles dedicated to aspects of A Vision and Yeats’s
Hermetic interests. He created and maintains the website YeatsVision.com, a resource for
students and scholars, and a blog on aspects of A Vision, YeatsVision.blogspot.com. He is
currently writing a short introduction to A Vision.
Claire V. Nally is a Lecturer in Twentieth-Century English Literature at the University
of Northumbria, United Kingdom. She has published on Yeats in the Irish Studies Review
and the Canadian Review of Irish Studies, as well as writing the monograph Envisioning
Ireland: W. B. Yeats’s Occult Nationalism (2009). Forthcoming work includes Selling Ireland: Advertising, Literature and Print Culture, 1891-1922, co-written with John Strachan
(Palgrave, 2012), and edited the collection Naked Exhibitionism: Gender, Performance and
Public Exposure, with Angela Smith (I. B. Tauris, 2012). She is the co-editor (with Angela
Smith) of “Gender and Popular Culture,” a book series with I. B. Tauris.
Catherine E. Paul is Professor of English at Clemson University, South Carolina. She
is author of Poetry in the Museums of Modernism: Yeats, Pound, Moore, Stein (Michigan,
2002) and co-editor of A Vision: The Original 1925 Version (2008) in Scribner’s The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. She is currently completing a monograph tentatively titled Fascist Directive: Ezra Pound and Italian Cultural Nationalism and co-editing W. B. Yeats’s A
Vision: The Revised 1937 Version, also for the Collected Works series. She has published in
Modernism/modernity, Paideuma, Twentieth-Century Literature, Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, and Yeats in Context (Cambridge, 2010).
Rory Ryan is currently Professor of English and Dean of Humanities at the University of
Johannesburg, South Africa. He has published on literary theory, cultural theory, Virginia
Woolf, and Yeats. It is to an elucidation of A Vision and the automatic script that he turns
when in need of self-punishment.
xiv
C. Nicholas Serra is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame, Drake University, and
Binghamton University (where he completed his PhD in 1996). His primary interest is
the interface between Yeats’s occult preoccupations and subsequent texts. He is the North
American representative for the University of Sunderland’s North East [of England] Irish
Cultural Network, on the executive board of the Scottish Irish Network, and a frequent
presenter at Irish Studies conferences both in America and internationally. Currently he
teaches British and Irish Literatures as an Associate Professor of English at Upper Iowa
University, Fayette, Iowa.
Acknowledgments
T
he authors of the essays contained in this volume would all like to thank the
Yeats family for their unstinting generosity, and specifically Gráinne Yeats for permission to quote from unpublished manuscripts, Linda Shaughnessy and Hattie
Thorowgood at A. P. Watts for dealing with the permissions, and the National Library of
Ireland for access to and help with the manuscripts and books held in its collections, and
in particular Tom Desmond, Catherine Fahy and Colette O’Daly.
They also wish to thank the publishers Scribner’s Sons, Oxford University Press and
Palgrave Macmillan for permission to quote and use Yeats’s published material.
The editors would like to express their thanks to Wayne Chapman and his team at
the Clemson University Digital Press for all their hard work and patience, and especially
to Charis Chapman for her help with setting and correcting the proofs.
Wayne Chapman would like to thank Catherine Mitchell at Palgrave Macmillan for
permission to use material published in the Yeats Annual and Yeats’s Poetry in the Making
(2010).
Graham Dampier would like to thank Rory Ryan and the editors for helping him to
see his essay into print.
Matthew DeForrest would like to thank the editors for their hard work and insight.
He would also like to thank his wife Taura and daughter Edain for their patience and
support.
Matthew Gibson would like to thank Mark Barraclough and Neil Mann for help
with creating the diagrams in his essay.
Margaret Mills Harper would like to thank Oxford University Press for permission to
reprint material from Wisdom of Two (2006) and further to thank Rick Stoops.
Claire Nally thanks the University of Northumbia for paying to reproduce the bookplate used on the cover and is grateful to the AHRC for their generous funding of the project
from which her chapter is drawn, as well as to Peter Lang for permission to reproduce material from her book Envisioning Ireland: W. B. Yeats’s Occult Nationalism (2009).
Nicholas Serra would like to thank the staff of the National Library of Ireland’s Manuscripts Reading Room for their assistance with Yeats’s Golden Dawn papers, and likewise
the custodians and staff of the Warburg Institute of the University of London for access
to materials housed in the Gerald Yorke Collection. He is, in particular, indebted to Bill
Heidrick, former Grand Treasurer General of Ordo Templi Orientis, for his many years of
patient advice, insight, and access to rare and unpublished material held by that Order.
xv
Abbreviations
C
ommonly used works, both those by W. B. Yeats and others, are referred to by
standard abbreviations. These are in line with those used in the Yeats Annual,
omitting works not referred to in this volume and adding primary works that
are cited in more than one essay, though not criticism. Individual essays may also include
their own abbreviations, explained in an endnote at the first occurrence.
We refer throughout to the works of W. B. Yeats in both the editions of the Collected
Works of W. B. Yeats (Scribner and Macmillan) and also the editions that have been standard until recently, generally Macmillan’s editions of the prose works and its Variorum
Editions of the poems and plays. Although this procedure is slightly cumbersome, it is
intended to facilitate reference to the texts in question, and it is hoped that readers will
not find it obtrusive.
In the case of A Vision, reference is given: to the Collected Works edition of A Vision
(1925), edited by M. M. Harper and C. E. Paul (CW13); to the original T. Werner Laurie’s 1925 edition (AVA)—which is largely identical with the central facsimile section of
A Critical Edition of Yeats’s “A Vision” (1925) edited by G. M. Harper and W. K. Hood
(CVA), not cited directly; and to the Macmillan edition of the 1937 version, in the printing of 1962 corrected by George Yeats and Thomas Mark (AVB). Where text occurs in
both the 1925 and 1937 editions, all of the references are given, the order of the references
indicating whether the primary reference is to A Vision A or to A Vision B; the inclusion
of “cf.” before the second reference indicates that the texts are not identical, though the
differences vary from typography/punctuation to changes of text.
In the case of the poems and the plays, the primary reference is to the Variorum editions.
With the secondary reference to the poems in particular, there is a problem of potential confusion caused by Scribner’s publication of the poems in a variety of similar but different editions. Scribner has issued to date some six different versions of Richard J. Finneran’s editing
of the poems, five of them with “Collected” in the title and with three different paginations.
The edition referred to here is The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume I: The Poems in its
second edition (1997), where Richard Finneran gives a full explanation of the development
of the collection (CW1 xxvi-xxvii), which accounts for most of the variations. This revised
second edition was completely reset, so its pagination is not the same as that of the first edition (1989; revised 1990), which, though it was the first edition as Volume I of the Collected
Works, was actually a revised version of Poems: A New Edition (1983; 1984 in Britain). For
the text of the “canonical” poems these earlier editions all share identical pagination, as does
The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989; emphasis added), an edition aimed at a broader
public (and itself superseded by a revised edition in 1996). After the canonical poems, however, the editions diverge, since The Collected Poems (1989; 1996) does not include “Additional Poems” and has abbreviated notes, while The Collected Works, Volume I (1989; 1990),
includes four “Additional Poems” not in Poems: A New Edition (1983). The pagination of the
notes in these three versions (and their revised variants) is therefore different, and the notes
in The Collected Poems do not include complete or verbatim versions of Yeats’s own notes in
most cases. On a practical level, the references given here will usually be within a few pages
of the equivalent in the other volumes for poems cited, but not for the endnotes.
References to the books found in the Yeatses’ library are usually dual: firstly to Wayne
K. Chapman’s The W. B. and George Yeats Library: A Short Title Catalog, based on the
xvi
library given by the Yeats family to the National Library of Ireland. This updates and
corrects the earlier list published by Edward O’Shea, which is cited second, although
marginalia are currently only available in O’Shea’s catalog. For full details, see WBGYL
and YL in the list below.
Au
AVA
AVB
BG
BL Add. MS
CH
CL
CL1
CL2
CL3
CL4
CL Intelex
CVA
CW
CW1
CW2
CW3
CW4
CW5
CW6
Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955).
A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus
and upon certain Doctrines attributed to Kusta Ben Luka (London: T.
Werner Laurie, 1925).
A Vision (1937; revised, London: Macmillan, 1962).
Ann Saddlemyer, Becoming George: The Life of Mrs. W. B. Yeats. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002).
Additional Manuscript, The British Library, London (followed by
number).
W. B. Yeats: The Critical Heritage, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London:
Henley; Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977).
The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats
Volume I, 1865–1895, ed. John Kelly and Eric Domville (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1986).
Volume II, 1896–1900, ed. Warwick Gould, John Kelly, Deirdre
Toomey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
Volume III, 1901–1904, ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
Volume IV, 1905–1907, ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).
The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, gen. ed. John Kelly, Oxford
University Press (Intelex Electronic Edition) 2002; letters cited by
accession number.
A Critical Edition of Yeats’s A Vision (1925), ed. George Mills Harper
and Walter Kelly Hood (London: Macmillan, 1978).
The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats
Volume I: The Poems (Second Edition), ed. Richard J. Finneran
(1989; New York: Scribner, 1997).
Volume II: The Plays, ed. David R. Clark & Rosalind E. Clark
(New York & London: Palgrave, 2001; New York: Scribner,
2001).
Volume III: Autobiographies, ed. William H. O’Donnell, Douglas
N. Archibald, J. Fraser Cocks III, Gretchen L. Schwenker (New
York: Scribner, 1999).
Volume IV: Early Essays, ed. Richard Finneran & George Bornstein
(New York: Scribner, 2007).
Volume V: Later Essays, ed. William H. O’Donnell with Elizabeth
Bergmann Loizeaux (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994).
Volume VI: Prefaces and Introductions, ed. William H. O’Donnell
(London: Macmillan, 1988).
xvii
CW9
CW10
CW12
CW13
E&I
Ex
FPS
FFTIP
G-YL
L
Life
Life1
Life2
LMR
LTWBY
Mem
Myth
M2005
MYV1, 2
NC
NLI
OBMV
PEP
Volume IX: Early Articles and Reviews, ed. John P. Frayne &
Madeleine Marchaterre (New York & London: Palgrave, 2001;
New York: Scribner, 2004).
Volume X: Later Articles and Reviews, ed. Colton Johnson (New
York: Scribner, 2000).
Volume XII: John Sherman and Dhoya, ed. Richard J. Finneran
(New York: Macmillan, 1994).
Volume XIII: A Vision (1925), ed. Catherine E. Paul & Margaret
Mills Harper (New York: Scribner, 2008).
Essays and Introductions (London and New York: Macmillan, 1961).
Explorations, selected by Mrs. W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1962;
New York: Macmillan, 1963).
Frank Pearce Sturm: His Life, Letters, and Collected Work, ed. R. Taylor
(Urbana, Chicago & London: University of Illinois Press, 1969).
Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, edited and selected by W. B.
Yeats (London: Walter Scott, 1888).
The Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893–1938: Always Your Friend, ed. Anna
MacBride White and A. Norman Jeffares (London: Hutchinson, 1992).
The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis,
1954; New York: Macmillan, 1955).
Roy F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, 2 vols.
Volume 1: The Apprentice Mage (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997).
Volume 2: The Arch-Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
“Ah, Sweet Dancer”: W. B. Yeats / Margot Ruddock, A Correspondence, ed.
Roger McHugh (London and New York: Macmillan, 1970).
Letters to W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran, George Mills Harper
and William M. Murphy with Alan B. Himber, 2 vols. (London:
Macmillan; New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).
Memoirs: Autobiography – First Draft: Journal, transcribed & ed. Denis
Donoghue (London: Macmillan, 1972; New York: Macmillan, 1973).
Mythologies (London and New York: Macmillan, 1959).
Mythologies, ed. Warwick Gould & Deirdre Toomey (London:
Macmillan, 2005).
George Mills Harper, The Making of Yeats’s “A Vision”: A Study of the
Automatic Script, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan; Carbondale and
Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987).
A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats by A. Norman Jeffares
(London: Macmillan; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984).
Manuscripts in the National Library of Ireland (followed by number).
The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1895–1935, chosen by W. B. Yeats
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936).
A Packet for Ezra Pound (Dundrum: Cuala, 1929; facsimile: Shannon:
Irish University Press, 1970).
xviii
SB
SMRF
TSMC
UP1
UP2
VP
VPl
VSR
Wade
WBGYL
WWB1, 2, 3
YA
YAACTS
YGD
YL
YO
The Speckled Bird by William Butler Yeats: an Autobiographical Novel
with Variant Versions: New Edition, incorporating recently discovered
manuscripts, ed. and annotated William H. O’Donnell (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends: An Extract from a Record
Made by his Pupils: and a play in prose [The Resurrection] (Dundrum:
Cuala Press, 1931; facsimile: Shannon: Irish University Press, 1970).
W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence, 1901-1937, ed.
Ursula Bridge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Oxford
University Press, 1953).
Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, Vol. 1, ed. John P. Frayne (London:
Macmillan; New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).
Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, Vol. 2, ed. John P. Frayne and Colton
Johnson (London: Macmillan, 1975; New York: Columbia University
Press, 1976).
The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and
Russell K. Alspach (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1957). Cited
from the corrected third printing of 1966.
The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach
assisted by Catherine C. Alspach (London and New York: Macmillan,
1966). Cited from the corrected second printing of 1966.
The Secret Rose, Stories by W. B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition, ed. Phillip L.
Marcus, Warwick Gould and Michael J. Sidnell (1981; second edition,
London: Macmillan, 1992).
Allan Wade, A Bibliography of the Writings of W. B. Yeats, 3rd ed., rev.
Russell K. Alspach (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968). Item nos.
and/or page nos. preceded by “p.”
The W. B. and George Yeats Library: A Short-Title Catalog, Wayne K.
Chapman (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press, 2006;
online: http://www.clemson.edu/cedp/cudp/pubs/YeatsSTC/index.htm).
The Works of William Blake Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical, edited with
lithographs of the illustrated “Prophetic Books,” and a memoir and
interpretation, Edwin John Ellis and William Butler Yeats, 3 vols.
(London: Bernard Quaritch, 1893).
Yeats Annual (London: Macmillan, 1982–2000; Palgrave, 2001–),
cited by issue number.
Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies (publishers vary, 1983),
cited by issue number.
George Mills Harper, Yeats’s Golden Dawn (London: Macmillan, 1974).
A Descriptive Catalog of W. B. Yeats’s Library, Edward O’Shea, (New
York and London: Garland Publishing, 1985). Item numbers and/or
page numbers preceded by “p.”
Yeats and the Occult, ed. George Mills Harper (Toronto: Macmillan of
Canada; Niagara Falls, NY: Maclean-Hunter Press, 1975).
xix
YVP
YVP1
YVP2
YVP3
YVP4
Yeats’s “Vision” Papers, George Mills Harper (General Editor) assisted by
Mary Jane Harper:
Volume 1: The Automatic Script: 5 November 1917–18 June 1918,
ed. Steve L. Adams, Barbara J. Frieling and Sandra L. Sprayberry
(London & Iowa City: Macmillan & University of Iowa Press,
1992).
Volume 2: The Automatic Script: 25 June 1918–29 March 1920,
ed. Steve L. Adams, Barbara J. Frieling and Sandra L. Sprayberry
(London & Iowa City: Macmillan & University of Iowa Press,
1992).
Volume 3: Sleep and Dream Notebooks, Vision Notebooks 1 and 2,
Card File, ed. Robert Anthony Martinich and Margaret Mills
Harper (London & Iowa City: Macmillan & University of Iowa
Press, 1992).
Volume 4: “The Discoveries of Michael Robartes,” Version B (“The
Great Wheel” and “The Twenty-Eight Embodiments”), ed. George
Mills Harper and Margaret Mills Harper, with Richard W. Stoops,
Jr. (London: Palgrave, 2001).
xx
“EVERYWHERE THAT ANTINOMY OF THE ONE AND THE MANY”:
THE FOUNDATIONS OF A VISION
by Neil Mann
I
Y
eats wrote of A Vision that, “I will never think any thoughts but these, or some
modification or extension of these; when I write prose or verse they must be somewhere present though not it may be in the words…” (PEP 32). If the claim contains any truth then these thoughts merit attention when approaching Yeats’s “prose or
verse,” yet although there certainly are poems and plays where A Vision’s more detailed
machinery or its presentation of history obtrude very obviously, in the majority of cases
what is present in the art is the system’s broader perspective and the context that these
thoughts formed for Yeats’s ideas, and it is these more general principles that offer a deeper
understanding of his art.1
However, these broader concepts are difficult to find in Yeats’s expositions, since they
are seldom expressed directly, and it is no easy matter to extract them from Yeats’s presentation. As Graham Hough noted in his engaging but brief survey The Mystery Religion of
W. B. Yeats, “a good deal of the bewilderment that faces the unprepared reader of A Vision
comes simply because the fundamentals of its creed are never explicitly set out.”2 These
fundamentals include both underlying assumptions, which are implicit but buried, and
the central concepts of the system, which are often hidden in or overshadowed by local
detail. There are several reasons for this neglect on Yeats’s part, one of which is a deliberate choice to hedge the ideas in fictions and an attempt to create a myth, another is the
almost impossible task of wrestling the material of the automatic script into coherent and
sequential ideas, and yet another is a cast of mind and a style of writing ill-suited to lucid
expository prose.
A further important source of difficulty is that some of the concepts had much in
common with those that Yeats had encountered in his esoteric apprenticeship, and that
he assumes a similar background on the part of his readers. Hough comments that “Yeats
takes for granted the conception of the destiny of the human soul” that is “common to the
occult tradition,”3 and Yeats wrote that A Vision was “intended, to use a phrase of Jacob
Boehme’s, for my ‘schoolmates only’” (CW5 219; E&I xi), for whom it might well have
been otiose to repeat basic principles. However, even for those who were “schoolmates,”
more versed in the occult tradition than the general reader today, there were problems, as
is witnessed by some contemporary reviews,4 while the unspoken differences from tradition
are potentially almost as much of a stumbling block as the unspoken common ground.
Some of the clearest explanations of the central ideas of A Vision appear not in A
Vision itself but in the notes and introductions to volumes of poetry or plays, notably
Michael Robartes and the Dancer, The Resurrection, The Words upon the Window Pane, and
also in Autobiographies. The ideas affect the poetry and creative works directly enough to
merit elucidation and, since Yeats was aware that he was writing for a wider audience and
2
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
needed to start from first principles, he largely avoided specialized vocabulary and put
forward some of the key concepts succinctly. However, these explanations are necessarily
brief and fragmentary and usually couched in the fictions of Michael Robartes’s discoveries in Cracow and Arabia, which can obfuscate their import. These glimpses—some
published before the private edition of A Vision A of 1925 and all before the appearance
of a generally available edition of A Vision B in 1937—no doubt led interested readers to
hope for proper illumination in this fuller exposition. In A Vision, these readers certainly
received a more complete picture, with far more detail, but the detail often swamps the
general picture, the technicalities crowd out the principles, and the strength of one symbol
threatens to unbalance the whole. Yeats gives no clear overview of the system within A
Vision itself and the central theses are not given the prominence that they deserve, so that
to some extent they need to be teased out of the presentation.
Certain assumptions underlying A Vision are few but key. They were already largely
familiar to both of the Yeatses and were indeed concepts that Yeats had been exploring for
many years, including sometimes in his writings. They include a doctrine of divine manifestation in stages of emanation; of sparks from the divine fire descending as spirits into
material existence, evolving with a goal of experience and wisdom, and seeking to return
to and reunite with godhead; as corollaries of this evolution, the immortality of the spirit
and the concept of reincarnation; a multilayered constitution of the human being that
goes beyond the simple dualisms of mind-body or spirit-body; a similar multilayered constitution to the universe and a framework of correspondence between the human microcosm and the universal macrocosm, embracing astrology and a “soul of the world.”5 Also
important is the idea of expressing truth in symbol and a preference for ancient sources
together with new revelations (viz. CW13 liv; AVA x), so that Yeats was not surprised that
unknown communicators might offer him a new “Explanation of Life,” as the subtitle of
A Vision A announced, nor that it took a traditional form.
When such elements emerge implicitly in the automatic script and communications
they are largely unquestioned, taken as natural. To judge from the associated notebooks
and drafts, Yeats himself was more curious about establishing details of their process rather
than tackling these fundamental concepts, which were already well known to him. In
A Vision he then faced the difficulty of trying to present a digested and clear view of a
complex subject that he was still exploring and trying to understand. Mastering the detail
accumulated in the preparatory material was far more of a challenge than even the vast
syncretic corpus of Theosophy or the Golden Dawn, since it lacked the contributions of
many minds over time and the helpful winnowing of the transmission process, clearing
away extraneous material and clarifying the outlines. He writes of one section in A Vision
A that “These few pages have taken me many months of exhausting labour” as he “had to
discover all from unconnected psychological notes and from a few inadequate diagrams”
(CW13 138; AVA 170),6 yet almost four years after that publication, in October 1929,
he writes that “The Vision…requires another six months of simplification, but is already
fairly simple” (FPS 100), indicating a long process of gradual clearing and focusing.
Though both husband and wife worked on all stages, as the system was collated,
adapted and reformulated, it became more his than theirs.7 Yet it remained independent
in a way that he was not accustomed to, and he did not usually feel at liberty to change the
terminology without approval from George’s communicators, feeling himself confronted
The Foundations of A Vision
3
with a body of knowledge greater than the part to which he was personally privy (see AVB
21–22). The revelations had been fed to him piecemeal, possibly to prevent his committing himself precipitously to “some hasty application” of the ideas (AVB 11), but they were
also said to contain “frustration,” disinformation, as well as false starts and incomplete
ideas, and selection was an important element in the initial stages of construction. Indeed
Yeats’s “Vision” Papers show that, of the material which the Yeatses received, only a fraction
went on to make the basis of A Vision itself, while large portions of A Vision have no direct
sources in the automatic script, being Yeats’s own fleshing out of the bare bones provided.
Whatever we as readers feel about the nature of the inspiration behind the automatic
script, it is evident that Yeats himself felt constrained by the often peremptory voices of his
instructors, guides and controls, yet A Vision is also very much his own creation.
This is emphasized by the fictions which preface both A Vision A and A Vision B,
which enact or partly dramatize elements of the system in stories which are Yeats’s creation but are not truly independent of it: once the system is understood to some degree,
however, its central themes can be seen to underlie the fictions, which in turn contribute
further important elements.8 Yeats’s mind was naturally fictive and the first expositions of
the system were through dialogues from poetic and philosophical models (see the drafts
in YVP4), while the elements of an Arabian sect and a European writer, Giraldus, date
back to the earliest conception of publishing the ideas.9 Much of the effort for Yeats was
to cast off this frame of mind and to attempt expository clarity. It is possible that A Vision shows Yeats at his weakest as a writer, since straightforward prose explication was not
his strength, as he himself acknowledged: “I have no gift for explanation & am the least
mathematical of men” (FPS 90; 20 January 1926). This is not to say that Yeats failed in
A Vision, and the books must remain at the core of our understanding of the system in
the form that Yeats felt confident enough to present to his audience.10 At the same time
we can also add that the system of A Vision can sometimes be better understood with the
help of material found outside either edition’s covers. Ultimately A Vision B is the final
published and “official” form of the system, an independent work and the closest to an
authoritative version, but it is also the last stage of a work in progress, remaining a version
rather than a Bible.
In both A Vision A and A Vision B the exposition starts by introducing one of the
main symbols: A Vision A with the Great Wheel and A Vision B with the gyres. A Vision A
opens its direct presentation of the system in a section entitled “What the Caliph Partly
Learned,” indicating that this is the more accessible material, at a level that the fictional
Caliph was willing and able to learn. In opening with a presentation of the Great Wheel,
A Vision A immediately engages the reader with an imaginatively vital symbol, albeit one
that is actually secondary. However, Yeats’s strategy is to present the most readily comprehensible element first and he then intends to deepen that understanding by going into
fundamental principles once the reader has grasped some of the system’s practical application. This has many advantages and it follows logically from the introductory poem, “The
Phases of the Moon.” The lunar phases are indeed a symbol of such power that they all but
take over our understanding of the system, and they also dominate Yeats’s own thinking
in many ways, not only as an elegant expression of the cycle’s stages, but also through the
myriad poetic and symbolic associations that the vivid interplay of sun and moon affords.
Ultimately, however, the circle of the moon’s phases is just one expression of the system’s
4
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
more fundamental antitheses and the detailed character delineations of the phases have
far less repercussion for Yeats outside the ambit of A Vision itself than the more general
concepts of the gyres and their nature. This is as true of Yeats’s own work as it is of any
broader application that Yeats might have envisaged.
Yeats later saw the initial presentation of the Wheel in A Vision A as “an unexplained
rule of thumb that somehow explained the world” (AVB 81) rather than an exposition of
first principles. In contrast, therefore, A Vision B’s exposition opens with the “principal
symbol,” the antinomies and the gyres, building up to presentation of the Tinctures, before
then moving on to the Faculties. This also seems to be a clear and logical strategy, and
one that is evidence of a more considered and meditated approach. It risks starting with
rather abstract matter that is unconnected to the reader’s experience, but does so in order
to build a solid foundation. However the presentation is couched in a language that is far
from perspicuous, a syntax that is seldom straightforward, and relies upon references to
a bewildering array of sources and writers. Within the first six pages, over twenty writers
or works are mentioned, most in reference to an idea or work of some complexity, and
constituting an allusive shorthand.11 It seems that Yeats is so concerned with showing us
the analogues and parallels between his ideas and those of great minds of the past that he
scants his own concepts,12 and as a consequence the reader is faced with abstract ideas presented with a confusing profusion of reference. The structure of the underlying exposition
can be discerned, but additional examples are overlaid at every possible juncture so that
the underlying shape is lost amid the accreted elements. The clutter of names soon gives
way to the technicalities of applied detail as the introductory exposition then continues
with the gyres’ more mechanical operations, before the overpowering symbol of the lunar
phases is introduced. From here Yeats moves further and further into rules for placing
the Faculties within the framework of the Great Wheel and quasi-astrological categories.
Readers are therefore never really given a clear view of “The Principal Symbol” announced
by the section’s subtitle and it is only with time and effort that they can strip away the agglomerated detail to appreciate the fundamental structure and sense of the system.
In this examination of the foundations of the Yeatses’ system much detail has necessarily been left to one side in order to give a clearer overall view. The explication of A
Vision naturally leads off into minutiae and qualification, and Yeats’s own difficulties in
keeping the fundamental lines clear and visible become all too understandable for anyone
who attempts to follow him in writing on the material. Furthermore, Yeats’s prose characteristically twists together several strands of thought within a sentence or paragraph, so
that the presentation of an idea is, in Wilde’s words, “rarely pure and never simple.”13 One
strand that I am deliberately omitting as much as possible is the frequent appeal to names
and authorities that I referred to earlier, because, although the references add a richness to
Yeats’s exposition, they can also lead away from the core and the complication is, initially
at least, distracting. I shall also keep to general outlines in most areas and try to avoid too
many details, relegating as much of Yeats’s special terminology as possible to notes and
asides. The concepts can be understood without the terminology, and it is useful to try
to express A Vision’s ideas in more usual language, although the terms are the key to what
Yeats himself wrote both in A Vision and elsewhere, encapsulating the ideas in their most
succinct form.
The Foundations of A Vision
5
II
Yeats’s clearest statement of the system’s foundation comes at the opening of the second book of A Vision B, “The Completed Symbol.” Even so, it is not given the prominence
that it may seem to warrant, placed as a supporting comment amid exposition of another
point: “The whole system is founded upon the belief that the ultimate reality, symbolised
as the Sphere, falls in human consciousness…into a series of antinomies” (AVB 187). The
system that he proposes is not a dualism because the ultimate reality is one, represented in
the Sphere; however all manifestations of the system that human consciousness can apprehend are dualistic because of this “fall,” and a form of duality or multiplicity is essential to
consciousness, because “things that are of one kind are unconscious” (AVB 82). The most
fundamental antinomy is that which embodies the dualism itself, the One and the Many,
and the most important manifestation of these two poles is that of God and humanity,
while within individual human consciousness the polarity is also that of the objective and
the subjective. Yet Yeats is less concerned with the poles themselves than with the forces
pulling in either direction—towards the One and towards the Many: the unifying and the
dispersing, the centripetal and the centrifugal, the homogenizing and the differentiating,
the objectifying and the subjectifying.
The dynamic essences are the primary and the antithetical Tinctures: the primary
named because it comes first and “brings us back to the mass where we begin” (AVB 72),
the antithetical “because it is achieved and defended by continual conflict with its opposite” (AVB 71–72). Tincture as the common term for both forces is drawn from alchemy
(via Boehme, see AVB 72) where it represents the purified state of the Great Work: the
white or lunar tincture will transform base metals to silver, while the red or solar tincture will transform them to gold and needs only further concentration to become the
Philosopher’s Stone. The term is suggestive, drawing as it does on dynamic principles of
transformation, and in A Vision A Yeats conceives of the “Solar and Lunar” as the more
inclusive forms of the Tinctures (CW13 112; AVA 139) and, though A Vision B largely
dispenses with this imagery, it still infuses his understanding. Another correspondence
has a more “scientific” or philosophic slant, where the primary Tincture is taken as space
and the antithetical Tincture as time, so that the two together create the continuum of
space-time.
The twin Tinctures and their opposition, reflected at all levels of creation, are embodied in the central symbol of the gyre, a spiral expressing the two forces or essences in
space and time. In order to express this concept visually, time is symbolized geometrically
by a straight line, “a movement without extension” (AVB 70), while space is reduced to a
plane at right-angles to it, creating three-dimensional space and within it the spiral gyre:
the “straight line…represents, now time, now emotion, now subjective life,” and the
“plane at right angles to this line…represents, now space, now intellect, now objective
life” (Notes on “The Second Coming,” Michael Robartes and the Dancer, VP 824; CW1
659). While a single gyre can express the whole scale of this duality, since the minimum of
one automatically implies a maximum of its counterpart, it is generally doubled to make
the opposition clearer and is “marked out by two gyres which represent the conflict, as it
were, of plane and line, by two movements, which circle about a centre,” and “the circling
is always narrowing or spreading, because one movement or other is always the stronger”
6
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
(VP 824; CW1 659). This key symbol of the double gyre “is frequently drawn as a double
cone, the narrow end of each cone being in the centre of the broad end of the other” (VP
824; CW1 658), the minimum of one Tincture coinciding with the maximum of the
other, and on the page these often become simply triangles, but it needs to be borne in
mind that this is a flattening of the cone, which is in turn a three-dimensional representation collapsing a dynamic process in space and time.
(see AVB 72)
Yeats views the Tinctures as including or taking part in almost every polarity of
the cosmos by means of extended correspondences, in the perennial manner of occult
thought. Many of these correspondences are relatively traditional and once he had stated
that the primary Tincture was solar and objective, while the antithetical was lunar and subjective, Yeats would be aware that his esoterically trained “schoolmates” would automatically make a series of further attributions by correspondence. Most of these are confirmed
by passing references throughout A Vision, but not all, and they are never clearly set forth
either for the schoolmates or the more general reader. The solar is traditionally associated
with the spirit, the logical, the linear, the word, the idea, the Apollonian and the masculine, while the lunar with the soul, the emotional, the non-linear, the image, the form, the
Dionysian and the feminine. The clearest lists of the attributes of Yeats’s Tinctures are set
forth in the context of their historical manifestations, which are necessarily slightly limited
and skewed.14 The primary is associated in historical civilization with “an age of necessity,
truth, goodness, mechanism, science, democracy, abstraction, peace” and the antithetical
with “an age of freedom, fiction, evil, kindred, art, aristocracy, particularity, war” (AVB
52); similarly in its religious manifestation, “A primary dispensation looking beyond itself
towards transcendent power is dogmatic, levelling, unifying, feminine, humane, peace its
means and end; an antithetical dispensation obeys imminent [for immanent] power, is expressive, hierarchical, multiple, masculine, harsh, surgical” (AVB 263). The attribution of
feminine to the solar and masculine to the lunar is an unexpected twist, and the associated
mixing of attributes has consequences that are important since sexual imagery and polarity underlie many of Yeats’s ideas and the ways that he uses them in his poetry and plays.15
As stated already, while Yeats’s cosmos is founded on this duality, it is non-dualistic:
“The cones of the Tinctures mirror reality but are themselves pursuit and illusion.…the
The Foundations of A Vision
7
sphere is reality” (AVB 73). The duality is illusory, like the maya of Indian philosophy, but
in contrast to the conventional aim of the Indian sage, Yeats embraces the dualism and
the illusion.16 Although ultimate reality may be non-dual, human monotheism is no truer
than human polytheism, nor are human conceptions of unity any more valid than human
conceptions of multiplicity, since they are both expressions of the antinomy. For Yeats the
cosmos can be expressed in human thought equally well and equally imperfectly as either
a single godhead or a community of spirits, and he himself prefers the latter: “I think that
two conceptions, that of reality as a congeries of beings, that of reality as a single being,
alternate in our emotion and in history, and must always remain something that human
reason, because subject always to one or the other, cannot reconcile” (Pages from a Diary
Written in 1930, Ex 305). What monotheists conceive of as “God’s abstract or separate
thoughts” are for Yeats “spaceless, timeless beings that behold and determine each other”
(Ex 305).
Yeats’s natural contemplation is not directed towards divine unity, although it remains the opposite pole of his dialectic and he does not deny it, but towards the multiplicity of individual souls and their community or congeries. These souls are eternal and some
of them are born into earthly incarnation, repeatedly:
All ancient nations believed in the re-birth of the soul and probably had empirical evidence.…Even though we may think temporal existence illusionary it
cannot be capricious; it is…the characteristic act of the soul and must reflect
the soul’s coherence. All our thought seems to lead by antithesis to some new
affirmation of the supernatural.…We may come to think that nothing exists
but a stream of souls, that all knowledge is biography, and…that every soul is
unique.…
(“Introduction to The Resurrection,” VPl 934–35; CW2 725; Ex 396–97)
Although his comment is couched in the language of possibility, Yeats suggests that he
conceives that “nothing exists but a stream of souls.” This stream is both the souls’ passage
through their series of incarnations and also the stream of space, time and consciousness,
which proceeds from the souls’ “characteristic act,” “temporal existence.” In Yeats’s conception, the souls are responsible for the whole fabric of the universe, and the majority of
these souls are not incarnate as human beings. In A Vision A Yeats quotes the opinion that
“time and space [are] the work of our ancestors” and then states that “With the system
in my bones I must declare that those ancestors still live and that time and space would
vanish if they closed their eyes” (CW13 128; AVA 158), yet those ancestors are not a separate class of being and are also the earlier lives of souls who continue being born into the
stream of space and time themselves.
The stream of souls or community of spirits (the two terms are equivalent in this
general context)17 is a vital element of Yeats’s conception of the cosmos, and is not limited
to those who are or have been human, and includes beings “that have never lived in mortal
bodies” (“The Twisting of the Rope and Hanrahan the Red,” VSR 199). It is most clearly
outlined in A Vision A Book IV, “The Gates of Pluto,” where the cloud of spirit witnesses
is given some treatment: Daimons, Ghostly Selves, associated spirits, spirits between death
and birth, spirits at Phase 1 and Phase 15, Covens, Teaching Spirits, Arcons.18 Not all of
8
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
these are dealt with clearly, mainly because Yeats himself was far from certain about their
exact nature, however he gives the reader a sense of the supernatural night-side of reality
that is entered more fully in dreams and after death. In A Vision B this material is incorporated in Book III, “The Soul in Judgment,” but made subservient to the process of the
individual’s afterlife and the exposition of the Principles rather than the more animate
universe that A Vision A sketches. Yeats laments that “Because we no longer discover the
still unpurified dead through our own and others’ dreams, and those in freedom through
contemplation, religion cannot answer the atheist” (AVB 223),19 but A Vision B itself marginalizes this material, perhaps out of fear of being associated with “popular spiritualism”
(AVB 24). In A Vision A Yeats writes of seeking to restore the ancient world’s perspective,
where “every condition of mind discovered by analysis, even that which is timeless, spaceless, is present vivid experience to some being” (CW13 207; AVA 252), and he advocated
this “hierarchy of beings from man up to the One” in a letter to Joseph Hone as a solution
to “much of the confusion of modern philosophy, perhaps the whole realism versus idealism quarrel”: “What I do not see but may see or have seen, is perceived by another being.
In other words is part of the fabric of another being.…We are in the midst of life and there
is nothing but life” (24 September [1927?], L 728).
This extended web of being was the basis for an aphoristic distillation of Yeats’s thinking, written in one of the notebooks he was using to redraft A Vision during 1929. He
put the system’s complexities to one side for a while to focus on its core and constructed
a simple set of propositions around the conception of the universe as a congeries of souls
or spirits, which went so far as to make all of experienced reality a manifestation of the
individual spirit and its fellows.20
1. Reality is a timeless & spaceless community of Spirits which perceive each
other. Each Spirit is determined by & determines those it perceives, and each
Spirit is unique.
2. When these Spirits reflect themselves into time & space they are so many
destinies which determine each other, & each Spirit sees the others as thoughts,
images, objects of sense. Time & space are unreal.
3. This reflection into time & space is only complete at certain moments of
birth, or passivity, which recur many times in each destiny. At these moments
the destiny receives its character until the next such moment from all other
Spirits or from the whole external universe. The horoscope is a set of geometrical
relations between the Spirit’s reflection and the principal masses in the universe
and defines that character.
4. The emotional character of a timeless & spaceless Spirit reflects itself as its
condition in time, its intellectual character as its condition in space. The position
of a Spirit in space & time therefore defines character.
5. Human life is either the struggle of a destiny against all other destinies, or a
transformation of the character defined in the horoscope into timeless & space-
The Foundations of A Vision
9
less existence. The whole passage from birth to birth should be an epitome of the
whole passage of the universe through time & back into its timeless & spaceless
condition.
6. The acts and nature of a Spirit during any one life are a section or abstraction of reality & are unhappy because incomplete. They are a gyre or part of a
gyre, whereas reality is a sphere.
7. Though the Spirits are determined by each other they cannot completely lose
their freedom. Every possible statement or perception contains both terms—the
self & that which is perceived.21
If Martin Buber famously proposed two ways of perceiving the world, an “I–It” that objectifies and an “I–Thou” that relates, Yeats puts both of these into an “I–Ye” dualism.22
Yeats conceives of reality as the product of collective perception in which all impinge
upon “each other,” affecting and affected by their fellows, partaking in the whole but
asserting independence (Propositions 1 and 7). It is very much an antithetical answer to
what Yeats understood as Berkeley’s primary conception of reality, where physical reality
persists because it is “the thought of a more powerful spirit which he named God” (CW13
128; AVA 158). Yeats accepts much of Berkeley’s idealism but substitutes a multitudinous
community of perceivers for a single “powerful spirit” or deity. He also notes that Berkeley
“thought that ‘we perceive’ and are passive whereas God creates in perceiving. He creates
what we perceive” (Ex 320), but here Yeats’s spirits are both passive and creative in their
perception.23 The other spirits are part of the flow of consciousness as well as the stream of
phenomena, “thoughts, images, objects of sense” (Proposition 2).
Yeats also sees in this conception a justification of astrology, since the planets and
zodiac are simply massive and predictable parts of this spiritual web, and views the spirit’s
incarnation in terms of taking on emotional, antithetical time and intellectual, primary
space (Propositions 3 and 4).24 This web of time and space is part of the soul’s destiny and
its disposition at a particular moment molds the character that it will temporarily assume
during incarnation, which is captured in the moment and place reflected in the horoscope
(Propositions 4 and 5). The term “horoscope” here stands for a complex group of elements
in A Vision, including both the birth chart of traditional astrology, which delineates the
more superficial character, and also Yeats’s special anatomy of the being (the Faculties),
which shows the soul’s deeper spiritual task in life and which is expressed through and
alongside the horoscopic character, which may help or hinder it.25 Overarching all is the
distinction between the two Tinctures: the antithetical being should strive during its life
for greater individuation, against the spiritual collective, “the struggle of a destiny against
all other destinies” to bring the soul and spirit into deeper contact with emotional experience, while the primary being should strive to unify itself with the collective, in “a transformation of the character defined in the horoscope into timeless & spaceless existence”
to bring the soul and spirit to intellectual understanding (Proposition 5).
Intrinsically, however, human life is antithetical and what we call afterlife primary,
so each incarnation at birth starts on its antithetical search for individuation and physical
experience, while at death it starts its primary search to understand and reintegrate that
10
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
experience into its self. This mirrors the universe’s fall into experience and gradual redemption from the physical, divine manifestation and return, so that the “whole passage
from birth to birth should be an epitome of the whole passage of the universe through
time & back into its timeless & spaceless condition” (Proposition 5).26 The search for
individuation is the urge to freedom, which constantly comes up against limits and, in
searching to lose itself in what is greater than itself, the self is constantly made aware of
its separateness and difference (Propositions 5 and 6).
Both elements of the polarity are, of course, present throughout experience: “Every
possible statement or perception contains both terms—the self & that which is perceived”
(Proposition 7) so that there is always an “I” and always “another.” In more complete
terms, “Every action of man declares the soul’s ultimate, particular freedom, and the soul’s
disappearance in God; declares that reality is a congeries of beings and a single being”
(AVB 52). “Every action” includes every poetic or creative act, and each contains in some
degree the antithetical assertion of the individual freedom and the primary acceptance of
final unity, the antithetical congeries and the primary whole. Yeats, writing in his 1930 diary, saw more of a dichotomy: “I am always, in all I do, driven to a moment which is the
realisation of myself as unique and free, or to a moment which is the surrender to God of
all that I am” (Ex 305). He felt that he expressed the primary badly in comparison with
the antithetical: trying to sing the approach of a time “where all shall [be] as particular
and concrete as human intensity permits,” the coming antithetical world-cycle, he notices
that he has “almost understood [his] intention” to express these multitudinous forces in
poetry. However: “Again and again with remorse, a sense of defeat, I have failed when I
would write of God, written coldly and conventionally” (Ex 305). Yet he acknowledges
that the triumph of one or the other is unthinkable: “Could those two impulses, one as
much a part of truth as the other, be reconciled, or if one or the other could prevail, all
life would cease” (Ex 305). It is the tension of the two and their conflict that is the basis of
life, and once that movement stops the process of life is over.27 It is possible that the end
of time and life is the beginning of fuller being but that is not where Yeats’s interests lie.
He is happy to be an antithetical man, acknowledging his partiality and incompleteness,
without any desire to rid himself of it. Gazing on the austere, sensuous delights of Capri
in winter: “I murmured as I have countless times, ‘I have been part of it always and there
is maybe no escape, forgetting and returning life after life like an insect in the roots of the
grass.’ But murmured it without terror, in exultation almost” (CW13 lvi; AVA xiii). The
desire to surrender into union with godhead is weak, and he can even relish the possibility
of limitless incarnations, the very opposite of Buddhist or Hindu teaching.
Though he sees himself as a man in whom the antithetical Tincture predominates,
giving him a subjective, creative emphasis in his current incarnation, he considers he is
at a point in the cycle where this influence is weakening, so that with successive lives the
primary will become stronger until it will inevitably predominate for a while. Then he will
no longer savor being tied to the wheel but want the path of the saint out of the circle.28
Once the cycle reaches the maximum of primary objectivity, in “complete plasticity” (AVB
183; CW13 94; AVA 116), the soul will then start another series, at a more developed
level. Within its various series of incarnations, the individual spirit therefore expresses
many characters and approaches to living, moving from objective search for worldly reality to subjective individuality to objective social and spiritual emphasis and then back
The Foundations of A Vision
11
again. The language sometimes implies that the character comes from outside (in Yeats’s
astrological terms, that the planets impose their influence), but in fact that character represents the inner necessity to bring certain elements to the fore, so that time and space
are the external expression of the inner state. Yet, since the individual life can only hope
to express a fraction of the spirit’s whole, its fractured nature is an inevitable source of
unhappiness (Proposition 6).29
Yeats conceives of an eternal archetype of the soul, “the timeless individuality or
daimon,” and “This timeless individuality contains archetypes of all possible existences
whether of man or brute, and as it traverses its circle of allotted lives, now one, now another, prevails. We may fail to express an archetype, or alter it by reason, but all done from
nature is its unfolding into time” (“Introduction to The Words upon the Window-Pane,”
VPl 970; CW2 721; Ex 368).30 The complete soul is expressed aspect by aspect, appearing
in space and time only partially at any given moment and place, and epitomizing on a
microcosmic scale the reflection into time and space of the macrocosmic reality: “Time
must continue [till] reality has been completely displayed as a series.”31 Yeats also refers
approvingly to Berkeley’s thought that the Seven Days of Genesis were “not the creation
of sun and moon, beast and man, but their entrance into time, or into human perception,
or into that of some spirit” (CW5 107; E&I 403), and in a similar way, the complete soul
may contain all the possibilities of existence in potentia, but they must be realized through
entrance into incarnation, or through perception by other spirits.
If the soul’s “characteristic act” is “temporal existence,” what it expresses is the archetype contained in the Daimon. The Daimon is a somewhat awkward figure within the
system, an unpredictable element within the regularity of A Vision. It remained elusive
even to Yeats, seen variously as the individual archetype, a twin being, controlling angel
and theatrical director (AVB 84), but it is a form of guiding essence and he writes of a
person’s “Daimon or ultimate self ” (AVB 83), referring also to “my own Daimon, my own
buried self ” (CW3 279; Au 371). More allusively, he notes that “revelation is from the self,
but from that age-long memoried self, that shapes the elaborate shell of the mollusc and
the child in the womb, that teaches the birds to make their nest; and that genius is a crisis
that joins that buried self for certain moments to our trivial daily mind” (CW3 216–17;
Au 272), phrasing that echoes A Vision A where he writes that the Daimon “is that being
united to man which knows neither good nor evil, and shapes the body in the womb, and
impresses upon the mind its form. She is revealed to man in moments of prevision and
illumination and in much that we call good and evil fortune…” (CW13 182; AVA 220).32
In notes for A Vision B Yeats speculates about the Daimon in terms that partly unfold the
implications of the phrase “that age-long memoried self,” seeing it as embodying a continuum of memory, yet pointing to the paradox that the Daimon is truly fullness rather than
memory of the past, pre-existent archetype rather than remembered or lived experience:
“Is not the Daimon in some sense that being which can stretch its memory…through 28
incarnations & man that being whose memory includes one only.…The Daimon in its
essence is always the timeless moment, the symbolic sphere,— the fullness which includes
every movement.”33 This timeless moment is a form of eternity, beyond or without time,
and links the Daimon to the unfallen unity that precedes the antinomy, which is expressed
in A Vision A in terms of its remaining “always in the Thirteenth Cycle” (CW13 182;
AVA 220), a formulation for eternity or the divine.34 In many ways the Daimon is a link
12
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
to the divine, separate from our selves but tied to us, through which we can relate to the
eternal personally. Yet as the more complete archetype, the Daimon also embodies opposition to the human, being a perpetual opposite, embodying all of the archetype that is not
being expressed in the incarnation in question: it is primary if the human is antithetical
and antithetical if the human is primary, male if female and female if male, pursuing and
engineering the soul’s crises.35
Within the incompleteness of the single life that the human can perceive, the core of
Yeats’s morality is completeness of experience: finding the soul’s inner purpose and realizing this, exploring it as fully as possible. The purpose varies according to the life’s place
in the cycle of reincarnation: the soul starts its journey discovering the objective reality
of the world through a number of primary incarnations, gradually feeling the growing
importance of selfhood and inner dreams, which become stronger until they take over
as the main focus and the subjective, antithetical element becomes dominant. Once the
soul’s experience has reached a maximum of subjectivity, in a supernatural stage of isolation and separation from the whole, it begins to seek an intellectual frame of reference
and objectivity again until that objectivity in turn takes over, and the social and spiritual
objective becomes paramount, bringing a different engagement with the outside world in
its train. This too reaches a degree of maximum objectivity, where a supernatural stage of
union with the whole of creation overwhelms all individuality, until the cycle starts again
at a higher, more advanced level, not so much a circle as a kind of helix.
Within this system it is pointless for the soul to seek to express itself with subjective
intellectual sincerity when it is in an incarnation that requires it to explore worldly or
spiritual objectivity, and similarly a soul whose purpose is to explore imaginative creativity should not attempt to lead the life of a social reformer or saint. In creating a sect
of fictional believers in the system, an Arab people called the Judwalis, Yeats had them
“known among other Arabs for the violent contrast of character amongst them, for one
finds amongst them holy men, and others extremely licentious. Fanatical on all matters of
doctrine they seem tolerant of human frailty beyond any people I have ever met” (“The
Discoveries of Michael Robartes,” YVP4 16; cf. CW13 lx, AVA xviii–xix). It is not the
spectrum of character that is surprising, but the tolerance of them all, since unlike the adherents of some conventional religions, this sect considers that holiness is only appropriate
for a small group of people, and that licentiousness is just as appropriate for another group
and necessary for them to explore the limits of that particular incarnation.
Whether directed towards the antithetical licentiousness of sensuous self-absorption
or the primary holiness of connection with supernatural reality, incarnate life is for the
gathering of experience; a symbolic “day and night constitute an incarnation and the discarnate period which follows…the incarnation, symbolised by the moon at night” (AVB
79). Human life therefore is symbolic night, the lunar or antithetical half of a cycle during
which the soul weaves, creates and complicates. In contrast, symbolic day is the solar, primary half, the afterlife, where the soul clarifies, seeks to understand, simplify and absorb
the experience into the immortal being, an idea that A Vision shares with Theosophical
reincarnation. True understanding is therefore impossible to the living, and “Wisdom is
the property of the dead, / A something incompatible with life” (VP 482; CW1 242); even
true judgment may be impossible, so that it is only the dead forebears who can “judge
what I have done,” since “Eyes spiritualised by death can judge, / I cannot” (VP 604;
The Foundations of A Vision
13
CW1 329). This understanding is achieved through the processes of the afterlife, a series
of dream-like states and self-searching meditations where the soul repeatedly goes over
the life just lived in “expiation,” exploring it from as many angles as possible, changing
elements in the reliving, such as motive or even role, until the maximum experience has
been wrung from the material offered by the life. It follows that a life lived to the full, perhaps even full of errors or bad motives, will provide richer material for the afterlife, since
whatever has been experienced will be explored and reversed at various stages after death,
and “The more complete the expiation, or the less the need for it, the more fortunate the
succeeding life. The more fully a life is lived, the less the need for—or the more complete
is—the expiation” (AVB 236).36 This is as close as the system’s amoral humanism seems to
come to any concept of reward or punishment. Certainly there is no sense of good and evil
in terms of morality and they are almost relative terms, categories which must be reversed
during the afterlife so that the soul can be “purified of good and evil,” before they “vanish
into the whole” of total reality (AVB 231–32). A life fully lived also means that the cycle
of incarnations can be completed in fewer steps, while a life misdirected or frustrated in
some way will lead to a repetition at the same stage.
While human life is intrinsically antithetical, the driving force of the afterlife is towards primary unity: “We come at birth into a multitude and after death would perish
into the One…” (AVB 52). Yeats writes that the aim of the dead “is to enter at last into
their own archetype, or into all being: into that which is there always” (VPl 969; CW2
720; Ex 366), and once the process of the soul’s reliving and understanding is complete,
it is briefly united with “the Divine Ideas in their unity” (AVB 187).37 At this point “pure
mind” contains “within itself pure truth, that which depends only upon itself ” (AVB
189), but, unless the full archetype has been expressed in time and space and its twelve
cycles are finished, the being is then drawn back to birth and multitude.38 In A Vision A
Yeats writes of these spirits as having drunk “the Cup of Lethe” (CW13 195; AVA 236),
and the remainder of the afterlife is actually rather “before-life,” preparatory to the coming
incarnation. They are no longer “the dead” but “spirits” (AVB 235) who await the right
circumstances for rebirth and whose purpose is to purify their intention of complexity
and thereby attain a vision of perfection (AVB 233–34), moving in a world of Platonic
form.39 It is the stage to which Yeats assigned most of the spirits who communicated the
system of A Vision as well as the creative support that poetic tradition offers the individual
poet (AVB 234).
The paradigmatic cycle of reincarnation is one of twenty-eight stages, or as it is put in
an early typescript draft: “The philosophy is founded upon the conception that the typal
man lives through twelve 13 cycles each of twenty-eight incarnations corresponding to
the 28 lunar mansions” adding that the reason for the phrase “typal man” is that “sin may
increase or virtue decrease the number of incarnations” (YVP4 17).40 (The language of sin
and virtue was later rejected, but for Yeats sin is in effect the misdirection of the soul from
its life’s ordained purpose and virtue is the living of this purpose to the fullest possible
degree.41) The twenty-eight lunar mansions are taken as marking the phases of the moon
and these are the notation which Yeats uses to express the cyclical growth and withering of
the primary and antithetical Tinctures.42
The Great Wheel of the phases is one of the images of A Vision that first strikes any
reader, whether in Edmund Dulac’s archaized engraving (AVB 66; CW13 lviii; AVA fac-
14
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
ing xiii) or in the diagram (AVB 81; CW13 14; AVA 13), and announced in the poem “The
Phases of the Moon” (AVB 59–64; CW13 3–9; AVA 3–8; VP 372–77; CW1 164–68). It is
easy to see both why Yeats put this symbol first in A Vision A and, on more mature reflection in A Vision B, deferred its presentation, as it is mythically vivid but tends to submerge
the vital, central dualism and to impose its quasi-astrological aspect upon the reader’s understanding. Of course it also dominated Yeats’s own thinking in many respects too, and
provided him with the
most evocative of symbols in the waxing and
waning of the moon.
It is a natural image of
increase and decrease,
symbolizing the cyclical interchange of two
principles, sun and
moon, light and dark,
and already a powerful element of Yeats’s
own poetic mythology.
It is however a partial image or symbol,
which can sometimes
distract attention from
more fundamental and
simpler ideas, as Yeats
recognized in A Vision
B where he refers to the
Wheel in A Vision A as “an unexplained rule of thumb” (AVB 81) rather than the foundation of the ideas. The phases are, though, essential as the nomenclature for registering
the two Tinctures’ relative strengths and directions of movement, so that even when the
symbol of the moon’s waxing and waning is not immediately relevant they remain as the
notation.
The order of the incarnations is largely immutable and differences between adjacent
steps are relatively small within the quarters, until the crucial phases are reached. These
cardinal points of the cycle, Phases 1, 8, 15 and 22, are simplest in terms of delineation
since they are complete absolutes or perfect balances, but they are the most problematic
in terms of human life.43 The new moon’s Phase 1 and the full moon’s Phase 15 represent
complete objectivity and complete subjectivity respectively, states which are impossible
for humanity, as “human life cannot be completely objective” (AVB 183; CW13 94;
AVA 116) or subjective, and the incarnations are supernatural and non-physical, forming yet another part of the great spirit world that Yeats thinks of as surrounding us. The
half-moon phases, Phase 8 and Phase 22, are less problematic in conceptual terms but
more difficult to live, since in them the soul shifts from primary to antithetical goals or
vice versa. The moment of balance comes during the life itself and, before that tipping
point, the bias is to one side and, after it, to the other, so that it is almost impossible to
The Foundations of A Vision
15
live either of these lives adequately, which frequently entails repetitions.44 In comparison
the incarnations of the other Phases are straightforward, since the goal of a primary or
an antithetical life is relatively clear, although the emphasis in Yeats’s descriptions on the
life “out of phase” points to the fundamental difficulty that he sees in self-understanding
and self-knowledge.
The system presented in A Vision deals almost exclusively with human life and with
the human condition, both at the individual level and in more general historical terms,
where the cycle of the two Tinctures is expressed in broadly similar stages. Yeats divides
the historical cycle into twelve gyres rather than twenty-eight phases, placing two steps
between each of the cardinal points. The nomenclature of the phases is retained, however,
since the broader steps effectively subsume several phases and Yeats understandably does
not wish to multiply labels. Within historical time there is actually a myriad of cycles in
operation simultaneously, from individual acts and lives to the great cultural movements.
The ones that most concern Yeats, however, are those of some 2,000 years and those of
some 1,000 years, in which religions and their civilizations are seen to move.45 A religious
dispensation lasts for some 2,000 years and is either primary or antithetical. It in turn gives
rise to a corresponding civilization, which starts (its Phase 1) at the dispensation’s midpoint (Phase 15) and also lasts for some 2,000 years. At the mid-point of this civilization,
its Phase 15, the religious dispensation of the opposite Tincture arises (starting at its Phase
1) and so on in syncopated succession. Specifically, the primary Christian religion arose at
the height of the antithetical classical civilization, and the primary culture of Christendom
arose around 1000 CE. This culture reaches its high point around 2000 CE when there
will be the origin of the next antithetical religion, which Yeats looks forward to in poems
such as “The Second Coming” and “The Gyres.” The cycle only really applies to western
European civilization, at least in this form, but the treatment of this element of the system
is particularly prominent in the poetry, making it the point where many readers of Yeats’s
poetry first encounter the ideas of A Vision.
The imminence of the new dispensation in his own time was particularly important
for Yeats, who saw himself as a forerunner, even prophet, of the new era. Antithetical in
character, he was in sympathy with the antithetical dispensation to come rather than the
final throes of the primary one. Indeed in A Vision A he seems to see the book as part of
the philosophy that prepares the way for the new:
During the period said to commence in 1927, with the 11th gyre, must arise
a form of philosophy, which will become religious and ethical in the 12th gyre
and be in all things opposite of that vast plaster Herculean image, final primary
thought. It will be concrete in expression, establish itself by immediate experience, seek no general agreement, make little of God or any exterior unity, and
it will call that good which a man can contemplate himself as doing always and
no other doing at all. It will make a cardinal truth of man’s immortality that its
virtue may not lack sanction, and of the soul’s re-embodiment that it may restore
to virtue that long preparation none can give and hold death an interruption.…
Men will no longer separate the idea of God from that of human genius, human
productivity in all its forms. (CW13 177; AVA 214–15)
16
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
In many ways this is A Vision’s self-description. Yeats has Owen Aherne comment on
the work’s “concrete expression” (CW13 lxiv; AVA xxiii), it seeks “no general agreement,”
makes “little of God,” but makes “a cardinal truth of man’s immortality” and reincarnation. Generally it both seeks to present the system as a whole and, even more, to be a
manifesto for the antithetical side of that system, in which God will be perceived in creative human genius and antithetical multiplicity.
This statement was removed from the 1937 version of A Vision, along with the earlier
version’s comments on the present day and future. In its place Yeats ponders the nature
of the symbol, the possibility of revelation and how much can be foreseen, alluding to
the techniques of meditation he had learned during his training with the Golden Dawn.
He questions how to “work out upon the phases the gradual coming and increase of the
counter-movement, the antithetical multiform influx” but realizes that:
I have already said all that can be said. The particulars are the work of the Thirteenth Cone or cycle which is in every man and called by every man his freedom.
Doubtless, for it can do all things and knows all things, it knows what it will do
with its own freedom but it has kept the secret. (AVB 302)
The entry of the new religious dispensation may be predictable, even its general character,
but its particular form is not (viz. AVB 263).
The key to the future lies in the troublesome form of the Thirteenth Cone or Cycle. It
is troublesome because it stands for God in Yeats’s system, but he never deals with it clearly
and its nature is very different from that of most believers’ conception of God. Though it
is not a cone, nor the thirteenth of anything, its name alludes to the soul’s twelve cycles
of incarnation, after which the soul’s archetype will have been manifested fully into space
and time and it will enter the full possession of itself in the cycle beyond, which is out of
time but can be seen as the thirteenth. Each cycle in time is like the circular colure of an
armillary sphere and as these move on in succession form a sphere and are integrated into
a new order of whole. Even in their partial earthly lives the “eternal archetypes” (Ex 397)
are present “in every man” and through them humanity may partake of their timeless
state, so that through them the final completed whole, the Thirteenth Cone, is implicit.46
In a radically recast sense, the kingdom of heaven is within (cf. YVP4 40; 103). The Thirteenth Cone’s relation to time and the whole of creation is similar to that of the Daimon’s
relation to the individual being, a perpetual opposite (viz. AVB 210), though its opposition is illusory, since its true form is the all-inclusive sphere (AVB 193 & 240).
Ultimately the purely primary is the beginning and end of the Wheel. Religions and
schools that teach reincarnation, including Theosophy and the Golden Dawn, tend to
stress the importance of personal development and escape from the wheel of repetition
and suffering. Yeats’s system ostensibly shares this goal, in the phaseless sphere, which “becomes, the moment it is thought of…the thirteenth cone” (AVB 193), or does so when he
writes from the primary perspective of conventional spirituality, as in the “Seven Propositions.” This eternal moment “is in every man and called by every man his freedom” (AVB
302), but it is not conventional release from incarnation, it is the archetype of all incarnation, which constantly coexists with the process of the two antinomies. Yeats, though, is
generally too partisan to champion even such ideas with any conviction:
The Foundations of A Vision
17
There is perhaps no final happy state except in so far as men may gradually grow
better; escape may be for individuals alone who know how to exhaust their possible lives, to set, as it were, the hands of the clock racing. Perhaps we shall learn
to accept even innumerable lives with happy humility—“I have been always an
insect in the roots of the grass”—and putting aside calculating scruples be ever
ready to wager all upon the dice.
(“Introduction to The Resurrection,” VPl 935; CW2 725; cf. Ex 398)
For Yeats the process has taken over from the end, and he views interminable process with
equanimity.47 Even the individuals who know how to set “the hands of the clock racing”
must strive to live the life of the sensual libertine at Phase 13 as fully and wholeheartedly
as the life of the saint at Phase 27 in order to speed their progress around the wheel. While
in the grip of the antithetical and seeking to assert human individuality, their rebellion
paradoxically speeds their progress towards the divine: “Hatred of God may bring the soul
to God” (CW1 292; VP 558). Every element evokes its opposite, so that the assertion of
“the soul’s ultimate, particular freedom” is tied to “the soul’s disappearance in God” (AVB
52) and, if the tension of these opposites is lost, life ends, since the oscillation of the opposites is the rhythm of life.
If the entry of the soul’s archetype into time is a gyre, spun like a thread from a spherical spindle, Yeats also seems to conceive of the streams of souls being braided and wound
again, to conjoin into a single whole:
We may come to think that nothing exists but a stream of souls…that these
souls, these eternal archetypes, combine into greater units as days and nights into
months, months into years, and at last into the final unit that differs in nothing
from that which they were at the beginning: everywhere that antinomy of the
One and the Many.…
(“Introduction to The Resurrection,” VPl 934–35; CW2 725; Ex 396–97)
The antinomy ultimately resides in the opposition of the many individuals and the One;
these “two eternities” (VP 637; CW1 333) are represented as the self and the soul, the soul
and the race, man and God. We are impelled towards one or the other but neither movement is more real than the other, for “if either circuit, that which carries us into man or
that which carries us into God, were reality, the generation had long since found its term”
(Ex 307) and time would have come to an end.
The tension maintained by the antinomies is essential to life and to Yeats’s art, which
dramatizes the tensions, by taking now one perspective and now another, and “conceives
of the world as a continual conflict,” which Yeats names the “Vision of Evil” (AVB 144;
CW13 65; AVA 78). A Vision itself proposes this view of existence, a dualism that pits a
whole series of opposites against each other and sets a gulf between them but also views
them as no more than “the two scales of a balance, the two butt-ends of a see-saw” (AVB
29). From the two antinomies arises a vast array of subtleties that can be bewildering yet
are ultimately founded upon a simple opposition.
Recognizing the antinomies’ dynamic within Yeats’s later works enriches the reading
and illuminates the poet’s thought. Yeats himself felt that such a recognition could applied
18
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
more broadly: “I cannot prove that this drama exists…but I assert that he who accepts it
though it be but as a Myth like something thought out upon a painted stage sees the world
breaking into life.”48 Whether or not this is true, the dramatic philosophy that springs
from the conflict of the antinomies informs Yeats’s own writing and view of reality. This is
not to reduce the poetry and plays to a single theme or idea, especially since Yeats himself
demonstrates how much complexity they elaborate in his own system, but it acknowledges a source of Yeats’s creativity and underlines the vigor and richness of the vision.
Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
Space sadly precludes any real consideration of the system in Yeats’s art in this essay, but see Wayne Chapman, “‘Metaphors for Poetry,” 217–251.
The Mystery Religion of W. B. Yeats (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984), 64. Hough’s approach, which derives
from the book’s origin as public lectures, has much to recommend it in seeking to understand the broadest
ideas and themes, putting some of the detail to one side, and I am following that method here to some
extent. However, he jettisons far too much after only the most cursory consideration, including central
concepts such as the Daimon and the Principles. Genuine simplification cannot ignore essentials.
The Mystery Religion of W. B. Yeats, 64.
See the reviews of AE, who had shared many of Yeats’s Hermetic interests, and G. R. S. Mead, who shared
involvement in the Theosophical Society. AE’s review, “A Vision” (The Irish Statesman, 13 February 1926,
714–16), is printed in full in CH 269–73. This review, together with Mead’s in The Quest (18:1, October
1926, 96–98) and most others, are also available at www.YeatsVision.com/Reviews.html (consulted June
2009).
See The Mystery Religion of W. B. Yeats, Chapter 1.
At this stage he was maintaining a fictional provenance for the material of A Vision, so the terms are slightly
inexact.
See Margaret Mills Harper, Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual; and Literary Collaboration of George and W. B.
Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), especially Chapter 3.
Each edition has a significantly different set of fictions and prefatory material, though common to both is a
version of the story of Michael Robartes’s discovery of Giraldus, his connection of Giraldus’s work with the
teaching of Kusta ben Luka and the Judwalis, and his dealings with Owen Aherne. Three framing poems
are also common to both editions “The Phases of the Moon,” “Leda,” and “All Souls’ Night.”
The Arabs and Giraldus certainly date to December 1917 (see www.YeatsVision.com/Fictions.
html#Background; consulted January 2010), since both are mentioned in a letter to Lady Gregory on 4
January 1918 (L 643–44) and discussed in the script itself on 12 January 1918 (YVP1 250) and possibly
earlier, while the element of Robartes and Aherne is similarly early.
See Colin McDowell “To ‘Beat Upon the Wall’: Reading A Vision,” which addresses the problem of flawed
exposition and “the spectre of incompletion,” YA4 (1986) 219–227.
The primary names are twenty: Empedocles, Burnet, Heraclitus, Simplicius, Duhem, Alcemon, Dr Sturm,
St Thomas Aquinas, Dr Dee, Macrobius, Swedenborg, Flaubert, Berkeley, Plotinus, MacKenna, Gentile,
Kant, Boehme, Hegel, Blake. However, Aristotle is mentioned to explain who Simplicius was, Pythagoras
to explain who Alcemon was, and it is assumed that the reader knows the author of the Timaeus to be
Plato. There are also references to Gentile’s translator, H. Wildon Carr, and to Yeats’s own works.
Yeats often prefers to account for ideas that in fact had a predominantly occult or esoteric origin with ideas
from more respectable or venerated thinkers, and sometimes obscures the thought in doing so. Yeats hints
at this in his description of how Muses “sometimes form in those low haunts” at the dockside “their most
lasting attachments” (AVB 24).
The Importance of Being Earnest (London: Leonard Smithers & Co., 1899), 15.
These appear in two places in A Vision B: the introductory fictions (AVB 52) and in the treatment of the
Great Year of the Ancients (AVB 263).
The fullest “table of opposites” for the Tinctures is probably that given by Northrop Frye in his essay “The
Rising of the Moon,” in Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society (Bloomington & London:
Indiana University Press, 1976), 245–74 at 256–57, with some rather debatable inclusions, but for some
reason he omits the terms “masculine” and “feminine.”
The Foundations of A Vision
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
19
Cf. Advaita (“non-dualism”), one of the six schools of orthodox Vedanta, which maintains that the Self
(Atman) and the One (Brahman) are not distinct, whereas the Dvaita (“dualism”) school holds that they
are absolutely different. In Vishishtadvaita (“modified non-dualism”) Brahman alone exists but is characterized by multiplicity.
In both religious and secular usage, there is not usually a distinction between spirit and soul, but in esoteric usage “spirit” (Greek: pneuma, Latin: spiritus) is usually taken as higher, often solar and immortal,
while “soul” (Greek: psyche, Latin: anima) is lower, often lunar and mortal (and each of these can often be
anatomized further). Yeats uses the terms relatively indiscriminately when writing for a general audience
but, within A Vision, Spirit is applied to the primary, immortal Principle of the being, while “soul” is more
vaguely applied to the selfhood that survives the body, especially in “The Soul in Judgment,” and effectively
means the Principles as a whole.
Yeats remained uncertain about the distinction between the Daimon and the Ghostly Self, and later seems
to have dispensed with such concepts as Covens, collective Daimons (AVA 228–29, 234; CW13 189, 193),
and Arcons (a Yeatsian version of “Archons”), beings begotten by contact with spirits at Phase 1 or 15 and
embodying ideas or expressions (AVA 241–44; CW13 199–201). See “The Thirteenth Cone,” n68, 189–90.
The “still unpurified dead” are spirits in the earlier stages of their afterlives, “those in freedom” spirits in the
later stages of their afterlives or beyond incarnation: “The Spirits before the Marriage [or Beatitude, fourth
stage of the afterlife] are spoken of as the dead. After that they are spirits, using that word as it is used in
common speech” (AVB 235); at the fifth stage, the Purification, “the Spirit…is at last free” and aims to
purify its intention of complexity (AVB 233).
In the “Seven Propositions” “Spirit” seems to be a semi-technical usage, largely congruent with Spirit in
Celestial Body. The capitalization of “spirit” in Rapallo Notebook D is very uncertain in Yeats’s handwriting, but the later typescript has “Spirit” capitalized.
NLI MS 13,581 (Rapallo Notebook D) 24 recto and 26 recto. The text here incorporates all Yeats’s changes
on the page and is very similar to the typescript NLI MS 30,280 (titled “Seven Propositions”), which probably dates from the 1930s. He told Frank Pearce Sturm, to whom he sent a similar list in October 1929 (“Six
Propositions”), that they were “mainly aimed at AE who in reading my Packet [for Ezra Pound] preferred
to it certain Indian aphorisms, & seems to think that aphorism [is] the true method” (FPS 100–01). The
version of NLI MS 30,280 is given by Virginia Moore, The Unicorn: W. B. Yeats’ Search for Reality (New York
NY: Macmillan, 1954), 378–89; Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (1954; 2nd ed. London: Faber &
Faber, 1964), 236–37; Hazard Adams, Blake and Yeats: The Contrary Vision, Cornell Studies in English, Vol.
40 (1955; New York: Russell & Russell, 1968), 287–88. See also www.YeatsVision.com/7Propositions.html
(consulted Dec 2009).
Buber’s Ich und Du (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1922) appeared in English, as I and Thou, in 1937.
Cf. “The essential sentence is of course ‘things only exist in being perceived,’ and I can only call perception
God’s when I add Blake’s ‘God only acts or is in existing beings or men’” (TSMC 80).
The earlier draft of the Propositions was titled “Astrology & the Nature of Reality” and states that “My
spirit reflects the timeless space less universe my empirical nature reflects the whole universe, including itself, as displayed at some one moment. Only the movements of the stars are sufficiently certain to permit
the mapping of the universe as displayed” (NLI MS 13,581, 23 verso). When Yeats sent the “Six Propositions” to Frank Pearce Sturm (see n21), he wrote that “They contain the first theoretical justification of
Astrology made in modern times” (FPS 100).
See Rory Ryan’s essay on the constitution of the human being in Yeats’s system (22–54) and Colin McDowell’s essay on the connection between the horoscope and Faculties (194–216). Yeats also entertained the idea
of the horoscope of conception showing temperament or destiny, while the horoscope of birth showed fate
(YVP3 31): “So too must each individual life retain to the end the seal set upon it at birth” (AVB 252).
Yeats says little about the universe’s passage “through time & back into its timeless & spaceless condition,”
but, as Hough comments, it seems to be very much in line with the broad view taken by Theosophy, the
Golden Dawn and general occult thought.
Yeats writes that it is not the traditional view of humanity’s being “re-absorbed into God’s freedom as final
reality. The ultimate reality must be all movement, all thought, all perception extinguished, two freedoms
unthinkably, unimaginably absorbed in one another” (Ex 307).
The opposition of artist and saint is already present in the essays of Discoveries (1906); see CW4 204–9;
E&I 281–88.
Since the fragmentation of individual life is an antithetical quality, it follows that the antithetical is in most
senses more isolated, unhappy and tragic than the primary: “The antithetical is creative, painful—per-
20
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
sonal—the Primary imitative, happy, general” (“Michael Robartes Foretells,” YO 222). Cf. “The primary is
that which serves, the antithetical that which creates” (AVB 85).
Cf. “There is something within a man or enclosing him that Leibnitz called a monad, and that I prefer to
call a daimon. That daimon is timeless, it has present before it his past and future, or it has no present and
is that past and future, and as the dramatisations [of the séance] recede from his waking mind and from
the dreams that reproduce his waking desires they begin to express that knowledge. But the mirror-like
daimon reflects all other daimons, the dramatisation or the medium can as it were pass from daimon to
daimon” (Dublin Magazine version of “Introduction to The Words upon the Window-Pane,” VPl 975).
First draft of “Seven Propositions,” NLI MS 13,581 (Rapallo Notebook D), 23 verso.
In AVA the Daimon is described as always being the opposite sex to its human counterpart. Since in AVA
Yeats takes the male as the default for the human, he takes the female as the default for the Daimon; in AVB
and the introduction to The Words upon the Window-Pane he uses the pronoun “it.”
NLI MS 13,580 (Rapallo Notebook C), penultimate page. “Movement” may be mistakenly written for
“moment.”
See Neil Mann’s essay “The Thirteenth Cone” (159–193).
See Janis Haswell’s essay “Yeats’s Vision and the Feminine” (291–306).
In reference to one of the particular afterlife states Yeats also notes, “The more complete the Dreaming Back
the more complete the Return and the more happy or fortunate the next incarnation” (AVB 227).
“Spirit and Celestial Body are mind and its object (the Divine Ideas in their unity)” (AVB 187) and, at the
stage of afterlife called the Beatitude or Marriage (AVB 232; cf. CW13 193–94; AVA 235–36), Spirit and
Celestial Body “are one and there is only Spirit; pure mind, containing within itself pure truth, that which
depends only upon itself ” (AVB 189). This is in some senses “the hymen of the soul” that Yeats had written
about so allusively in Per Amica Silentia Lunae (CW5 9; Myth 332).
In AVA, Yeats offers an apparently complex set of options, which may all actually be versions of the same
concept: “Were the Spirit strong enough, or were its human cycles finished, it would remain, as in the
Beatitude, permanently united to its Ghostly Self, or would, after two more states, be reborn into a spiritual
cycle where the movement of the gyre is opposite to that in our cycles, and incomprehensible to us, but
it will almost certainly pass to human rebirth because of its terror of what seems to be the loss of its own
being” (CW13 195; AVA 236).
The purification is symbolized as the dance on the flaming pavements of Byzantium (VP 498; CW1 253).
Most deletions have been omitted for clarity, but the substitution of “twelve” by “13” was reversed in subsequent drafts (YVP4 145). The thirteenth cycle when it first appeared in the automatic script was spaceless
but in time, beyond the ordinary twelve. Later it is seen as timeless and spaceless and therefore out of series,
see the discussion in the essay “The Thirteenth Cone” (159–193).
This is associated with living “in phase” or “out of phase” and with the lure of False Mask and False Creative
Mind.
The 28 mansions of the moon have traditionally referred to the moon’s passage through the zodiac (taking
an average of 27.3 days) rather than the moon’s phases (which go through their cycle in an average of 29.5
days), but the Yeatses’ division is symbolic and has no direct relation to the heavens or astrology.
These phases correspond to the “cardinal points,” North, East, South and West, and the “cardinal signs”
of the zodiac, Capricorn, Aries, Cancer and Libra (the attributions of both vary according to the solar or
lunar zodiacs), but are also “cardinal” in the etymological sense of being the “hinges” where the major
cruces occur.
The soul may return to Phase 8 and 22, “perhaps to all phases…up to four times, my instructors say,
before it can pass on. It is claimed, however, that four times is the utmost possible” (AVB 86; cf. CW13
19; AVA 20). At one point in the automatic script, Yeats was told that only thirteen of the phases could
not be missed: “One 3 & 4 8 12 13 15 17 & 18 22 26 27 28” (YVP2 28), and later that “the only phases
that could not be missed were 1 & 15” (YVP3 46). In the manuscript of the “The discoveries of Michael
Robartes,” the number became nine: “Every phase—except the 1, 4th 8th 12th 13th 15, 18th 19th 27th—
can be missed if the phase has been lived very fully, & some times we may repeat a phase up up [sic] to
three times” (YVP4 107). None of these ideas is included in A Vision.
The time period in these cases is based upon the Great Year measured by the Precession of the Equinoxes,
which through history has been calculated at various lengths but is now reckoned at 25,786 years. A
twelfth of this year or month is therefore 2,149 years. Yeats is never particularly concerned with numerical
precision however. See Matthew Gibson, “A Vision and Philosophy” (103–135) and Charles Armstrong,
“Ancient Frames: Classical Philosophy in Yeats’s A Vision” (90–102).
The Foundations of A Vision
46
47
48
21
These are possibly realized in special moments of “harmonisation,” linked to sexual love and the Critical
Moments, coming “at each crisis under the sway of the thirteenth cone. That is to say there is harmonisation or the substitution of the sphere for the cone” (CW13 140; AVA 172), but Yeats never deals with this
topic in any depth.
The passage echoes the Dedication to A Vision A where he speaks of “no escape, forgetting and returning
life after life like an insect in the roots of the grass” (CW13 lvi; AVA xiii) cited above. Yeats also quoted it
in a journal entry from 1929, see Ellmann, Identity of Yeats, 239.
Draft of AVB, NLI MS 30,757. The final stop is followed by a cancelled phrase: “like a hedgerow in
spring.” In the same mixed papers there is a version of the much-worked paragraph starting “Some will
ask…” (PEP 32; cf. AVB 24; cf. MYV2 414–15): “Some will ask if I believe what I have written & I will
not know how to answer, because we all mean different things by the word belief. Who will understand me
if I say that I should must & do believe it because it is a Myth.” As Yeats struggled with formulation and
confession, he seems to have revised towards an ever more noncommittal answer, not least in the greater
vagueness of the version that appeared in AVB in contrast with PEP.
THE IS AND THE OUGHT, THE KNOWER AND THE KNOWN:
AN ANALYSIS OF THE FOUR FACULTIES IN YEATS’S SYSTEM
by Rory Ryan
T
he primary and antithetical Tinctures are the principal oppositional energies that
create the double cone which allows for incarnation, and they set the basic structure for the whole of Yeats’s system. If the Tinctures set the design of the structure,
then the Faculties function as the bricks and mortar that give style and substance to the
system, providing specificity for each of its parts while binding the whole into an elegant
conceptual network. The present study aims to analyze and explore the Faculties and their
interconnections, using A Vision A (1925), A Vision B (1937) and the Vision Papers.1
I.1
Yeats introduces the Four Faculties in A Vision A by means of the wonderfully evocative
story, “The Dance of the Four Royal Persons” (CW13 10–12; AVA 9–11).2 In this story,
“the King, the Queen, the Prince and Princess of the Country of Wisdom” dance for the
Caliph to reveal all wisdom. The Caliph finds their dance dull, and orders their execution.
Each of the dancers implores their executioners to “smooth out the mark of my footfall on
the sand” (CW13 10; AVA 10). This alerts the Caliph to the significance of the patterns
caused by their footfalls, and Kusta ben Luka is summoned to explain them. The dancers
are the Four Faculties and their dance imprints the Great Wheel on the sand. Section IV of
Part 2 of Book II of A Vision A, “The Pairs of Opposites and the Dance of the Four Royal
Persons,” is an excellent place at which to begin one’s understanding of the Faculties. Yeats
presents the following diagram:
Diagram 1 (see CW13 109; AVA 135)
In the center are Will and Mind, which can reach their fullest expansion in Destiny and
Fate respectively. Yeats describes the diagram as follows: “Destiny is here the utmost range
possible to the Will if left in freedom, and its other name is beauty, whereas Fate is the
utmost range of the mind when left in its freedom and its other name is truth” (CW13
109; AVA 135). Here, in essence, is the founding conceptual scheme for the Four Faculties:
The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known
23
“Will is Will, Mind is Creative Mind, Destiny is Mask and Fate is Body of Fate” (CW13 111;
AVA 138). In Book I of A Vision A, Yeats identifies these as the Faculties: “Incarnate man
has Four Faculties which constitute the Tinctures—the Will, the Creative Mind, the Body of
Fate, and the Mask” (AVA 14). And in A Vision B, he offers these observations:
It will be enough until I have explained the geometric diagrams in detail to describe Will and Mask as the will and its object, or the Is and the Ought (or that
which should be), Creative Mind and Body of Fate as thought and its object, or
the Knower and the Known, and to say that the first two are lunar or antithetical or natural, the second two solar or primary or reasonable. A particular man
is classified according to the place of Will, or choice, in the diagram. (AVB 73)
The four Faculties are identified: Will and Mask are antithetical; Creative Mind and Body of
Fate are primary. In the antithetical phases (Phases 9–21), Will dominates Creative Mind,
and Mask dominates Body of Fate. In the primary phases (Phases 23–7), Creative Mind
dominates Will and Body of Fate dominates Mask.3 At Phase 15, Will and Mask have
completely absorbed and nullified Creative Mind and Body of Fate respectively. At Phase
1, Creative Mind and Body of Fate have nullified Will and Mask. Thus, at Phases 1 and 15,
only two Faculties operate, whereas at each of the remaining twenty-six phases, all four
Faculties are present. These move across the double cone in complementary pairs towards
complete antithetical expansion, after which they change direction and move towards
complete primary expansion. On the Great Wheel (below, Diagram 2) the direction of the
phases, from 1 to 28, is counter-clockwise. Will, which sets the phase, thus travels in an
counter-clockwise direction, while Creative Mind travels in a clockwise direction.
Diagram 2 (see AVB 81)
24
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
In Diagram 3, Will is at Phase 13 and the individual is moving towards pure antithetical
being (indicated by the direction of the arrow). In Diagram 4, Will is at Phase 27 and the
individual is moving towards pure primary being.
Diagram 3
Diagram 4
The position of the Will at any phase automatically sets the position of the three remaining Faculties, and these are easily calculated. In terms of the double cones, the position of
Creative Mind is best represented by a vertical line drawn from Will, as in Diagrams 3 and
4. In terms of the Great Wheel, Mask is always in exact opposition to Will (thus a relationship of 180° on the wheel) and Body of Fate is always in exact opposition to Creative Mind
(thus a relationship of 180°). In Diagram 5, a person at Phase 13 is indicated; the straight
line between Will at Phase 13 and Mask at Phase 27 indicates an angle of 180°. Similarly,
the straight line between Creative Mind at Phase 17 and Body of Fate at Phase 3 indicates
an angle of 180°.
Diagram 5
The angle of relationship between Will and Creative Mind varies from 0° (at Phases 1 and 15)
to 180° (at Phases 8 and 22). In Diagram 6a, the relationship of 0° between Will and Creative
The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known
25
Mind is shown in terms of the cones. In Diagrams 6b and 6c, this relationship of 0° is shown in
terms of the Great Wheel. In Diagram 7a, the relationship of 180° between Will and Creative
Mind is shown in terms of the cones. In Diagrams 7b and 7c, this relationship of 180° is shown
in terms of the Great Wheel. The geometry of the Faculties is thus precise and regular.
Diagram 6a
Diagram 7a
Diagram 6b
Diagram 7b
Diagram 6c
Diagram 7c
26
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
The geometric relations are described by Yeats as “Oppositions” and “Discords”:
The being becomes conscious of itself as a separate being, because of certain
facts of Opposition and Discord, the emotional Opposition of Will and Mask,
the intellectual opposition of Creative Mind and Body of Fate, Discords between
Will and Creative Mind, Creative Mind and Mask, Mask and Body of Fate, Body
of Fate and Will. A Discord is always the enforced understanding of the unlikeness of Will and Mask or of Creative Mind and Body of Fate. There is an enforced
attraction between Opposites, for the Will has a natural desire for the Mask and
the Creative Mind a natural perception of the Body of Fate; in one the dog bays
the Moon, in the other the eagle stares on the Sun by natural right. (AVB 93-4;
cf. CW13 23; AVA 25)
The two principal energies are “natural desire” (the Will’s relation to the Mask) and “natural
perception” (the relation of Creative Mind to Body of Fate). These energies are the Oppositions. The Discords are the relations that exist between one set of opposites (Will and Mask)
and the other (Creative Mind and Body of Fate), and consist of “an enforced understanding
of…unlikeness.” In “Relations,” Yeats clarifies:
Those between Will and Mask, Creative Mind and Body of Fate are oppositions, or
contrasts.
Those between Will and Creative Mind, Mask and Body of Fate discords. (AVB 104)
Diagram 5 (above) illustrates the perpetual opposition that pertains between the two antithetical Faculties. Similarly, the two primary Faculties remain at opposite sides of the wheel,
throughout the twenty-eight phases. The term “opposition” is used in astrology to refer to
planets that, within a chart, exist in a relationship of 180°, and Yeats’s employment of the
term also denotes a relationship of 180°.
I.2
Perhaps the most important observation one can make about the four Faculties is that one
can say very little of their essences on a general level. Each Faculty is so strongly determined by its phase (and the corresponding phases of the other three Faculties) that there is
a limit to the meaningful observations one can make concerning each of the Faculties that
is true of all twenty-eight phases. Nevertheless, these four actors in the drama of incarnation occupy different roles, whose functional outlines can be described.
As the founding Faculty, Will relates unequally to the other Faculties. Yeats describes
this “first matter” of personality as follows:
By Will is understood feeling that has not become desire because there is no object
of desire; a bias by which the soul is classified and its phase fixed but which as yet
is without result in action; an energy as yet uninfluenced by thought, action, or
emotion; the first matter of a certain personality—choice. (CW13 15; AVA 14–15)
The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known
27
In the absence of a context of incarnation, Will cannot be described as anything other
than a “bias,” an inclination or propensity; not a choice but the (as yet) undirected capacity to choose: “Ego [Will] is free will simply” (YVP2 19) or “Creative Power” (CF P41;
YVP3 361). Further:
When not affected by the other Faculties it has neither emotion, morality nor intellectual interest, but knows how things are done, how windows open and shut, how roads
are crossed, everything that we call utility. It seeks its own continuance. (AVB 82–83)
When considered by itself, its only impulse is to perpetuate itself. Thus, although it is the
founding Faculty, in the absence of the other Faculties it has no definable substance or
direction. However, as the founding Faculty, Will contains within it that which differentiates the incarnation from all others. In the Card File, Yeats records: “The Ego [Will] is that
particularised element which distinguishes individual from individual” and it is “The ideosincracy” (CF F10; YVP3 304). And: “Ego is Free will. The other three imposed” (YVP3
304). Moreover, it has “a natural desire for the Mask” (AVB 94; CW13 23; AVA 24). In the
automatic script, Yeats asks the communicator to define Will:
6. Define Ego as apart from other 3.4
6. free will
7. Free will only – all other elements of soul from the 3.
7. yes the free will free only in itself the other component parts being imposed.
(7 June 1918; YVP1 484)
In summary, while Will is the essence of corporeal being, and it is largely without form,
until it is integrated with the other three Faculties.
The Mask is the object of the Will’s desire or the supreme idea of good, and is thus
an ideal: “By Mask is understood the image of what we wish to become, or of that to
which we give our reverence” (CW13 15; AVA 15). In simple terms, Will and Mask can be
described as follows: “Ego = Creative Power | Mask = Personality” (CF P41; YVP3 361).
The principal forces of incarnation are expression of will, and submission of will, which
is love. These forces constitute destiny and fate: “The first or active is Destiny the second
or enforced is Fate. The First is Will, the second Love” (CF F13; YVP3 305). Under the
heading “Mask,” Yeats writes: “‘It is a figure of destiny’.…‘The Mask expresses no ambition It expresses enthusiasm apart from ambition’” (CF F14; YVP3 305).5
Mask is thus active, although it does not originate ambition or desire. The expression
of “enthusiasm apart from ambition” perfectly encapsulates the Mask: it is the object of
ambition or desire, but it does not create desire.6 It is summoned by desire.7 By providing
an object and a channel of desire, it becomes the means whereby the Will interacts with
the world. Without a goal, the Will is inactive: “Mask as action is the relation of Ego with
the world” (VNB1, p. 82; YVP3 174). Similarly, the Mask does not create emotion, but
acts as a conduit for emotion: “Emotion not from but through Mask” (CF M8; YVP3
334). However, while it does not create emotion, it induces in the self an “unnatural”
emotion: “Mask = desired emotion & is always opposite to natural emotion of Ego”
28
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
(VNB1, p. 53; YVP3 164). Perhaps the most important function of the Mask is to create
a sense of unity or coherence of self. Yeats informs us that “all unity is from the Mask…”
(AVB 82). It knits together the Faculties so that the individual experiences incarnation as a
single consciousness, rather than a cluster of disparate forces: Yeats declares that “the Mask
is described as ‘A form created by passion to unite us to ourselves’” (CW13 18; AVA 18;
cf. AVB 82), and “Mask as emotion unites the Ego to himself ” (VNB1, p. 82; YVP3 174).
And Yeats asks the control Eurectha:
9. Is the mask the source of form it self.
9. Yes
(YVP2 287)
The exercise of desire forges structural links between the four Faculties: purpose dissolves
disparity by creating a common goal. However, too great an obsession with the Mask can
result in weakness:
25. Can you define more accurately form of subjective weakness?
25. The realisation that the ego has lived entirely in the mask & consequently has
neglected self discipline & self knowledge.
(YVP2 214)
This very starkly indicates that if an antithetical person overemphasizes the Mask, then
it produces overindulgence in objects of desire, and an accompanying lack of “self discipline.” This has an interesting moral emphasis, usually absent from A Vision.
A lengthy and difficult passage on the Mask from the automatic script on January
17, 1918, bears attention. Thomas attempts to explain aspects of the Mask and the other
Faculties, as follows:
30. Is not mask that portion of anti of which we are conscious or which we
especially desire? […]
No that is what mask is used to attain – the mask is a set thing
2. What do you mean by a set thing?
2. It possesses certain characteristics for each phase
3. It is a group of fixed characteristics which draw from anti corresponding qualities? a mask put on by anti to play an especial part.
3. Yes
In accordance with degree of adaptability of primary
4. Anti wearing mask can play no other part but the play may be twisted by
primary?
4. Yes can wear no other mask but can move or dance or speak against the mask
itself
The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known
29
5. In other words anti can modify mask?
5. Can modify detail only
6. Is not that modification fixed by phase?
6. No intensity may be modified in detail never in intensity
7. In that case anti does not work against Mask but uses it.
7. Uses it in that case but where mask is let us say curiosity or enthusiasm it can
be equally modified in all detail but used to unify that detail – Mask good –
always unifies
8. Do correct statement that anti can work against mask?
If not give example.
8. No anti adopts mask & simultaneously works against it
Therefore more often than not you fit both good & evil masks on one fit
9. By working against do you mean using one mask against other.
9. Yes
10. Can anti reach ego except through these two masks?
10. Yes anti through creative genius
11. Creative genius genius subject mask object?
11. Creative genius object yes – Mask links ego & self
(YVP1 266–68)8
In answer 3, Yeats speaks of the “mask put on by anti” and Thomas reminds him that this
occurs “in accordance with the degree of adaptability of primary.” If the Will is antithetical, then the Mask must be primary, as Will and Mask are always in opposition. Concerning 4 (above): “Anti adopts Mask & simultaneously works against it. Therefore more ‘often
than not you put both good & Evil Mask on one Ego’” (VNB1, p. 55; YVP3 164). The
Mask is desired, but can overwhelm the Will, directing the self solely towards the object
of its desire. The relationship between Will and Mask can thus be all-absorbing or fraught
to the extent that Will attempts to distance itself from the compulsion of its desires. We
might “speak against” the Mask but we cannot escape it. While the Mask “possesses certain
characteristics for each phase” (answer 2), it may be “modified in all detail” (answer 7) but
“never in intensity” (answer 6). Thus, there is a degree of flexibility in the composition or
the contents of the Mask, because the Mask is voluntary during antithetical phases, and
thus fortifies or emboldens the Will: “The antithetical Mask comes to men of Phase 17 and
Phase 18 as a form of strength…” (AVB 150).9 The Mask is involuntary during primary
phases: “The Mask is involuntary when the Ego [the Will] has become so objective that
passion is impossible” (YVP1 262). However, in both primary and antithetical phases, the
Will may not alter the intensity of the Mask, presumably because the essential function
of the Mask is to provide an object of desire. Any attenuation of the intensity of desire
will fundamentally weaken the relation between Will and Mask, thereby unraveling the
30
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
self. The Mask “always unifies” the self (answer 7) by unifying the Faculties. Moreover,
Thomas proposes that “anti adopts mask & simultaneously works against it” (answer 8),
indicating that the antithetical Will may oppose the Mask while being unable to discard
it. Thus, in the complex relationship of simultaneous attraction and repulsion, the self
achieves coherence or defining structure. The “Mask links ego & self” (answer 11). The
Mask thus operates on the Will (the “ego”) so that the Will “links” with the “self.” “Self ”
here may refer not to the composite of the four Faculties in any Phase, but to an ideal or
higher unity, “a form created by passion to unite us to ourselves, the self so sought is that
Unity of Being…” (AVB 82). Moreover, the process of the construction of the self involves
a two-way movement of energy:
3. Parallel relation between Mask & Ego?
3. The Ego is stirred up by creative genius into adopting the mask – Hence
Environment or PF
|
Creative Genius
|
Ego
|
Mask
(YVP1 262)
The first process (as indicated earlier in the essay) involves Creative Mind perceiving Body
of Fate (which precedes the other Faculties) and thereby stirring up the Will into adopting
a Mask. The process is thus: Body of Fate—Creative Mind—Will—Mask. The second process
(as indicated above) is a reversal of the first process: “Mask links ego & self.” The process
is thus: Mask—Will—Creative Mind—Body of Fate. By means of these dual processes, the
four Faculties are knitted together, creating the self.
It is necessary to emphasize the difference between the purpose of the Mask in the
primary and antithetical phases. The antithetical Mask functions both to create self, and to
create a repository of desire. This is confirmed by the control Ameritus:
1. Is not the mask in subjective phases double – a form which we put on, a form
which we desire, that which we become & that we would possess
1. Yes
(YVP2 468)
For primary incarnations, Mask is an impediment, a mechanism that causes closure and
confinement, and sets the limits of the self. The aim of the Will (Ego) is to slip the Mask:
13[answer]. In the objective man the mask is inferred – freedom comes only
when the Ego releases itself from the obligation of the mask & acts through the
primary & c[reative] g[enius]…
(YVP2 18)
The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known
31
Prior to Phase 15, it is a “revelation,” as it is the means whereby the being comes to know
itself, whereas after Phase 15, Mask is a “concealment,” as the identity begins the long and
slow process of breaking itself up:
“Mask created by ego as a protection or revelation of the soul”.…
“Mask is that form created by passion to reveal or conceal individuality”
(VNB1, p. 52; YVP3 163–64)
“Before Beauty [i.e., Phase 15] mask is revelation of characteristics
After [Beauty mask is] substitution [of characteristics][”]
(VNB1, p. 104; YVP3 181)
As the self emerges from undifferentiated submersion in transcendence at Phase 1, into
incarnation, it begins to form itself by means of gradual separation from transcendent
truth, and from race, tradition and nature, and its means of doing so is the Mask. During
the long journey towards complete self-absorption at Phase 15, the Ego or Will increasingly declares its singularity and specificity by the exercise of choice, which is always the
nomination of desire(s). As the Will establishes and understands its desires, so it gradually
becomes itself. The first fifteen phases of the Wheel are thus an increasing revelation, a
process of coming-to-be. After perfect selfhood, the Mask no longer continues to reveal
identity. Instead, it is employed as a device of concealment. The effects of concealment are
specified in the Card File:
Mask (enforced)
insincerity when mask is enforced – seperates Mask & ego by making ego
through fear of self knowledge choose evil Mask
In 2 3 4 it fears approaching subjectivity consequent forcing inward of mind
Before 1 it fears knowledge of the self, weakening after 1 of its strength
(CF M6; YVP3 334)
The principal impulse of the self is no longer towards self-knowledge, thereby avoiding
true Mask and adopting false Mask. A false Mask will effectively conceal true intent both
from others and from ourselves. This is explained by the control Thomas:
9. How does insincerity in case of enforced mask seperate mask & ego.
9. The Ego chooses the evil mask
10. Why does insincerity make it choose evil mask?
10. Because it cannot face self knowledge which is brought by Mask
(YVP2 137)
Moreover, the revelation of Mask is an act of courage; its concealment an act of fear: “Concealment moral fear, revelation moral courage (VNB1, p. 66; YVP3 168).
The Creative Mind is the faculty of perception and understanding, the sensorium
and the interpreting mind, that is, the means and the act of “making sense”: “By Creative
32
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Mind is meant intellect, as intellect was understood before the close of the seventeenth
century—all the mind that is consciously constructive” (CW13 15; AVA 15). It has “a
natural perception of the Body of Fate” (AVB 94) and delights in intellectual constructions,
contemplation and conceptual organization.
In primary phases, the primary Faculties (Creative Mind and Body of Fate) dominate
and, thus, the Mask and Will are “enforced.” In antithetical phases, the antithetical Faculties (Will and Mask) dominate and, thus, Creative Mind and Body of Fate are “enforced.”10
This is further elucidated by the communicator Thomas, as follows:
4. Environment enforced mask voluntarily?
4. Environment enforced or willed – Mask voluntary in subjective states
[.…]
7. Describe process where Mask is involuntary?
7. The Mask is involuntary when the Ego has become so objective that passion is
impossible – state where only emotion is possible
[.…]
12. Where mask is enforced is relation between CG & PF11 very different?
12. Then creative genius expresses objective instead of expressing subjective objectively
Yes
Then PF instead of stir[r]ing creative genius stirs ego
(YVP1 262–63)
During antithetical phases, the ego and its object of desire eclipse the process of thinking and the exterior world. During primary phases, thinking and the perception of the
exterior world dominate the ego and its desires. When “passion is impossible,” Creative
Mind perceives and expresses external reality, without the contamination of desire. During primary phases, Mask is enforced. Similarly, during antithetical phases, Creative Mind
is enforced:
26. By what is CG enforced in subjective phases.
26. before 15 by the mask – after 15 by the Ego
(YVP2 58)
Creative Mind both establishes the primacy of thought over desire, and works actively to
minimize the effects of the Mask: “Genius both creator & destroyer – it destroys in the day
what mask weaves at night…” (CF M31; YVP3 342).
In “General Character of Creative Mind,” Yeats presents the following information,
listing the phases affected and the phase from which the influence derives:
(1) Affecting
(2)
"
(3)
"
(4)
"
(5)
"
28, 1, 2 from 2, 1, 28. Controlled.
3, 4, 5, 6 from 27, 26, 25, 24. Transformatory.
7, 8, 9 from 23, 22, 21. Mathematical.
10, 11, 12 from 20, 19, 18. Intellectually passionate.
13 from 17. Stillness.
The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known
(6)
(7)
(8)
(9)
(10)
"
"
"
"
"
33
14, 15, 16 from 16, 15, 14. Emotional.
17, 18, 19, 20 from 13, 12, 11, 10. Emotionally passionate.
21, 22, 23 from 9, 8, 7. Rational.
24 from 6. Obedient.
25, 26, 27 from 3, 4, 5. Serenity.
(AVB 101; cf. CW13 31; AVA 34–35)
This list is consistent with the information presented in “The Twenty-eight Incarnations”
in that the Creative Mind of Phase 3 is from Phase 27; the Creative Mind of Phase 4 is
from Phase 26; the Creative Mind of Phase 5 is from Phase 25, and so on. What is entirely
new in this presentation is the division of the phases into ten sections. Such decimal division cannot be regular (because 28 divided by 10 is 2.8), but the divisions above appear
inordinately irregular.
In a footnote, Yeats declares: “This and the following Table [“General Character of
Body of Fate Affecting Certain Phases,” see below] are divided into ten divisions because
they were given to me in this form, and I have not sufficient confidence in my knowledge to turn them into the more convenient twelvefold divisions” (AVB 101n).12 There
is no discussion, in the automatic script, the Vision Notebooks or the Card File of the
tenfold division of Creative Mind and Body of Fate. When the latter list occurs in the
automatic script, it is simply given, with no prompting from Yeats, and no explanation
from Thomas (YVP2 101–2). The footnote quoted above confirms that Yeats did not
properly understand these divisions or the properties ascribed to them. On occasion,
the descriptor is easily identifiable in terms of the associated phases. For example, in section 4, the “General Character of Creative Mind” is “Intellectually Passionate” and this
strongly accords with the Creative Mind of Phases 20, 19 and 18. Similarly, in section 7,
the “General Character” is “Emotionally Passionate” and this echoes the Creative Mind
of Phases 10, 11, 12. But generally, the “General Character of Creative Mind” raises
more questions than it answers, and it awaits further inquiry.
The Body of Fate is the exterior context of the man:13 the realm of brute fact, and
also comprising the events that constitute the context of an individual. Yeats describes
this as “the sum, not the unity, of fact, fact as it affects a particular man” (AVB 82).
Further:
By Body of Fate is understood the physical and mental environment, the changing human body,14 the stream of Phenomena as this affects a particular individual, all that is forced upon us from without, Time as it affects sensation.
(CW13 15; AVA 15)
The following brief exchange between Yeats and the communicator, Thomas, sheds light
on how the Faculties interact to create a single self:
2. No special relation between CG & PF?15
2. Yes the relation is of environment partially forcing Creative Genius into action by stirring up passion
34
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Of the four Faculties, the Body of Fate is the most primordial or impersonal, in that it
is the vast context in which the self operates. In elucidating the functioning of the self,
Body of Fate is therefore prior, and is presented first in the diagram. This external world
is perceived by the Creative Mind, which is the appropriate Faculty of perception and the
understanding of external reality. This act of perception results in “stirring up passion.”
The Will, hitherto without direction, becomes driven by passion, and thus adopts a Mask.
The diagram thus indicates the stages operative in the functioning of the whole self.
In “General Character of Body of Fate Affecting certain Phases,” Yeats presents the
following information:
(1) Affecting
(2)
"
(3)
"
(4)
"
(5)
"
(6)
"
(7)
"
(8)
"
(9)
"
(10)
"
28, 1, 2 from 16, 15, 14. Joy.
3, 4, 5, 6 from 13, 12, 11, 10. Breathing.16
7, 8, 9 from 9, 8, 7. Tumult.
10, 11, 12 from 6, 5, 4. Tension.
13 from 3. Disease.
14, 15, 16 from 2, 1, 28. The world.
17, 18, 19, 20 from 27, 26, 25, 24. Sorrow.
21, 22, 23 from 23, 22, 21. Ambition.
24 from 20. Success.
25, 26, 27 from 19, 18, 17. Absorption.
(AVB 101–2; cf. CW13 31; AVA 35)
The irregular division of phases in the ten sections (for Creative Mind above) is repeated
identically for the sections of Body of Fate. In general, there is a correlation between the
descriptors and the discussion of the Body of Fate in “The Twenty-eight Incarnations,” although the use of a single word to describe the Body of Fate pertaining to four consecutive
phases tends to vagueness. One problem common to the “General Character” of Creative
Mind and Body of Fate is that these Faculties are ascribed to Phase 15, during which both
Creative Mind and Body of Fate disappear. Body of Fate cannot “affect” Phase 15 because,
in this phase, there is no such thing.
II
Before examining the four Faculties as they operate within the tetrad of each phase, and
within the quarters (and their two sets of three), it is appropriate to indicate the ways
in which they are determined by the Tinctures. Yeats says: “The primary and antithetical
define the inclination of the Will, and through the Will affect the other three…” (CW13
16–17; AVA 16). Will has both “direction and quality” (CW13 17; AVA 17). Quality refers
simply to the amount of primary and antithetical Tincture at each phase. “The Two Directions” comprises the following:
Phase 1 to 15 is towards Nature.17
Phase 15 to 1 is towards God.
(AVB 104)
The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known
35
In his introduction to the Tinctures, Yeats says that “the objective cone is called that of the
primary Tincture because whereas subjectivity…tends to separate man from man, objectivity brings us back to the mass where we begin” (AVB 72). Briefly, the antithetical energy,
culminating at Phase 15, is towards the subordination of the world to the self, whereas
the primary drive is towards the annihilation of self in favor of celestial, racial or natural
authority: “The primary is that which serves, the antithetical is that which creates” (AVB
85; CW13 19; AVA 19). In its most pure form, the antithetical Tincture draws all creation
into itself and lives in a self-created universe, whereas the primary Tincture abandons all
identity and desire, and becomes featureless: “No description except complete plasticity”
(AVB 183; CW13 94; AVA 116). Whereas Phase 15 is all self, Phase 1 is all void.
Dramatizing the Tinctures, Yeats offers an image of antithetical being in terms of the
Commedia dell’ Arte:
When I wish for some general idea which will describe the Great Wheel as an
individual life I go to the Commedia dell’ Arte or improvised drama of Italy. The
stage-manager, or Daimon, offers his actor an inherited scenario, the Body of
Fate, and a Mask or rôle as unlike as possible to his natural ego or Will, and leaves
him to improvise through his Creative Mind the dialogue and details of the plot.
He must discover or reveal a being which only exists with extreme effort, when
his muscles are as it were all taut and all his energies active. But this is antithetical
man. (AVB 83–84)
On the previous page, Yeats defines the Daimon as “the ultimate self of that man” (AVB 83).
During antithetical phases, Will and Mask are set against one another; Body of Fate is prescribed, and Creative Mind makes sense of the plot, adding dialogue and narrative structure.
Will and Mask dominate Creative Mind and Body of Fate respectively and to varying degrees,
least successfully at Phases 9 and 21, most successfully at Phase 15. The desiring self and its
compelling object of desire attempt to ignore and even obliterate the perceiving mind and
the objects of its perception, with varying degrees of success, depending on the quarters.
The dramatization of primary being is as follows:
For primary man I go to the Commedia dell’ Arte in its decline. The Will is weak
and cannot create a rôle, and so, if it transform itself, does so after an accepted
pattern, some traditional clown or pantaloon. It has perhaps no object but to
move the crowd, and if it “gags” it is that there may be plenty of topical allusions.
In the primary phases man must cease to desire Mask and Image by ceasing from
self-expression, and substitute a motive of service for that of self-expression. Instead of the created Mask he has an imitative Mask; and when he recognizes this,
his Mask may become the historical norm, or an image of mankind. (AVB 84)
After Phase 15, the Mask conceals the self, rather than reveals it.18 The mind overrides
the will. At the peak of the primary Tincture, the individual has no self-expression. At the
peripheral primary phases (23 and 7), Will is permitted to choose a role, but this role is
always from the public and for the public. The object of desire (the Mask) is taken from
the norm rather than from a private compulsion. Insofar as primary man seeks at all, he
36
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
seeks the world as it is. In this quest, primary individuals are assisted by the Body of Fate. In
a section entitled “Rule for Finding Body of Fate,” Yeats offers the following information:
The Body of Fate of any particular phase is the effect of the whole nature of its
Body of Fate phase upon that particular phase. As, however, the Body of Fate is
always primary it is in sympathy with the primary phase while it opposes the
antithetical phase; in this it is the reverse of the Mask, which is sympathetic to an
antithetical phase but opposes a primary. (AVB 92)
Antithetical men have violent wills and “are in their intellect (Creative Mind) gentle” (AVB
84–85). The hatreds of primary men are “impersonal” and they are “violent in their intellect but gentle in themselves” (AVB 85). In the antithetical phases, the Will intrudes upon
the world, whereas in the primary phases the mind asserts itself, performing analytical
operations upon the world that will benefit the majority rather than the self.19
In the above discussion of the Faculties, mention has been made of free and enforced
Faculties. In “Enforced and Free Faculties,” the definitions are:
In primary phases the Mask and Will are enforced, the Creative Mind and
Body of Fate free.
In antithetical phases the Creative Mind and Body of Fate are enforced and
the Mask and Will free. (AVB 104)
Nevertheless, freedom is restrained or attenuated in almost all the phases, because the
Faculties, both “free” and “enforced,” form a single whole. Freedom occurs within the
constraints of contextual enforcement, with the exception of Phases 1 and 15, during
which the “enforced” Faculties are stripped entirely of their capacity to restrain or contain
the “free” Faculties, which now operate without boundary or imposition.
During Phase 15, Will and Creative Mind both occupy Phase 15, while Mask and
Body of Fate occupy Phase 1. Because the antithetical Tinctures dominate during antithetical
phases, “Creative Mind is dissolved in the Will and the Body of Fate in the Mask” (AVB 135;
CW13 58; AVA 69). The effects of this dissolution of the primary Faculties are profound.
Thinking becomes an end in itself. Contemplation is always and automatically directed
to the object of desire. Moreover, the world (Body of Fate) has collapsed into the Mask,
resulting in “a world where every beloved image has bodily form, and every bodily form is
loved” (AVB 136; CW13 59; AVA 70). The mind and the world serve only to reflect and
express the self and its desires. There is nothing outside of this circle of self: “effort and
attainment are indistinguishable” (AVB 135; CW13 58; AVA 69–70). Beings of Phase 15
are discarnate, because incarnation requires conflict between the Tinctures. The discarnate
world of the spirit at Phase 15 is entirely of its own making. Whatever is imagined by the
Will becomes the exterior world, because the Body of Fate has been absorbed by the Mask.
During Phase 1, Will and Creative Mind both occupy Phase 1, while Mask and Body of
Fate occupy Phase 15.20 Will has been absorbed into Creative Mind; Mask has been absorbed
into Body of Fate. The activity of thinking does not emanate from individuality, it does not reflect individuality and it is not in the service of an individual. Will has been obliterated. There
is no individual achievement, no individual success or blame: “The images of mind are no
The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known
37
longer irrelevant even, for there is no longer anything to which they can be relevant, and acts
can no longer be immoral or stupid, for there is no one there that can be judged” (AVB 183;
CW13 94; AVA 116). Body of Fate absorbs Mask, so the object of desire is obliterated in favor
of fact. Desire gives way wholly to perception. There is only a knower and a known or, rather,
a capacity for knowing, since there is no individual knower. In the absence of Will, there is no
self. This phase is discarnate because all notions of selfhood have been relinquished in favor
of dissolution into the material and celestial worlds. The individual mind and body have
become “this plasticity, this liquefaction, or pounding up” (AVB 183; CW13 94; AVA 117).
Phases 8 and 22 are crucial phases because there is a special coincidence of the Faculties. During Phase 8, Will and Body of Fate are at Phase 8, while Mask and Creative Mind
are at Phase 22.21 During Phase 22, the reverse configuration occurs: Will and Creative
Mind are at Phase 22, while Mask and Creative Mind are at Phase 8. No longer constituted
by four interlocking elements, the individual now comprises two opposed pairs, which
effectively split the individual. Yeats says of Phase 8: “The union of Creative Mind and
Mask in opposition to Body of Fate and Will, intensifies this struggle by dividing the nature
into halves which have no interchange of qualities” (AVB 118; CW13 44–45; AVA 51).
This state of equal and opposite force results in a struggle for dominance. Phase 8 may be
described as the battle for control of the Mask:
At Phase 8 is the “Beginning of Strength,” its embodiment in sensuality. The
imitation that held it to the enforced Mask, the norm of the race now a hated
convention, has ceased and its own norm has not begun. Primary and antithetical are equal and fight for mastery; and when this fight is ended through the
conviction of weakness and the preparation for rage, the Mask becomes once
more voluntary. (AVB 85; cf. CW13 19; AVA 19–20)
Having asserted a fragile control over Creative Mind, Will conceives of individual desires,
and creates its Mask according to its own taste, rather than from convention (Body of Fate).
The man of Phase 8 “chooses himself and not his Fate” (AVB 119; CW13 45; AVA 52).
During the primary phases, the Mask has been enforced by the insistence of the Creative
Mind that the object of desire must derive from the norm. The Creative Mind thus harnesses the Mask for its own purposes. During Phase 8, the Will is “forced to recognise the
weakness of the Creative Mind when unaided by the Mask, and so to permit the enforced
Mask to change into the free” (AVB 117; cf. CW13 44; AVA 50). The difficulty is to find a
Mask that defies norms, facts and circumstances, one that is the product only of individual
desire. But the man of Phase 8, balanced between individuality and race, “is suspended;
he is without bias,22 and until bias comes, till he has begun groping for strength within
his own being, his thought and his emotion bring him to judgment but they cannot help”
(AVB 118–20; CW13 45; AVA 52). This is the phase of “greatest possible weakness” (AVB
119; CW13 45; AVA 52). Only the true Mask, “Courage,” and the true Creative Mind,
“Versatility,” can assist in resolving the “greatest possible conflict,” in order to “make the
greatest possible change,” from the primary to the antithetical Tincture.
At Phase 22, the outcome of the battle between “ambition and contemplation” is a
quiet defeat, as the chosen Mask is one of “self-immolation” (AVB 157; CW13 75; AVA
91). The reason for this choice is clear: “Once balance has been reached, the aim must
38
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
be to use the Body of Fate to deliver the Creative Mind from the Mask, and not to use the
Creative Mind to deliver the Mask from the Body of Fate” (AVB 158; CW13 75; AVA 92).
The mind must gain ascendance over the object of desire, by focusing attention upon the
world of fact and circumstance rather than the ideal or the imagined. The “Will, engaged
in its last struggle with external fact (Body of Fate), must submit, until it sees itself as inseparable from nature perceived as fact…” (AVB 158; CW13 75; AVA 92). Perhaps Phase
22 is less traumatic than Phase 8 because it is a submission to norm and fact, whereas
Phase 8 involves a supreme effort of will to overcome norm and fact. Will and Mask can
no longer sustain themselves internally, and thus submit to externality: “the mind exhausts
all knowledge within its reach and sinks exhausted to a conscious futility” (AVB 160;
CW13 77; AVA 94). In the process of moving from Phase 15 to Phase 22, Will has shifted
far from Creative Mind and discovers proximity to Body of Fate, finding joy in the direct
apprehension of the physical world: “as the Will moves further from the Creative Mind,
it approaches the Body of Fate, and with this comes an increasing delight in impersonal
energy and in inanimate objects” (AVB 162–63; CW13 79; AVA 96). There is thus “no
longer a Will, as distinct from the process of nature seen as fact” (AVB 163; CW13 79;
AVA 97). Will and the world are one; the self identifies with its surroundings. Mask and
Creative Mind (both at Phase 8) are fused: thinking and desiring become a single act,
neither of them under the control of the Will. In their combination, the operation of the
mind becomes desirable, and desire becomes an intellectual matter: “Intellect knows itself
as its own object of desire” (AVB 163; CW13 79; AVA 97) and life “becomes an act of
contemplation” (AVB 163; CW13 79; AVA 96).
III
The Tinctures effectively divide the Wheel into two parts (Phases 8–22 and 22–8). Yeats
makes other divisions, the most frequent and sustained of which is the division into four
quarters: “Excluding the four phases of crisis (Phases 8, 22, 15, 1) each quarter consists
of six phases, or of two sets of three” (AVB 92–93; CW13 22; AVA 23). These sets comprise Phases 2–4 and 5–7 (first quarter), Phases 9–11 and 12–14 (second quarter), Phases
16–18 and 19–21 (third quarter) and Phases 23–25 and 26–28 (fourth quarter). Each of
the Faculties dominates a quarter of the Wheel: “The Will is strongest in the first quarter,
Mask in second, Creative Mind in third, and Body of Fate in fourth” (AVB 93; cf. CW13
22; AVA 24). In the “Four Conditions of the Will,” Yeats offers the following:
First quarter.
Second [quarter.]
Third [quarter.]
Fourth [quarter.]
Instinctive.
Emotional.
Intellectual.
Moral.
(AVB 102; CW13 32; AVA 36)
Taken together, the above two quotations provide structure for the Wheel in terms of the
Faculties. To reiterate, Yeats says of Will: “When not affected by the other Faculties it has
neither emotion, morality nor intellectual interest, but knows how things are done, how
windows open and shut, how roads are crossed, everything that we call utility” (AVB 82–
The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known
39
83). Thus, in the first quarter, Will dominates and its powers and capacities are instinctive.
In the second quarter, Mask dominates, and the “Condition of the Will” is thus passionate
and emotional, having been infused with desire. In the third quarter, Creative Mind dominates, and the Will is thus predominantly intellectual, creating systems of understanding.
In the fourth quarter, Body of Fate dominates. It must be remembered that the Body of
Fate comprises not only the exterior world of fact and circumstance, but also the celestial
realm. Thus, in the fourth quarter, Will is principally moral, having been increasingly
drawn beyond itself, and beyond even the phenomenal world, to the ultimate reality.
The “Four Conditions of the Will” is followed by the “Four Conditions of the Mask”:
First quarter.
Second [quarter.]
Third quarter.
Fourth [quarter.]
Intensity (affecting third quarter).
Tolerance (affecting fourth quarter).
Convention or systematization (affecting first quarter).
Self-analysis (affecting second quarter).
(AVB 102–3; cf. CW13 32; AVA 36)
The condition of the Mask in each quarter affects the opposite quarter; the Mask is always
in opposition to the Will. Thus, the first “Condition of the Mask” to be discussed derives
from the third quarter, affecting the first quarter, and is “Convention or systematization.” In the first quarter, the Mask functions to awaken the incarnated spirit to independent existence. The actions of the recently incarnated spirit are instinctive, conventional
(conforming to the norms of race) and automatic, and the task of the first quarter is to
establish separate identity: “Instinctive automatism preserves the race element. The Mask
from 1 to 8 separates ego from race. (CF A5; YVP3 230). The Will is not yet comfortable
with the notion of subjectivity, and thus avoids it in the early phases: “In 2 3 4 it fears
approaching subjectivity consequent forcing inward of mind” (CF M6; YVP3 334). In
spite of fear, however, the Will is compelled to seek subjectivity. During primary phases,
the Mask is always enforced but, in this instance, it is enforced by the Will: “Mask 1 to
8 enforced by ego itself ” (CF M7; YVP3 334). The “Condition of the Mask” affecting
the second quarter is “self-analysis.” In the Card File, Yeats writes: “[Mask from] Fourth.
analysis because ‘of realization of the objective world’” (CF F2; YVP3 302). The Mask during this second quarter is voluntary. One might infer, from the drive to pure and complete
subjectivity, that self-knowledge (or “self-analysis”) is as important as self-creation. This
is confirmed in the following entry in the Vision Notebooks: “The Primary on one side
is that which is purely instinctive & having will & no thought; it has tradition & experience. On the other side it is the deliberate attempt of the Nature to avoid complexity &
self analysis” (VNB1, p. 42; YVP3 159). The primary “Nature” (that is, self or intrinsic
qualities)23 seeks to avoid “complexity and self analysis.” It follows that the antithetical
self seeks such “self analysis” in order to create the perfect self-enclosed circle of selfhood.
The reference to the “objective world” in the Card File may be more difficult to explain.
In the Card File, Yeats explains that, for the purely antithetical being to hold an idea,
an external reference point is necessary: “An idea is a concrete intellectual effort made to
synthesise an objective object. Therefore an idea cannot exist at 15. The spirit at 15 has
to put the man in relation to the object in order that he shall obtain the idea” (CF I8;
YVP3 324). Why should it be necessary for antithetical incarnations to have ideas at all?
40
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Subjective phases, in the quest for self-analysis, engage also in self-judgment and, for this,
they require thought, and thought is possible only by means of external referents. The
following extract from the automatic script (involving Erontius as the control) provides
some elucidation:
18. In subjective phases we understand others by feeling, & in objective by
thought.
18. Yes
19. In subjective phases we understand our selves by thought in objective phases
we understand our selves by feeling.
19. No it is more correct to say in subjective phases we judge ourselves by
thought & in objective phases we judge ourselves by what we think we feel
(YVP2 32)
Curiously, while the perfectly subjective self is all-absorbed in itself, it requires a shift
outside itself, to the objective world, in order to understand itself. As with navigation, the
lonely seafarer employs external reference points in order to situate him/herself.
The “Condition of the Mask” affecting the third quarter is “Intensity.” The Card File
specifies: “Mask from First Quarter intensity from ‘realization of life apart from objective
world’” (CF F2; YVP3 302). The Mask is voluntary. The antithetical incarnation has now
turned away from the “objective world” as a means of self-understanding, and employs
the mind and its capacity for rational analysis: the “Condition of the Will” in the third
quarter is “Intellectual.”
The “Condition of the Mask” affecting the fourth quarter is “Tolerance.” The Mask is
enforced by the Creative Mind,24 thus ensuring that the object of desire is an intellectual
understanding of external reality, both corporeal and celestial. The self is regarded with
some suspicion: “Before 1 it fears knowledge of the self ” (CF M6; YVP3 334). Instead,
the dissolving self would rather contemplate and revere an external figure: “In objectives
when ego ceases to desire Mask it is changed into Christ image” (CF M9; YVP3 334).
In the automatic script, mention is made of the “Automatic Faculty.” Its operation is
described as follows:
1. Whence comes the momentum that drives the automatic faculty
1. from the action of the pf [Persona of Fate = Body of Fate] on the creative genius
[Creative Mind] – the greater the strength of the pf the more does the automatic
faculty take possession of the cg – The cg should use the auto[matic] faculty &
not be used by it. (YVP2 42)
In simple terms, when the Automatic Faculty dominates, the exterior environment dictates to the interpreting mind, and the individual becomes passive and “automatic.” In the
quarters, the Automatic Faculty works in these ways:
2 to 8 instinctive (protects growth)
8 to 15 imitative (imitates mask)
The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known
41
15 to 22 creative
22 to 28 obedient (imitates environment) (CF A36; YVP3 242)
In A Vision, this appears as the “Four Automatonisms”:
First quarter.
Second [quarter.]
Third [quarter.]
Fourth [quarter.]
Instinctive.
Imitative.
Creative.
Obedient.
(AVB 102; CW13 32; AVA 36)
Yeats describes the action of Automatonism as a pause in the struggle that defines the interaction of the Faculties, and thus incarnation. The Faculties briefly “refuse that struggle”
and “need Automatonism as a rest” (AVB 95; cf. CW13 24; AVA 26).
The four quarters can be described in other ways that shed light on the Faculties. A
combination of the “Elemental Attributions” (AVB 103; CW13 33; AVA 36) and “The
Four Contests of the Antithetical Within Itself ”25 results in the following table:
Quarters
First
Second
Third
Fourth
Elements
Earth
Water
Air
Fire
Contests
with body
with heart
with mind
with soul
The elements and contests correspond to instinct (dominated by Will in the first quarter),
emotion (dominated by Mask in the second quarter), intellect (dominated by Creative
Mind in the third quarter) and transcendence (dominated by Body of Fate in the fourth
quarter).
IV
We now turn attention to the operation of the Faculties as they occur in individual phases.
Various phases will be chosen to illustrate this operation. In “The Table of the Four Faculties,” Yeats specifies the necessary character of each Faculty at each of the phases. The
Faculties, as they occur at Phase 2 (AVB 96; CW13 27; AVA 30) are shown below:
WILL
MASK
CREATIVE MIND BODY OF FATE
26
Beginning of energy True. Illusion
False. Delusion
True. Physical Ac- Enforced love of the
tivity
world
False. Cunning
This information may mislead the reader. These are not the Faculties pertaining to an individual incarnated at Phase 2. Such an individual will have only Will at Phase 2. Mask will
be from Phase 16, Creative Mind from Phase 28, and Body of Fate from Phase 14. Thus, a
person at Phase 2 will have the following Faculties:27
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
42
WILL
MASK
Beginning of energy True. Player on
(Ph 2)
Pan’s Pipes (Ph 16)
False. Fury (Ph 16)
CREATIVE MIND BODY OF FATE
True. Hope (Ph 28) None except monoFalse. Fury (Ph 28) tony (Ph 14)
Persons of Phase 2 will be dominated by the primary Faculties, namely, Creative Mind and
Body of Fate. The Body of Fate, derived from Phase 14, described as “None except monotony,” allows the mind to withdraw into itself. The Will is “Instinctive” (see the “Conditions
of the Will” above) and the first quarter is dominated by the body, so the Creative Mind
will gravitate towards contemplating the deepest parts of the nature of the self—instinct
or the knowledge of the body. Yeats says of the person of Phase 2:
…he uses the Body of Fate to clear the intellect of the influence of the Mask. He
frees himself from emotion; and the Body of Fate, derived from Phase 14, pushes
back the mind into its own supersensual impulse, until it grows obedient to all
that recurs; and the Mask, now entirely enforced, is a rhythmical impulse. He
gives himself up to Nature.…
(AVB 106; cf. CW13 35; AVA 39)
The Mask is not chosen but “enforced,” which is precisely how it should be during a primary phase. The Mask desires concealment, and prefers “transcendent intoxication” (AVB
107; CW13 36; AVA 40). The object of desire is the inner nature of the self: “The bodily
instincts, subjectively perceived, become the cup wreathed with ivy” (AVB 107; CW13
36; AVA 40). This brief introduction to Phase 2 is intended to show the operation of the
Tinctures during a strong primary phase. The corresponding antithetical phase, Phase 16,
will now briefly be discussed, to provide symmetry to the discussion.28
Phase 16 is described as “The Positive Man” (AVB 137; CW13 60; AVA 71). The Faculties
are as follows:
WILL
MASK
CREATIVE MIND BODY OF FATE
The Positive Man
(Ph 16)
True. Illusion (Ph 2) True. Vehemence
False. Delusion (Ph 2) (Ph 14)
False. Opinionated
will (Ph 14)
Enforced Illusion
(Ph 28)
Geometrically, the Faculties from Phase 2 have swapped places. Will (at 2 in the previous
example) is now at 16, while Mask (previously at 16) is now at 2. Creative Mind (previously at 28) is now at 14, while Body of Fate (previously at 14) is now at 28. The Will at
Phase 16 has emerged from perfect antithetical existence, “the still trance of Phase 15”
(AVB 138; CW13 60; AVA 72), and “is itself a violent scattering energy.” The Mask, from
Phase 2 (whose Will is described as “Beginning of Energy,” or the earliest emergence of
self ) is thus described as “the Child” (AVB 137; CW13 60; AVA 72), and the object of
The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known
43
desire is thus “the child’s toy” (AVB 137; CW13 60; AVA 72). The primary Faculties are at
their weakest or least developed. Thus, the intellect or reasoning capacity (Creative Mind)
is at its “most narrow” (AVB 137; CW13 60; AVA 72) while the exterior world or Body of
Fate (from the phase of the Fool) is itself an illusion. The result of these primary deficiencies is that “sense of fact is an impossibility” (AVB 137; CW13 60; AVA 72). The wild,
disordered energy of the self and its childlike desire are thus almost completely severed
from reality. The “excitement, and this dream, are both illusions” (AVB 137; cf. CW13 60;
AVA 72). The third quarter on the Wheel is dominated by Creative Mind but, because Creative Mind is so weakly developed at Phase 16, the operation of the intellect is minimal.
At best, individuals of this phase can manage to employ the intellect “to disengage the
aimless child” (the compelling Mask) so that the self “surrounds itself with some fairyland,
some mythology of wisdom or laughter” (AVB 137–38; CW13 60; AVA 72). Phase 2 is the
first phase after pure primary being, while Phase 16 is the first phase after pure antithetical
being. Their Faculties are reversed: Will of one is Mask of the other; Mask of one is Will
of the other; Creative Mind of one is Body of Fate of the other, and Body of Fate of one is
Creative Mind of the other. This complementarity of the Faculties creates complex interrelationships within the Wheel.
Moreover, each phase has a second kind of complementary relationship with another
phase. For example, Phase 16 is not only contrasted to Phase 2 (its opposite number in the
primary phases) but also to Phase 14, as Phases 14 and 16 occupy symmetrical positions
relative to Phase 15, the discarnate phase of pure antithetical being. The complementarity
of Phases 16 and 14 is precisely the opposite of the complementarity of Phases 16 and
2. The Faculties are reversed in another way: the Will of Phase 16 is the Creative Mind of
Phase 14 (and vice versa) while the Mask of Phase 16 is the Body of Fate of Phase 14 (and
vice versa). Yeats describes this complementarity as follows:
Phase 16 is in contrast to Phase 14, in spite of their resemblance of extreme
subjectivity, in that it has a Body of Fate from the phase of the Fool, a phase of
absorption, and its Mask from what might have been called the phase of the
Child, a phase of aimless energy, of physical life for its own sake; whereas Phase
14 had its Body of Fate from the phase of the Child and its Mask from that of
the Fool.
(AVB 137; cf. CW13 60; AVA 72)
For the same reasons, complementarity must exist between Phases 2 and 28. Thus, these
four phases can be shown to be intricately interwoven. The table below indicates the phase
of each of the Faculties in these four phases:
Phase
Will
Mask
Creative Mind
Body of Fate
28
28
14
2
16
2
2
16
28
14
16
16
2
14
28
14
14
28
16
2
44
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
These four phases, composed of a combination of Faculties deriving from the same four
phases on the Wheel, provide a great deal of internal coherence and structure to the
Wheel. There are five other such groups of phases with the same correspondences:29
Phase
Will
Mask
Creative Mind
Body of Fate
3
3
17
27
13
17
17
3
13
27
13
13
27
17
3
27
27
13
3
17
4
4
18
26
12
18
18
4
12
26
12
12
26
18
4
26
26
12
4
18
5
5
19
25
11
19
19
5
11
25
11
11
25
19
5
25
25
11
5
19
6
6
20
24
10
20
20
6
10
24
10
10
24
20
6
24
24
10
6
20
7
7
21
23
9
21
21
7
9
23
9
9
23
21
7
23
23
9
7
21
These six sets constitute twenty-four of the twenty-eight phases. The remaining four are
the phases of crisis that set the basic structure of the entire Wheel, and these form pairs
(rather than tetrads) of Faculties, as indicated below:
Phase
Will
Mask
Creative Mind
Body of Fate
8
8
22
22
8
22
22
8
8
22
The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known
1
1
15
1
15
15
15
1
15
1
45
The interior structure of the Wheel relies thus on six sets of four phases and two sets of
two phases. A close analysis of the construction and operation of each of these sets would
go far towards demonstrating the extent and nature of the connections and symmetries,
but is beyond the scope of this essay.
V
We now turn attention to “True and False Mask” and “True and False Creative Mind.”30
At the end of the explanation of “Rules for Discovering True and False Masks” Yeats offers
the following information:
In an antithetical phase the being seeks by the help of the Creative Mind to deliver
the Mask from Body of Fate.
In a primary phase the being seeks by the help of the Body of Fate to deliver the Creative Mind from the Mask.
(AVB 91; CW13 20; AVA 21)
These are the simple rules concerning Masks. In order to determine True and False Masks,
Yeats explains as follows:
When the Will is in antithetical phases the True Mask is the effect of Creative Mind
of opposite phase upon that phase; and the False Mask is the effect of Body of Fate of
opposite phase upon that phase.
(AVB 90; CW13 19–20; AVA 20)
Yeats uses Phase 17 to illustrate the principle:
The True Mask of Phase 17, for instance, is “Simplification through intensity,”
derived from Phase 3, modified by the Creative Mind of that phase, which is
described as “Simplicity” and comes from Phase 27, which is that of the Saint.
(AVB 90; cf. CW13 19–20; AVA 20)
This explanation complicates matters. The Mask of Phase 17 derives from Phase 3. When
Yeats says that True Mask is “modified by the Creative Mind of that phase,” he refers not
to the Creative Mind of a person of Phase 17 (that is, Creative Mind at Phase 13), but to
the Creative Mind of a person of Phase 3, which is at Phase 27, and is described as “Simplicity.” This introduces a new feature of the interaction of the Faculties in Yeats’s system.
Until this point in A Vision B, our basic understanding of a phase is that each of the four
pertinent Faculties affects each of the others, and this combination of forces (comprising
oppositions and discords) defines the phase. However, in the determination of True and
False Mask, the incarnation is affected by Faculties beyond the principal four. The Faculties
46
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
of Phase 17 are: Will at 17, Mask at 3, Creative Mind at 13 and Body of Fate at 27. The True
Mask of Phase 17, however, is determined not by the Creative Mind appropriate to Phase
17 (which is at Phase 13) but to the opposite phase—namely, Will at Phase 3—which
has Creative Mind at Phase 27. Yeats’s explanation makes it clear that, in addition to the
prescribed Creative Mind of Phase 17—namely, that of Phase 13—the Creative Mind of
Phase 27 is also operative on the Mask of Phase 17. Similarly, the False Mask of Phase 17
derives from the influence of Body of Fate from the opposite phase, namely Phase 3, whose
appropriate Body of Fate is at Phase 13. The table below is intended to clarify matters:
Phase
Will
Mask
Creative Mind
Body of Fate
17
17
3
13
27
3
3
17
27
13
The True Mask of a person at Phase 17 is determined by the Creative Mind at Phase 27.
The False Mask of the same person is determined by the Body of Fate at Phase 13. The
diagram above indicates that, in effect, identifying True and False Masks, is a matter of
transposing Creative Mind and Body of Fate. Translated into conceptual terms, the True
Mask of Phase 17 requires the operation of an intellect that is located precisely at the position of the exterior world of that phase. In short, the knower must resemble the known.
Conversely, during the False Mask of Phase 17, the known must take on the form of the
knower.31
The above discussion, and the rules offered by Yeats, pertains only to antithetical
phases. The rules for primary phases can be derived by a simple substitution of terms.
Whereas, in antithetical phases, True Mask involves the “effect of Creative Mind of opposite
phase upon that phase,” in primary phases, True Mask involves the “effect of Body of Fate
of opposite phase upon that phase” (AVB 90; cf. CW13 20; AVA 21). Employing this same
principle of substitution, the False Mask of primary phases involves the “effect of Creative
Mind of opposite phase upon that phase.” In summary, in the True Mask of primary phases,
the known must take on the form of the knower, while in the False Mask of primary
phases, the knower must resemble the known.
Turning to True and False Creative Mind, if rules of substitution (similar to those
above) were to apply, we would find that the operative Faculties would be Will and Mask
(just as, in the determination of True and False Mask, the operative Faculties are Creative
Mind and Body of Fate). However, to complicate matters further, such a pattern does not
apply. Yeats states the rule as follows:
When the Will is in antithetical phases the True Creative Mind is derived from the
Creative Mind phase, modified by the Creative Mind of that phase; while the False
Creative Mind is derived from the Creative Mind phase, modified by the Body of
Fate of that phase. (AVB 91; cf. CW13 21; AVA 22)
The rule for True and False Creative Mind is thus entirely different to the rule for True and
False Mask. The Creative Mind of Phase 17, as indicated in the above table, derives from
Phase 13. The True Creative Mind of this phase results from the influence of the Creative
The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known
47
Mind of the phase from which the Creative Mind of Phase 17 itself derives. The Creative
Mind of a person of Phase 17 derives from Phase 13. In turn, the Creative Mind of Phase
13 derives from Phase 17. This Creative Mind from Phase 17 “modifies” the Creative
Mind of Phase 13 to create the True Creative Mind appropriate to a person of Phase 17.
We observe that, in effect, the “modifier” derives from the same Phase as the Will of that
phase, namely, Phase 17. Thus, the knower must resemble the ego in the creation of True
Creative Mind in antithetical phases.
False Creative Mind (in antithetical phases) involves the influence of the Body of Fate
from the phase of the Creative Mind. In Phase 17, Creative Mind is from Phase 13. The
Body of Fate of a person of Phase 13 is from Phase 3. So, the Body of Fate from Phase 3
“modifies” the Creative Mind from Phase 13 in order to create False Creative Mind of a
person of Phase 17. This modifier derives from the same phase as the Mask of a person
at Phase 17 (namely, Phase 3) and we can thus conclude that, in effect, the knower must
resemble the object of desire in the creation of False Creative Mind. These are the rules
pertaining to antithetical phases.
During primary phases, the rule is as follows:
When the Will is in primary phases the True Creative Mind is derived from the
Creative Mind phase, modified by the Body of Fate of that phase; while the False Creative Mind is derived from the Creative Mind phase modified by the False Creative
Mind of that phase. (AVB 92; CW13 21; cf. AVA 22)
The simple rule of substitution applies here. The Creative Mind of a person of Phase 27
(to employ Yeats’s own example in AVB 92) derives from Phase 3. The Body of Fate of that
Phase derives from Phase 13. This Body of Fate from Phase 13 “modifies” the Creative
Mind of Phase 3 to create the True Creative Mind appropriate to a person of Phase 27 (and
other primary phases). We observe that, in effect, this “modifier” derives from the same
phase of the Mask of that phase, namely Phase 13. Thus, the knower must resemble the
object of desire in the creation of True Creative Mind for primary phases.
False Creative Mind (in primary phases) involves the influence of the False Creative
Mind from the phase of the Creative Mind. In Phase 27, Creative Mind is from Phase 3.
The Creative Mind of a person of Phase 3 is from Phase 27. So the Creative Mind from
Phase 27 “modifies” the Creative Mind of Phase 3 to create the False Creative Mind appropriate to a person of Phase 27 (and other primary phases). In effect, this “modifier”
derives from the same phase as the Will of a person of Phase 27. Thus the knower must
resemble the ego or the desiring self in order to create False Creative Mind. In this final
rule concerning True and False Creative Mind, Yeats specifies that the “modifier” derives
not simply from the Creative Mind, but from the “False Creative Mind” of Phase 27. One
realizes that in the prior rules, no such specificity was given. One may conclude that False
Creative Mind modifies False Mask or False Creative Mind, whereas True Creative Mind
modifies True Mask or True Creative Mind. If this conclusion is correct, then Yeats should
have made this clear in the previous rules. Thus, in the rule for discovering the True Mask
in antithetical phases, the phrase “the effect of Creative Mind of opposite phase upon that
phase” (AVB 90; CW13 19; AVA 20) should read “the effect of True Creative Mind of opposite phase upon that phase.” In the rule for discovering the False Mask in primary phases, the
48
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
phrase “the effect of Creative Mind of opposite phase upon that phase” (AVB 90; cf. CW13 20;
AVA 21) should read “the effect of False Creative Mind of opposite phase upon that phase.” In
the rule for discovering the True Creative Mind in antithetical phases, the phrase “modified
by the Creative Mind of that phase” (AVB 91; CW13 21; AVA 22) should read “modified by
the True Creative Mind of that phase.”
The appropriateness of these proposed clarifications is perhaps supported by the “Defects of False Creative Mind which Bring the False Mask,” presented in “Table of the
Quarters” as follows:
First quarter.
Second [quarter.]
Third [quarter.]
Fourth [quarter.]
Sentimentality.
Brutality (desire for root facts of life).
Hatred.
Insensitiveness.
(AVB 103; CW13 33; AVA 36)
This tetrad is somewhat mysterious, in that it is given no explanation or supporting discussion in A Vision. However, a series of questions and answers in the automatic script
provides some elucidation:
7. Can you give any general definition of the evil as distinguished from the
creative genius.
7. Separative of the four faculties
8. Does it for instance seperate PF & CG
8. It separates each from the other – mask from cg – cg from pf – pf from mask
& so on
9. By acting on what human quality does it seperate PF & CG.
9. Repeat slowly
Yes [GY, later] (Separation CG. From P.F)
Varies in every quarter – your quarter hatred – first quarter sentimentality—
2nd quarter a form of brutality (word later) – 4th insensitiveness
10. By what quality does it seperate mask & ego
10. insincerity always (Mask & Ego)
11. How does it seperate Mask and C.G
11. Sterilisation (Mask & CG)
12. PF & Mask
12. emulation (PF & Mask)
13. PF & Ego?
13. That is individual (PF & Ego)
The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known
49
14. Ego and CG?
14. by accentuating pf (Ego & Cg)
15. Which is most important.
15. insincerity
16. How does insincerity seperate Mask & Ego
16. That you can work out quite easily
17. How does hatred seperate PF and CG
17. by mutilating power of cg to overcome pf & absorb it – now all these can
you work out in talk
18. Can you define the brutality more clearly.
18. desire for root facts life as it is
(YVP2 134–35)32
The “evil genius” or False Creative Mind functions to separate the Faculties from each
other, thereby disrupting their proper function. The passage above indicates that the “Defects of False Creative Mind which bring the False Mask” are specifically related to the
separation of Creative Mind from Body of Fate (answer 9). This is confirmed in a footnote
to the “Defects”: “In primary phases these defects separate Mask from Body of Fate, in
antithetical, Creative Mind from Body of Fate” (AVB 103; CW13 33; cf. AVA 36). In primary phases, the separation between Mask and Body of Fate is not given its own tetrad of
descriptors and is described only as “emulation” (answer 12). And there is no explanation
of the process whereby other combinations of Faculties are separated. The quality that
separates Mask from Will is “insincerity” (answer 10). A passage quoted earlier confirms
this: “insincerity when mask is enforced – seperates Mask & ego by making ego through
fear of self knowledge choose evil Mask” (CF M6; YVP3 334). Thus, the rule of “insincerity” (or the separation between Mask and Will) is that it operates in the primary phases.33
The quality that separates Mask from Creative Mind is “Sterilisation” (answer 11), and this
is left unexplained. The topic of “defects” (and the separations they cause) is given uneven
treatment in A Vision and bears further scrutiny.
The discussion in the pages above constitutes an attempt to explore, perhaps laboriously,
the rules governing True and False Mask, as well as True and False Creative Mind. In order to
understand what this entails on a practical level, it will be necessary to discuss the complexities
of the Faculties in the context of each of the phases. Such discussion would be of the “flesh”
rather than the “skeleton” of A Vision, and is beyond the scope of the present study.
Yeats says in A Vision:
Only long familiarity with the system can make the whole table of Masks, Creative Minds, etc.—see Sec. XII [“The Table of the Four Faculties”]—intelligible;
it should be studied by the help of these two following rules:
In an antithetical phase the being seeks by the help of the Creative Mind to
deliver the Mask from Body of Fate.
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
50
In a primary phase the being seeks by the help of the Body of Fate to deliver the
Creative Mind from the Mask. (AVB 91; cf. CW13 20; AVA 21)
Here, amidst all the complex detail, is a pair of overarching principles. The goal of antithetical incarnation is to free the Mask from the restraints of materiality, and to do so,
the Creative Mind is employed as a lever or a buffer. The mind mediates between desire
and fact; if the mind can be harnessed by desire to serve its images, then the external
environment lacks restraining power. The goal of primary incarnation is to free Creative
Mind from its subordination to Mask, by offering an alternative and an adversary to the
dreams of Mask, namely, the hard facts of the external world. Once the mind focuses on
fact, dreams are relegated to obscurity, and the self submits to the authority of the natural
and transcendent worlds.
The section immediately after “The Rules for Discovering True and False Masks” and
“Rules for Finding the True and False Creative Mind” is Section VIII of Part II of Book I
of A Vision B, “Rule for Finding Body of Fate”:
The Body of Fate of any particular phase is the effect of the whole nature of its
Body of Fate phase upon that particular phase. As, however, the Body of Fate is
always primary it is in sympathy with the primary phase while it opposes the
antithetical phase; in this it is the reverse of the Mask, which is sympathetic to an
antithetical phase but opposes a primary. (AVB 92; CW13 22; AVA 23)
The first statement suggests that when the Body of Fate operates on a phase, it brings with
it the energies and propensities of all the Faculties of that phase (the “Body of Fate phase”).
By way of illustration, during Phase 5, the Body of Fate, which derives from Phase 11,
brings with it the influence of the Will, Creative Mind and Mask from Phase 13. These
effects, complex and subtle, are not readily discernible in Yeats’s descriptions of the phases
in Part III of Book 1 of A Vision B, “The Twenty-eight Incarnations.”34
VI
To reiterate, each of the quarters is dominated by one of the Faculties: “The Will is strongest in the first quarter, Mask in second, Creative Mind in third, and Body of Fate in
fourth” (AVB 93; cf. CW13 22; AVA 24). However, in response to the question, “Phases
where Mask, CG, Etc should be predominant?” (YVP2 146), the control Thomas provides
information (YVP2 551 n27) that can best be captured in the following table:
Will
CM
Mask Will
CM
BF
Mask BF
Will
CM
BF
Mask
2
3
4
5
6
7
9
10
11
12
13
14
16
17
18
19
20
21
23
24
25
26
27
28
The Faculties are allocated to pairs of phases that occupy opposed positions on the Great
Wheel, and each Faculty dominates three pairs of phases, but there is otherwise no obvious regularity in the allocation of Faculties to phases, in that the allocation does not take
The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known
51
an obviously regular form, such as Will/CM/Mask/BF which is then repeated. However,
if one divides the Wheel into the eight triads that comprise the quarters (2–4, 5–7, 9–11,
12–14, 16–18, 19–21, 23–25, 26–28) a pattern emerges. The first phase of each of the
triads receives the following Faculty:
Triad
First
Phase
Faculty
Second
Phase
Faculty
Third
Phase
Faculty
1
2
Will
3
CM
4
Mask
2
5
Will
6
CM
7
BF
3
9
Mask
10
BF
11
Will
4
12
CM
13
BF
14
Mask
5
16
Will
17
CM
18
Mask
6
19
Will
20
CM
21
BF
7
23
Mask
24
BF
25
Will
8
26
CM
27
BF
28
Mask
The pattern is Will: Will: Mask: CM. Other patterns emerge: the middle phase of the
first and second triads is dominated by Creative Mind; the middle phase of the third
and fourth triads is dominated by Body of Fate. The third phase in the triads receives the
Faculties as follows: Mask: BF: Will: Mask in the first half of the Wheel, which is repeated
in the second half of the Wheel. And if one assigns ‘A’ to antithetical Faculties and ‘P’ to
primary Faculties, then the pattern of dominance in the first half of the wheel is APA APP
APA APP, and this pattern is repeated in the second half of the wheel. What does such
dominance mean? This is the question Yeats asks:
4. What does predominance of ego mean
4. Intensification of opinion as the result of intensification of choice & free will
The ego chooses his thought & opinion – he does not find himself compelled to
it by his own nature. (YVP2 146)
From this brief explanation, it is clear that predominance of the Will entails an accentuation of the influence of the Will on the interaction of the Faculties in that phase. From
this, one can reasonably extrapolate that in each phase, the “predominant” Faculty has
an accentuated effect on the whole phase. In sets 3–6 (the antithetical sets) only six of
the twelve phases are dominated by antithetical Faculties. Similarly, in sets 1–2 and 7–8
(the primary sets) only six of the twelve phases are dominated by primary Faculties. This
complicates our understanding of the two halves, and the four quarters, of the wheel.
In conclusion, this essay has attempted to shed light on the meaning, structure and
function of the Faculties in Yeats’s system. The Tinctures create the two fundamental and
opposed energies, the broad playing field, whereas the Faculties create specificity. Each of
the twenty-eight Phases is constituted by a unique combination of the Faculties, and this
52
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
combination is responsible for the unique character of each phase, both for individual
incarnations and historical periods. Thus, a deep understanding of the Faculties should
provide one, in turn, with the key, systematically and logically, to the construction of the
exact character of each of the phases. The “Table of the Four Faculties,” which provides
the brief descriptions of the character of each of the phases, was communicated to Yeats
in a single sitting, and is thus conveyed to Yeats rather than deduced from the Faculties
in their phases and in their combination. One important and difficult task for future
scholarship will be to bridge the gap between our understanding of each of the Faculties in
each of the phases, and the descriptions of each composite phase in the “Table of the Four
Faculties,” thus bridging the conceptual understanding of the components, and the final,
complex, distinctive, incarnated product. If successful, this will illustrate one of Yeats’s
most deeply help beliefs, namely, that the system is internally self-coherent, a system of
meaning that is the logical outcome of the interplay of the basic building blocks. While
the present study aims to show the development of the Faculties and their basic meaning
within the Great Wheel, there is much that is at present poorly understood. Perhaps the
most important point to have emerged is that a great deal more scholarly attention can
be given to the Faculties.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
I wish to express grateful thanks to Neil Mann and Matthew Gibson for their extensive and careful comments on the draft of this essay.
In ‘Version B’ (YVP4 153) Michael Robartes suggests that the four suits of the Tarot “were derived through
the Saracens from the Dance.” As Robartes’s story is a fiction, it is likely that the origin of the Four Royal
Persons was from the Tarot Court cards.
I have excluded Phases 8 and 22 from either the primary or the antithetical because at these phases, the Tinctures are balanced, and neither Tincture dominates. The mechanics of these phases will be discussed below.
The “other 3” refer to Mask, Creative Mind (here, Creative Genius) and Body of Fate (here, Persona of Fate).
In the Card File, Yeats records: “Mask & CG = Destiny | Ego & PF = Fate” (CF F17; YVP3 306).
Desire need not have a singular object: “The stronger the desire the more numerous the mask images” (CF
F22; YVP3 307).
The question that arises is, “How is desire formed?” Yeats tells us, enigmatically, that it is a product of
the clash between the primary and antithetical Tinctures: “Mask: ‘combination of phases & place of [sun]
quite apart from individual’.…‘Formed by ego as result of conflict of sun & moon’” (VNB1, p. 52; YVP3
162–63).
Some key elements of this passage are summarized in the following entry in the Card File: “We can wear
no mask but that of our phase but we can move or dance or even speak against Mask as we will. We can
only modify mask in detail. It is used to unity [unify] detail. As a form of intensity it cannot be changed”
(CF F20; YVP3 307).
My thanks to Neil Mann for alerting me to this quotation and others.
This is stated in “Enforced and Free Faculties” (AVB 104).
Ego = Will. CG = Creative Genius = Creative Mind. PF = Persona of Fate = Body of Fate. See note 4 above.
In A Vision A he suggests a possible reason that he evidently later considered unsatisfactory: “The relation
of the Great Wheel and the Year is explained in Book II, and the makers of these tables may have had the
old tenfold year in their minds” (CW13 31; AVA 34).
Thanks to Matthew Gibson for suggesting this formulation and “primordial”; see following page.
The body and all matter form part of the Body of Fate:
1. Is the body part of the pf
1. Yes
2. Is matter part of the pf
2. Yes (YVP2 354)
The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
53
CG = Creative Genius = Creative Mind. PF = Persona of Fate = Body of Fate. See footnote 3 above.
In the automatic script (YVP2 101–2) and the Vision Notebooks (VNB2, p. 34; YVP3 201), this is described as “Aspiration.”
By “Nature,” Yeats means the essence of the individual being, and not the natural world.
The control Thomas says, “Mask is that form which is created by passion to reveal or conceal individuality” (YVP1 262). After Phase 15, the Mask conceals, “for the being grows incoherent, vague and broken,
as its intellect (Creative Mind) is more and more concerned with objects that have no relation to its unity
but a relation to the unity of society or of material things known through the Body of Fate” (AVB 85). In
the predominantly primary phases, the Mask comprises not the free images of its own desire, but of social,
material and celestial necessity.
Without wishing to complicate an already complex system, this description implies that during the primary phases, the Creative Mind acts very much like the Will, imposing its intellectual convictions on the
world for its own good (Robespierre is cited as the example), whereas during the antithetical phases the
Will, by creating its own universe, acts simultaneously as Creative Mind. By extrapolation, during the antithetical phases, the Mask imposes itself on the world to such a great degree that it becomes the world (or
Body of Fate) whereas, during the primary phases, the Body of Fate demands attention, effacing the possibility of individually created objects of desire. Each of the two Tinctures takes on the function and identity of
the other two Tinctures, to varying extents, either minimally or totally.
See Diagram 6a.
See Diagram 7a.
“Bias” is a keyword for Will: “energy, or will or bias” (AVB 171; CW13 85; AVA 105).
Clearly, “Nature” denotes personal nature or the self-created self. In “The Two Directions” (AVB 104),
Yeats says: “Phase 1 to Phase 15 is towards Nature. Phase 15 to Phase 1 is towards God.”
“Mask 22 to 1 enforced by CG” (CF M7; YVP3 334)
In these contests, Yeats leaves one in no doubt as to who should win: “In the first quarter body should win,
in second heart etc.” (AVB 102; CW13 32; AVA 35).
Yeats distinguishes between True and False Mask, and True and False Creative Mind. These terms will be
discussed below.
The potential confusion arises from the fact that Yeats does not sufficiently highlight the distinction between, for example, the Creative Mind of a person at Phase 2 (which will be at Phase 28) and Creative Mind
of, or deriving from, Phase 2.
These phases, 2 and 16, both occur one phase after the perfection of the primary and antithetical Tinctures
(at Phases 1 and 15) and thus represent the start of the gradual decline from power. These phases are thus
in the descendent, although still almost completely full of a single Tincture.
The following set of tables is elegantly represented by Neil Mann in a single diagram (www.YeatsVision.com/
Faculties.html/#Fold, second diagram, and also /Wheel.html).
These constitute sections VI and VII of Part II of Book I of A Vision B (AVB 90–92) and sections V and
VI of Part I of Book I, “What the Caliph Partly Learned,” of A Vision A (CW13 19–22; AVA 20–23).
Yeats’s explanation is internally self-consistent, in that it presents no contradictions or confusions, but why
the determination of True and False Masks should involve Creative Mind and Body of Fate (respectively) of
the opposing phase is not explained. Further study is necessary.
This discussion is summarized in the Card File as follows:
CF F12
Faculties
Evil Genius separates CG from PF
In First Quarter by sentimentality
[In] Second [Quarter by] a form of brutality (desire for root facts of life as it is)
[In] Third [Quarter by] hatred
[In] Fourth [Quarter by] insensitiveness.
It seperates Mask & Ego (this is the “most important”) by insincerity always
It seperates Mask & CG by sterilization
It seperates Mask & PF by emulation
Evil Mask is fear
CF C12x
insincerity seperates enforced Mask & Ego because “it cannot face self knowledge brought by mask”
54
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Before 1 the enforced Mask brings to the ego “knowledge of its weakness & after 1 of its strength”
Insincerity in third quarter is “self deception & exultation” (YVP3 304–5)
33. However, the passage from the Card File, quoted in the note above, indicates that “Insincerity in third
quarter is ‘self deception & exultation’ ” (CF C12x; YVP3 305). This implies that insincerity is possible in
the antithetical phases, which appears to contradict the statement, quoted above, that “insincerity when
Mask is enforced” (that is, during primary phases only (CF M6; YVP3 334).
34. Cf. A Vision A’s very similar “The Twenty-eight Embodiments.”
“THE SPIRITUAL INTELLECT’S GREAT WORK”: A DISCUSSION OF
THE PRINCIPLES AND A VISION’S ACCOUNT OF DEATH
by Graham A. Dampier
T
he internal structure of the system elucidated in A Vision consists of an intricately
woven series of theoretic concepts, tenets and terms. For this reason, when dealing
specifically with the system’s account of death, as set out in Book III of A Vision
B entitled “The Soul in Judgment,” one is compelled to begin the study elsewhere. The
same applies to the Four Principles, since they oversee the soul’s progress through the six
discarnate states. The most appropriate point of departure for a study of A Vision’s account
of death and the role of the Principles in the states between lives would be the system’s
description of life, and the activity of the Faculties.
According to the system’s portrayal of life and death, the soul is subject to a purification
or clarification process in the discarnate states. This idea is expressed in the poem “The Fool
by the Roadside” as published in A Vision A: “When my days that have / From cradle run
to grave / From grave to cradle run instead” (CW13 181; AVA 219).1 These lines appear to
invert the traditional Western conception of the opposition between life and death. From
the material perspective (subject to multiplicity, individuated consciousness and constrained
perception) life ends with the death of the body, whereas from the transcendent point of
view bodily existence is a limit imposed upon a perfected soul. Life can thus be regarded,
according to the system of A Vision, as the contamination, imprisonment and confusion of
a spirit that is, in its natural state, pure, free and fully illuminated. Material life is a kind
of spiritual death, a rending of pure perfected transcendent consciousness. This is a fundamental postulate that regulates the opposition between life and death, materiality and
spirituality, and the Faculties and the Principles. “It is because of the identification of light
with nature,” Yeats explains, “that my instructors make the antithetical or lunar cone of the
Faculties light [cradle to grave] and leave the solar dark [grave to cradle]. In the cone of the
Principles, which operate after death, the solar cone is light [grave to cradle] and the other
dark [cradle to grave], but their light is thought not nature” (AVB 190).
Yeats explains that the “wheel or cone of the Faculties [i.e., the lunar cone] may be considered to complete its movement between birth [cradle] and death [grave], that of the Principles
to include the period between lives as well” (AVB 188). In the material cone of the Faculties life
is conceived, in accordance with traditional postulates, as running from dawn (birth) to dusk
(death), while in the transcendent cone of the Principles the entry of a being into materiality is
represented as the burial of a pure spirit in the “fury and the mire of human veins” (VP 497;
CW1 252). The reason, of course, is that the wheel of the Principles encompasses life and the
period between lives. The Faculties are involved in material being, while the Principles are transcendent. Whereas the Faculties are operative only in life, the Principles are present during incarnation, albeit dormant and concealed, while active in the discarnate states. To be more precise,
two of the Principles predominate in life, while the remaining two conduct the activity of the
discarnate states: “In the period between lives, the Spirit and the Celestial Body prevail, whereas
Husk and Passionate Body prevail during life. Once again, solar day, lunar night” (AVB 188).2
56
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
For reasons of length, I will discuss life not in material terms (considered to run from
cradle to grave, which is represented by the movement of the Faculties between the Tinctures), but from the transcendent perspective instead, so as to illustrate that death entails
a systematic purification of the soul. In order to achieve this objective, it is necessary to
explore the extension of the Principles into materiality, as this will reveal the details of the
transition from transcendental consciousness to the material conditions of experience.
In this essay, I will treat the system elucidated in A Vision as a discourse that is dynamic, fluid and continually in the process of development.3 Accordingly, all the various
incarnations of the system—from the exposition conducted in the automatic script and
the Sleep and Dream Notebooks, to Yeats’s codification of it in the various preparatory
notebooks, Card File entries, A Vision A, and A Vision B, as well as the various essays and
diary entries that serve in some way to develop its ideas and internal consistency—as
equally important to the task of providing a study of the system’s account of death as a
process of purification. With this approach in mind I will not consider any stage of the
system’s elucidation as being more definitive than others; instead, I will treat it as an unfolding collection of ideas, tenets and concepts.
The automatic script, the first edition, and then the second edition of A Vision represent three stages in the system’s exposition. The automatic script, as the first stage, serves as
the basis upon which both editions of A Vision are elucidated. The second edition departs
significantly from the automatic script and A Vision A. I am of the opinion that Yeats’s
exposition of the discarnate states in A Vision A retains more of the initial exposition developed in the automatic script. This is not to say that the second edition is incorrect, or
that it departs so significantly from the original exposition as to be unreliable; in fact, it
retains much of what was developed in the automatic script even if it refashions the original concepts and stages to some extent. Furthermore, the immense complexity and detail
of the automatic script, to my mind, remains under-utilized in studies of the system, and
has much to offer in terms of clarifying the system’s account of death. On the other hand,
the second edition is far more developed in terms of its treatment of the Principles, and accounts for the metaphysical basis of the system in a way that is more lucid and more useful
for defining them. My strategy is to use all three stages of the system’s development to account for the Spirit’s purification in death. In the end, all three sources of exposition have
their individual merits, and are equally important to understanding the system more fully.
This view is particularly useful when one considers that by Yeats’s own admission
“The Soul in Judgment,” Book III of A Vision B, in its final form is an incomplete elucidation of the system’s account of death, which includes the various processes involved in
the Celestial Body’s clarification of the discarnate Spirit. In the introduction to A Vision
B Yeats explains that “The Soul in Judgment” was elucidated “when my wife’s growing
fatigue made communication difficult” (AVB 23).4 He cites this and “defects of my own”
as the reasons for why “The Soul in Judgment” is “the most unfinished of my five books”
(AVB 23). This suggests that Yeats’s final attempt at elucidating the discarnate states of
death is not complete. One might say that a definitive exposition of the system’s account
of death does not exist. It is my opinion that various studies of the period between lives are
required before we can come close to completing our knowledge of the complex processes
involved in the Spirit’s passage from one incarnation to the next.
Since the over-arching aim is to contribute to existing knowledge on the system of A
“The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work”
57
Vision, I endeavor to provide an elucidation of the interaction of the Principles in death,
which will result in a study that employs ideas not fully developed in either version of A
Vision, but which are elucidated in the automatic script and the Sleep and Dream Notebooks. The motivation for this is not to arrive at the final, most authoritative exposition
of the system’s treatment of death. Instead, the ideas and concepts are employed so as to
provide a reading of the role of the Principles in death that accords with the system’s theoretical framework. This means that I will refer to all texts to argue that death is a systematic
process by which an individual Spirit is purified of its material life by the Celestial Body.5
I. The Extension of the Principles into Materiality
In Book I of A Vision B, “The Great Wheel,” Yeats presents an account of material existence in which he explains that all of life is constituted by contrary poles, viz. the primary
and antithetical Tinctures. The intersection of the Tinctures is the founding moment of material existence, and a fundamental requirement of life. When they meet the primary and
antithetical Tinctures give rise to the Faculties, which move constantly between the poles.6
Yeats’s opening statements on the Principles reveal that the Faculties are material derivatives of
Celestial Body, Spirit, Passionate Body and Husk: “the Principles are the innate ground of the
Faculties” (AVB 187). Given that the Tinctures and Faculties are essentially products of the
extension of the Principles into materiality, the contact of spirit with matter, and that life is
governed by the movement of Will, Creative Mind, Mask and Body of Fate between the poles,
it is necessary to discuss briefly the process of incarnation and the founding of the Faculties.
The extension of the Principles into materiality is a complex process that begins with
the highest order of existence, which Yeats has termed the “ultimate reality.” According to
Yeats, this reality cannot be defined, conceived or described; it is simply, as an imperative,
beyond the realm of human knowledge. It is the inaccessible and unsurpassable horizon of
human endeavor. Yeats explains that the “system is founded upon the belief that the ultimate
reality, symbolised as the Sphere, falls in human consciousness, as Nicholas of Cusa was the
first to demonstrate, into a series of antinomies” (AVB 187). The ultimate reality represents
all distinction, division and dualism reconciled, negated and transcended. However, since
the Principles facilitate the fragmentation of the sphere into a multiplicity of individuated
beings, they must represent the first instances of division, distinction and separation.
The Principles represent the first steps outside the phaseless sphere and are preliminary distinctions from which the proliferation of material antinomies proceeds. They are
founding elements of individuated consciousness, distinction and multiplicity. According
to Colin McDowell, “We could not begin to describe the Four Principles unless we made
distinctions between them, and hence it may be said that these distinctions hold the seeds
of discord [as well as the material antinomies and the strife between the Tinctures].”7
Yeats employs the diagram below to illustrate the distinctions between the “ultimate
reality,” and the Celestial Body, Spirit, Passionate Body and Husk. Yeats explains that he
has, “with some hesitation,” associated the Celestial Body with Plotinus’s “First Authentic Existant,” Spirit with the “Second Authentic Existant,” and Passionate Body with the
“Third Authentic Existant” (AVB 194).8 Husk we are told is produced when the Third
Authentic Existant splits in two, which causes it to reflect “first as sensation and its object
(our Husk and Passionate Body), then as discursive reason” (AVB 194). The reason for
58
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Yeats’s hesitation is that the Principles are distinct theoretical conceptions that exhibit a
low degree of formal relation to concepts found outside of A Vision’s fold. Yeats considered Plotinus’s division of reality into three hypostases as the closest approximation to
the system’s account of the intersection of the Tinctures, the founding of the Faculties and
the creation of material existence. It serves, then, as a good point of reference in Western
thought with which to orientate a reading of the Principles. The attempt to correlate
the Principles with Plotinus’s ontological system succeeds in providing the recognizable
ground needed to conceptualize the extension of the Celestial Body, Spirit, Passionate Body
and Husk into materiality:
Figure 1: The material extension of the Principles and the founding the Faculties (see AVB 194).
In the automatic writing session of 12 June 1918, Thomas, the communicator, begins
with the statement that the “celestial body is that portion of the divine influx [viz. the
“ultimate reality”] which is separable and divisible” (YVP1 498). Yeats responded to this
definition by asking whether the Celestial Body is “Seperable from the soul & devisible in it
self ” (YVP1 499). It appears that Yeats interpreted this statement as implying that the Celestial Body can be separated from individual beings and that divisibility is possible within
this Principle. The answer given by Thomas suggests that the Celestial Body is able to separate and divide Spirits from the “ultimate reality”: “Separable & divisible from the entire
into the particular & then incarnate” (YVP1 499). This implies that the Celestial Body
creates the possibility of distinction from the “entire,” which refers to the unified singularity of the “divine influx,” to the particular, which is the individuated Spirit. This action
“The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work”
59
allows the Spirit to be separated away from the sphere, which is the inaugurating step in
the process of incarnation. The Celestial Body initiates the extension of the Principles into
materiality by creating the possibility for spirits to be separated from the “divine influx.”
It is the first step outside “the Sphere” (AVB 187), the initiatory distinction between the
undivided state of being found in the “ultimate reality” and the proliferation of material
antinomies. Furthermore, Yeats’s definition of the Celestial Body as a “portion of Eternal
Life [a metonym for the ultimate reality] which can be separated away” enforces a distinction between the highest order of existence and what can be described as the founding
Principle (CW13 130; AVA 160). The “ultimate reality” is by definition beyond life and
remains detached from the multiplicity of material being. The Celestial Body is divisible
within itself, which means that it exists as a portion of the “ultimate reality” that can be
divided and fragmented into multiple entities.
The Spirit is defined by Yeats as “almost abstract mind” in the first edition (CW13
130; AVA 160). It is an emanation of Plotinus’s Intellectual Principle, or Second Authentic
Existant, which is said to hold the First, the Celestial Body in “its moveless circle” (AVB
194). Throughout its separation from the sphere the Spirit contemplates and apprehends
the Celestial Body. According to Yeats, the “Spirit’s object is of like nature to itself ” (AVB
198). The Celestial Body and Spirit “are mind and its object (the Divine Ideas in their
unity)” (AVB 187). The Spirit is the active Principle in this relation as it must seek its final
unity with the Celestial Body both in life and death. The latter, on the other hand, serves
only to facilitate those conditions in which the Spirit can separate from the “ultimate reality” and enter into embodied being. Since the founding Principle is confined to a moveless
circle, it is largely inactive. The Celestial Body provides the original split from undivided
being, and allows for the Spirit’s active experience of both life and the discarnate states.
“The celestial body,” according to Yeats’s instructors, “is the founder & fashioner of the
spirit” (YVP1 499).
In life the Celestial Body and Spirit are separated by the strife between the Tinctures
and the antinomies of material existence. Their distinction is enforced upon the moment of birth and is perpetuated, nay exacerbated, during life. These Principles only begin
to converge during death. In fact, the process of death serves to unite them. Rosemary
Puglia Ritvo contends that “Concord is found when Spirit and Celestial Body are at rest
and in perfect unity; then ‘pure thought’ becomes reality.”9 The ideal outcome of the six
discarnate states of the soul is the union of mind and its object, Spirit and the Celestial
Body. Matthew Gibson explains that in “Yeats’s system, when the Spirit contemplates the
Celestial Body without hindrance they are together ‘pure thought’ (Ex 316) or ‘pure mind,
containing within itself pure truth’ (AVB 189).”10 He goes on to argue that before the soul
reincarnates “the Spirit must experience the six discarnate states described in the third
book of A Vision, ‘The Soul in Judgment,’ and ‘find’ the Celestial Body (AVB 223–25). In
other words they must become ‘pure mind.’”11
Since the Spirit is the active Principle in this relation (it confines the Celestial Body to
its moveless circle), it is not certain whether the founding Principle has any knowledge of
material existence that is independent of its association with the former. In other words,
it appears that the Celestial Body is only conscious during material incarnation due to its
link with the Spirit. On 1 February 1918 Yeats asks the instructor of the day: “During life
has the CB a seperate conscious existence” (YVP1 322). He is told that, “During life it
60
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
has none except through the spirit” (YVP1 322). This ability to know and perceive within
materiality appears to be realized upon the material birth of the Spirit.12 The Celestial Body
is only conscious of materiality due to its connection with the Spirit, which could be its
motivation for prying the Spirit out of the “ultimate reality” in the first place. It caused
the separation of the individual Spirit from the “ultimate reality,” and enforced its incarnation into the limitations of bodily existence, so as to know for itself what the material
experience entails.
The implication of this for the Spirit is that it “is throughout incarnation subsidiary
to CB – it cannot act alone” (YVP1 326). This means that in life the Spirit is subject to
the Celestial Body, as it exists in a subordinate relation to its “fashioner.” In addition, Yeats
was told that, “CB is source of spiritual influx but only to degree of incitement by spirit
although CB is the source of strength of spirit” (YVP1 325). During life the Spirit derives
strength from the Celestial Body, while being subject to its authority.
Yeats explains in A Vision A that the Spirit “has neither substance nor life unless
united to the Passionate Body or Celestial Body” (CW13 130; AVA 160). It derives its life
from the Celestial Body, since without it the Spirit would not exist in the first place, which
means that it gathers its substance from the Passionate Body. As “almost abstract mind” the
Spirit derives knowledge, i.e., intellectual data, from the Passionate Body (CW13 130; AVA
160). When united to the Celestial Body, the Spirit, or mind, is indistinguishable from its
object. When the Spirit and its object are one, when the distinction between mind and
what it apprehends is transcended and negated “there is only Spirit; pure mind, containing
within itself pure truth, that which depends only upon itself ” (AVB 189). But what results
in the contrary situation where the Spirit is united to the Passionate Body? How does it
gain intellectual substance from it?
According to Yeats, “the discarnate Daimons or Ghostly Selves” constitute the Passionate Body (AVB 194). The main function of the Passionate Body is to link “one being to
another” and to rescue the Celestial Body from its inert isolation (CW13 143; AVA 176).
Yeats explains that, “the Passionate Body exists [so] that it may ‘save the Celestial Body from
solitude’” (AVB 189). The automatic script of 2 April 1918 describes the chief function
of the Passionate Body, which supports the statements above: “The pb exists solely to form
a link between one ego and another which would be lacking without it” (YVP1 413). It
appears that, in linking one being to another, the Passionate Body allows the Celestial Body
to apprehend the distinction and multiplicity of material existence, which it experiences
through the Spirit. This suggests that without the Passionate Body one incarnate Spirit
would not be able to encounter another, for separate beings are linked to each other in
life by the former Principle. In this way the Passionate Body saves the Celestial Body from a
solitary existence. The Spirit affords the founding Principle the ability to gain knowledge
of physical existence, while the Passionate Body allows it to know other beings within
materiality.
The Celestial Body, taken as a whole, is defined by the unity of all Daimons that
take part in material existence, while the Passionate Body is “the sum” of these Daimons
(AVB 189). If the Passionate Body saves the Celestial Body from solitude by providing
links between individual incarnate beings, then it appears, inversely, that the Celestial
Body’s isolation is defined by the indistinguishable unity of those Daimons encountered in
the Passionate Body. The absence of links between Daimons in the Celestial Body suggests
“The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work”
61
that difference, individuation and separation cannot be experienced within the founding
Principle itself. Only the potential of distinction occurring exists. The Spirit is created so
that the Celestial Body can perceive material multiplicity within the Passionate Body. Yeats
writes that the Celestial Body is often symbolized as “a prisoner in a tower rescued by the
Spirit” (AVB 189). It would probably be more accurate to suggest that together the Spirit
and Passionate Body save the Celestial Body from its static, inert state of being. The Spirit
exists as an active participant that allows the Celestial Body to experience the various entities united within it as a congeries of separate and distinct individual beings that interact
within the Passionate Body. Yeats writes that the Spirit knows:
all other Daimons [which refers to all beings taking part in material existence] as
the Divine Ideas in their unity. They are one in the Celestial Body. The Celestial
Body is identified with necessity; when we perceive the Daimons as Passionate
Body, they are subject to time and space, cause and effect; when they are known
to the Spirit, they are known as intellectual necessity, because what the Spirit
knows becomes a part of itself. The Spirit cannot know the Daimons in their
unity until it has first perceived them as the objects of sense, the Passionate Body
exists that it may “save the Celestial Body from solitude.” (AVB 189)
Generally, then, the Celestial Body is governed by “Concord,” which according to Yeats
“fabricates all things [including those Daimons that are encountered by the Spirit in the
Passionate Body] into ‘an homogeneous sphere,’” while the Passionate Body is defined by
“Discord,” which “separates the elements [that constitute the homogeneous sphere] and
so makes the world we inhabit [a world defined by a plethora of distinct beings]” (AVB
67). The homogeneous sphere, however, is not the same as the phaseless sphere that is used
to represent the “ultimate reality,” for there is a definite difference between the founding
Principle and “Eternal life,” or as Yeats explains, “even the sphere formed by Concord is
not the changeless eternity, for Concord or Love but offers us the image of that which is
changeless” (AVB 67–68). The Celestial Body is subject to “Concord” and craves material
“Discord,” while the phaseless sphere is “neither one nor many, concord nor discord”
(AVB 193). It is beyond these distinctions, whereas the Celestial Body is instrumental in
instituting them.
At this point it would appear appropriate to associate the Celestial Body with the primary Tincture and the Passionate Body with the antithetical Tincture, since it appears that
material perception is defined by the apprehension of the latter by the former. In fact, according to various elucidations in the automatic script, there is a close connection between
the antithetical Tincture and the Passionate Body. On 2 April 1918, Yeats asks, “Is Anti in
any way different from different from PB” (YVP1 413). He is told, “The PB is formed out
of anti as life continues – built up by anti and out of anti till it becomes complete – the
anti neither diminishes nor fades – as pb grows they are inseperable during life but pb has
separate life after death” (YVP1 413; cf. YVP3 155; emphasis added). The Passionate Body
and the antithetical Tincture are basically the same during life. This is confirmed in the
automatic script of 1 February 1918, “pb is anti – through anti the spirit brings the celestial
body into action” (YVP1 322; emphasis added).
In the automatic script of 17 March 1918 Aymor explains that the Passionate Body
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
can be regarded as the site where physical existence transpires: “the pb is the actual sphere
of the world” (YVP1 388). It is defined as the “objects of sense” (AVB 188) and is the
totality of all that can be encountered in life: “The Passionate Body is the sum of those
Daimons,” which are encountered in life by the Celestial Body through the Spirit, (AVB
189). The Passionate Body not only rescues the Celestial Body from solitude, but serves as
the object of the latter Principle’s attention during material existence. The Celestial Body is
drawn to the plethora of possibilities that are knowable in material existence, and is given
the opportunity to experience all that bodily existence offers because of the Passionate
Body’s natural tendency to present objects of sense to perceiving consciousness.
Since the Passionate Body is formed out of the antithetical Tincture throughout life,
the implication is that our desires and passions are derived from this Principle. In A Vision
B Yeats writes that the antithetical Tincture is “our inner world of desire and imagination,”
it is “emotional and aesthetic” (AVB 73). In the automatic script Yeats is told that the Passionate Body “is the mass of concrete image desire passion emotion – all that is thought
felt or acted” (YVP1 414). It contains all images seen within material existence, as well as
all the desires, passions and emotions felt. It is all that can be experienced. Incarnation is
lived within the Passionate Body.
To reiterate: the Celestial Body, as the founding Principle, inaugurates the process
of incarnation, whereas the Passionate Body is the world into which the individual Spirit
incarnates. Thus it seems that the Celestial Body initiates the material extension of the
Principles in order to experience life within the Passionate Body. This experience is realized through the Spirit. Thus, the statement that the Passionate Body “is anti” and that it
is through the “anti” “that the spirit brings the celestial body into action” further suggests
that the Celestial Body requires the Passionate Body to experience multiplicity and distinction (YVP1 322). On the other hand, the Celestial Body requires the Spirit to form a link
between it and the Passionate Body. The Spirit is the Celestial Body’s capacity to perceive
the Passionate Body.
While the Celestial Body’s apprehension of materiality is determined by the Passionate
Body, the nature of the Spirit’s apprehension of other beings within the Passionate Body
is defined by the Husk. According to Yeats, the Third Authentic Existant splits in two so
as to create a distinction between Husk (sense) and Passionate Body (objects of sense). As
the ability to sense within materiality the Husk’s constitution includes: “impulse, images;
hearing, seeing, etc., images that we associate with ourselves—the ear, the eye, etc.” (AVB
188). The Passionate Body is the sum of all that is sensed, while the Husk is the capacity
to sense. In addition, the Husk is “symbolically the human body” (AVB 188). The Husk
allows the individual Spirit to assume bodily form and to experience the objects of sense
contained within materiality. If the Spirit is the ability to perceive within the material
realm and the Passionate Body is all that can be perceived, then the Spirit needs a body
through which to experience sensory perception. The Husk provides a link between the
Spirit and Passionate Body: “Behind the Husk (sense) is the [incarnate] Daimon’s hunger
to make apparent to itself certain Daimons, and the organs of sense are that hunger made
visible” (AVB 189).
The function of the Husk is to enable the Spirit to sense within the material world. It
allows the Spirit to take on bodily form by affording it the ability to perceive through the
senses of the body. The Husk is essential to the Celestial Body’s experience of multiplicity,
“The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work”
63
distinction and difference. Yeats explains that the “[incarnate] Daimon seeks through the
Husk that in the Passionate Body which it needs” (AVB 189). Without the Husk it would
only be able to apprehend other incarnate Daimons indirectly, which would result in an
incomplete experience of materiality. In fact, it may not even be able to present itself to
other Daimons without the Husk. The Husk provides a direct experience of incarnation,
by facilitating the Spirit’s entry into materiality. While the Spirit requires the Passionate
Body to provide it with links to other incarnate beings or Daimons, the Husk exists so that
it may allow for a sensual experience of these beings.
Finally, without the Husk the Spirit would not be able to perceive through the five
senses of the body. It would not possess the ability to receive or send sensory information. The Spirit would be blind, deaf and dumb. The senses are of course a basic requisite
of material experience. The Spirit would know that other Daimons exist but would not
have the ability to produce knowledge of all those it perceives. After all, the Spirit knows
other Daimons by “intellectual necessity” (AVB 189). It needs to perceive these Daimons
as “objects of sense,” which indicates that the Husk gives the Spirit access to the Passionate
Body (AVB 189). Without the Husk the possibility of knowing other incarnate beings by
“intellectual necessity” would not exist. This knowledge would not be possible. Therefore,
if the Celestial Body is able to perceive the Passionate Body through the Spirit, then it is
through the Husk that the Spirit has a direct sensuous encounter with the world’s “objects
of sense.” This Principle completes the process of incarnation and therefore the Celestial
Body’s apprehension of the Passionate Body. What must be determined, at this stage, is how
the Tinctures are created.
According to Figure 1, the primary Tincture is created when the Spirit, attached to
the Husk, assumes bodily existence, while the antithetical Tincture is a reflection of the
Passionate Body, which as we know is indistinguishable from the subjective pole during
incarnation (AVB 194). The antithetical Tincture is defined as the “result of contact of
matter with CB” (YVP3 248). This suggests that when the Celestial Body makes contact
with the material world the result is the formation of the antithetical Tincture. On 12
June 1918 Yeats asks the instructor Thomas: “Is anti result of contact of CB with matter”
(YVP1 500). It can be argued that the antithetical Tincture is created when the Celestial
Body is afforded the mediated opportunity to perceive the distinctions that exist within
the Passionate Body, for the latter Principle is the “actual sphere of the world” (YVP1 388).
In other words, when the Celestial Body makes contact with the Passionate Body through
the Spirit, the antithetical Tincture is instituted.
Furthermore, the statement that the “PB is formed out of anti as life continues – built
up by anti and out of anti till it becomes complete” suggests that as an incarnate being ages
the Passionate Body grows in turn (YVP1 413). This means that the initial contact between
the Celestial and Passionate Bodies is weak. The Celestial Body’s experience of the Passionate
Body upon the material birth of the Spirit is at the stage of infancy, and as the incarnate
being ages this experience grows. The longer the being is incarnate the more the Celestial
Body comes to know of the Passionate Body. The more extended the period of contact is
between the Celestial Body and Passionate Body in life, the more complete the former’s
experience of the latter will be.
On the other hand, the primary Tincture is the result of Spirit’s contact “with matter”
(YVP3 248). When the Spirit incarnates the objective Tincture is formed. This presup-
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
poses the Spirit’s union with its Husk. Bearing in mind that the Spirit senses through the
Husk, it is reasonable to assume that as soon as the former Principle incarnates it begins
to sense within the material world. Furthermore, if the antithetical Tincture is the result
of the Celestial Body’s contact with the Passionate Body, then the primary Tincture must be
the result of the Spirit’s union with its Husk upon incarnation. The Spirit’s ability to sense
within the material realm is initially diminutive, for the Husk “begins very small & grows
with life” (YVP3 11). This means that as the incarnate being ages and grows the Husk
develops in turn. In other words, the Spirit’s ability to encounter “objects of sense” within
the material world is strengthened with age.
Upon their creation the Tinctures give rise to the Four Faculties, which, according to
Yeats, are derived from the Principles. Gibson explains that “the Husk [sense] and Passionate Body [object of sense] are reflected as Will and Mask in the living man,” which suggests
that Celestial Body and Spirit are reflected as Body of Fate and Creative Mind respectively,
since during the lived experience the Spirit (mind) encounters the Celestial Body (its object) as a series of sensual objects.13
According to Yeats, upon their reflection into materiality the Principles undergo a
process of transference in which an inversion takes place that creates the Faculties. This
inversion perpetuates the symbolic, conceptual and geometric opposition between life and
death, “Discord” and “Concord,” lunar and solar circuits, and the Faculties and the Principles. The following table provides a synthesis of the correlations between the Principles
and the Faculties:14
Principle
Faculty
Temporal inversion
Celestial Body
Body of Fate
Timeless–Present
Spirit
Creative Mind
Future–Past
Passionate Body
Mask
Present–Timeless
Husk
Will
Past–Future
II. The Geometry of the Principles
Since the Principles straddle the division between life and death, any representation of
their activity includes not only the discarnate states of the soul, but the experience of incarnation as well. The activity of the Principles in life coincides with the movement of the
Faculties between the Tinctures. The latter are said to complete their movement “between
birth and death” (AVB 188). The wheel of the Faculties only runs from cradle to grave,
while the wheel of the Principles is continuous; it encompasses the conditions that govern
bodily existence as well as the discarnate states. The liberation of the Celestial Body and
Spirit from material constraints occurs at death. From a certain perspective the end of
life can be viewed as a kind of birth, for in death the aim is for the Spirit to cling to the
“Celestial Body until they are one and there is only Spirit” (AVB 188–89). The Spirit’s only
function in life is to convert sensual experience, which it attains through the Husk, into
intellectual knowledge: “The Spirit cannot know the Daimons in their unity [which occurs
in the Celestial Body] until it has first perceived them as the objects of sense [within the
“The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work”
65
Passionate Body]” (AVB 189). This means that in order for the Celestial Body and Spirit to
become one in death, the result of which is the “Divine Ideas in their unity” (AVB 187),
the latter must first create intellectual knowledge of those beings linked together by the
Passionate Body, for “what the Spirit knows becomes a part of itself ” (AVB 189).
Since the system’s geometry is notoriously difficult to master and often confusing, it
is best to approach a discussion of it at a general level before working one’s way to more
specific configurations and illustrations. I begin with the basic distinction between the
lunar cycle of the Faculties and the solar cycle of the Principles.
The Will, Creative Mind, Mask and Body of Fate move through the twenty-eight lunar
phases of “The Great Wheel.” They move between the full and the dark moons. The Principles, as inverted correlates to the Faculties, move within a different symbolic scheme. By
following the maxim of “solar day, lunar night,” Yeats constructs a distinct geometrical system for the Celestial Body, Spirit, Passionate Body and Husk. He proceeds to convert a lunar
cycle into a solar circuit in order to maintain the oppositions between life and death, the
Faculties and the Principles, and “Discord” and “Concord.” “I am told,” he writes, “to give
Phases 1, 8, 15, 22 a month apiece, the other phases the third of a month, and begin the
year like the early Roman year in the lunar month corresponding to March” (AVB 196).
The result is that the phases of crisis—1, 8, 15 and 22—are associated with the months
March (Phase 15), June (Phase 22), September (Phase 1) and December (Phase 8). This
correlation of phases and months of the year can be tabulated as follows:
Lunar Phases
Months of the Year
1
September
2, 3, 4
October
5, 6, 7
November
8
December
9, 10, 11
January
12, 13, 14
February
15
March
16, 17, 18
April
19, 20, 21
May
22
June
23, 24, 25
July
26, 27, 28
August
These associations serve to produce a symbolically inverted geometric scheme that
shadows the lunar symbolism of “The Great Wheel” (viz. the wheel of the Faculties) at
every turn. A solar circuit is created in the process. “A solar period,” according to Yeats, “is
a day from sunrise to sunrise, or a year from March to March, a month from full moon to
full moon. On the other hand a lunar period is a day from sunset to sunset, a year from
September to September, a month from moonless night to moonless night” (AVB 197).15
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
It is important to note that the correlation of lunar phases with solar months produces a circuit of symbolically equal duration to that of “The Great Wheel,” which is
inaccurate if one wants to illustrate the activity of the Principles both in life and death.
The wheel of the Principles should, by virtue of its continuity between lives, be longer
than that of the Faculties. Since it contains the six discarnate states within its ambit, this
cycle should, logically, be longer than a cycle that only represents the material movement
of the Faculties between the Tinctures. Yeats explains that in order to solve this problem
his instructors developed a symbolic scheme that cannot be confused with that of the
Faculties: “That the small wheels and vortexes that run from birth to birth may be part of
the symbolism of the wheel of the twenty-eight incarnations without confusing it in the
mind’s eye, my instructors have preferred to give to the Principles of these small wheels
cones that cannot be confused with that of the Faculties” (AVB 197). The result is a system
of representation that depicts the movement of the Celestial Body, Spirit, Passionate Body
and Husk as it occurs in life and death, that is, between one birth and another, rather
different from the symbolism awarded to the Faculties, which illustrates their movement
through the twenty-eight phases of “The Great Wheel.” The conversion of lunar phases
into solar months provides the first distinction between the wheel of the Faculties and the
circuit of the Principles, by producing a contrary symbolic scheme. The second, and more
telling, distinction comes in the form of two figures: the diamond and the hourglass. The
purpose of these figures is not only to distinguish the movement of the Principles from
that of the Faculties, but to represent the life and death cycle of an individual being as well.
At this point, a more specific configuration comes under discussion, which means
that the rules change somewhat. The distinction of lunar and solar cycles is now applied
to the Principles, in order to indicate opposing functions of the Husk and Passionate Body,
and the Spirit and Celestial Body. The former prevail in life and are represented with lunar
phases, while the latter predominate in death and are represented with solar months or
the signs of the zodiac. This means that the following diagram is only concerned with the
movement of the Principles, which includes incarnation and the discarnate states:
Figure 2: Wheel of the Principles (see AVB 199).
“The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work”
67
Yeats explains that within “these figures move the Principles; Spirit and Celestial Body
in the figure shaped like an ace of diamonds, Husk and Passionate Body in that shaped
like an hour-glass” (AVB 198).16 This diagram represents the domination of the Husk and
Passionate Body in life, as well as the activity of the Spirit in death. Yeats writes that the
“dominant thought is to show Husk starting on its journey from the centre of the wheel,
the incarnate Daimon, and Spirit from the circumference as though it received its impulse
from beyond the Daimon” (AVB 197–98). The Husk begins its activity at Phase 1, which
is located at the central point of the wheel, where the apices of two cones meet to produce
the figure shaped like an hourglass. Due to the inversion of cradle and grave in the wheel
of the Principles, the Spirit does not begin its journey at the first sign, Aries, even though
a solar period is said to begin at this point. Death is represented as a cradle in the solar
wheel of the Principles, in which Aries (the symbol in the diamond, aligned with Phase
13 on the circle in the example given in Figure 2) can be shown to represent sunrise and
spring. The moment of birth is represented as a kind of dying (sunset) in the wheel of the
Principles, and corresponds to the position marked by Libra on the diamond (the symbol
aligned with the position marked by Phase 27 on the circle in Figure 2).
In fact, Yeats writes that the death of the body “comes when the Spirit gyre is at Aries [and] is symbolised as spring or dawn; and birth which comes when the Spirit gyre
is at Libra, as autumn or sunset. Incarnate life is night or winter, discarnate life is day or
summer” (AVB 201). This means if Husk begins its activity at Phase 1 that Spirit sets out
from Libra: “When Husk is at Phase 15, Spirit sets out from Aries. It reaches Cancer when
Husk is at Phase 22 and Libra when Husk is at Phase 1. When Spirit is at edge of wheel
Husk is at centre” (AVB 199). The following table represents the synchronized movement
of Husk and Spirit:
Husk
Spirit
1
Libra
2, 3, 4
Scorpio
5, 6, 7
Sagittarius
8
Capricorn
9, 10, 11
Aquarius
12, 13, 14
Pisces
15
Aries
16, 17, 18
Taurus
19, 20, 21
Gemini
22
Cancer
23, 24, 25
Leo
26, 27, 28
Virgo
The hourglass is divided into the twenty-eight phases of the lunar cycle, while the diamond is divided into the signs of the zodiac, “though,” according to Yeats, “[the diamond]
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
can be divided as readily according to the points of the compass” (AVB 198). The main
reason for the different methods of division is to distinguish the activity of the Celestial
Body and Spirit from that of Husk and Passionate Body. Since the latter two Principles prevail during life, the hourglass is used to represent the lived experience from a transcendent
perspective. According to Yeats, “Husk and Passionate Body remain always opposite, Passionate Body at Phase 15 when Husk is at Phase 1 and so on” (AVB 199). This means that
Husk sets out from Phase 1 at the moment of birth, while Passionate Body proceeds from
Phase 15. As Husk approaches Phase 8, Passionate Body reaches Phase 22. Husk then returns to the centre of the hourglass and reaches Phase 15 when Passionate Body approaches
Phase 1. The reason for the opposition between Husk and Passionate Body, between what
are defined as sense and the objects of sense, is that the Husk is said to face “an object
alien to itself ” (AVB 198). The hourglass is thus a computation of the “Discord” that exists between the Passionate Body and the Husk, between the sensed and that which senses.
In fact, the hourglass in some way refers to the strife between the Tinctures and the
movement of the Faculties through the twenty-eight phases of “The Great Wheel” as well.
The movement of Husk from Phase 1, through Phase 8, to Phase 15 coincides with the
movement of the Faculties between the Tinctures during an individual incarnation. The
twenty-eight phases of the lunar cycle can be represented in the hourglass by the movement of Husk from the center of the figure to the circumference of the circuit, and back to
the center again. This coincides with the converse movement of the Passionate Body from
Phase 15, through Phase 22, to Phase 1. When the Faculties complete their movement
between the Tinctures, the Husk and Passionate Body complete half of their entire circuit.
Yeats writes that the “Four Faculties have a movement also within the cones of the Principles. Their double vortex is superimposed upon half of the cone of Husk and Passionate
Body” (AVB 201). This is illustrated as follows:
Figure 3: The movement of the Faculties superimposed upon the hourglass (see AVB 201).
This diagram illustrates that the complete movement of the Faculties through the
twenty-eight phases of The Great Wheel coincides with the movement of the Husk from
Phase 1 to Phase 15 in the hourglass. It is the experience of material strife represented as
a double vortex from the transcendent perspective of the Principles.
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69
The diamond, on the other hand, actually “represents a sphere, at its gyre’s greatest expansion Spirit contains the whole wheel” (AVB 199). The diamond represents the Spirit’s
apprehension of the Celestial Body, which is of like nature to itself. The various points
marked on the diamond refer to the necessary steps that exist between the union of mind
and its object. Even though the diamond “contains the whole wheel,” for “convenience we
make the diamond narrow, like the diamond of a playing-card, its widest expansion must
be considered to touch the circumference of the wheel” (AVB 199). In fact, Yeats explains
that the Spirit’s “gyre touches that circumference throughout” (AVB 199). The reason
for this is that the Spirit is the only Principle that moves within the figure shaped like a
diamond. Since the “Spirit’s object is of like nature to itself,” there is never an opposition
between it and the Celestial Body in this figure (AVB 198). “In the cones of the Spirit and
the Celestial Body,” Yeats explains, “there is only one gyre, that of Spirit, Celestial Body
being represented by the whole diamond” (AVB 198). The Celestial Body allows for the
experience of “Concord.” It is the site where the union of all the Daimons that roam the
Passionate Body during life takes place, and it “fabricates all things into ‘an homogeneous
sphere’” (AVB 67).
“The union of Spirit and Celestial Body,” according to Yeats, “has a long approach
and is complete when the gyre reaches its widest expansion” (AVB 198). The distinction
and separation of the Spirit (mind) and that which it contemplates occurs at the point
marked by Libra on the diamond. This point coincides with the moment of incarnation,
and represents the inauguration of the Spirit’s apprehension of those Daimons in the Passionate Body that it requires knowledge of. It experiences these Daimons as objects of sense
throughout its movement from Libra, through Capricorn, to Aries, at which point it
begins to synthesize its experience of life, which equates to its apprehension of the Passionate Body. Since the Spirit knows all Daimons by “intellectual necessity,” the Celestial Body
is experienced as a fragmented unity within the Passionate Body. In order for the Spirit to
know all Daimons it encounters within the Passionate Body as a unified singular entity, it
must first experience them as objects of sense, for what the Spirit knows is assimilated into
itself. And since the Spirit faces an object of like nature to itself, the knowledge it gains
of other Daimons in life serves as the material that is synthesized in death into a singular,
pure truth. This results in the end with the union of Spirit and Celestial Body (viz. mind
and its object) and the realization of “Concord.” The union of mind and its object represents the synthesis of the disparate elements, which constitute material existence, into a
harmonized sphere.
Furthermore, in order to illustrate the activity of the Principles between lives geometrically, the diamond and hourglass are represented within a larger lunar circuit. A
fundamental feature of the system is that human life can be represented by the application
of “The Great Wheel” to multiple levels of human existence: it is “every completed movement of thought or life, twenty-eight incarnations, a single incarnation, a single judgment
or act of thought” (AVB 81). In the case of the activity of the Principles between lives, a
lunar circuit is used to describe the twenty-eight incarnations that a single individual is set
to complete in one cycle of time and space. For this reason the diamond and hourglass are
able to contain the movement of the Faculties through the phases of “The Great Wheel”
that is used to represent the duration of a single incarnation, while being enclosed by
the Faculties of a much larger cycle in turn. The diamond and hourglass, which are used
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
to describe the activity of the Faculties in life and the discarnate states between lives, are
formed out of the Four Faculties of the greater lunar wheel. According to Yeats, “These
cones are drawn across the centre of the wheel from Faculty to Faculty, two with bases
joined between Creative Mind and Body of Fate, and two with apexes joined between Will
and Mask” (AVB 198).
The phases numbered on the circumference of the circuit depicted in Figure 2 refer
to the position of the Faculties for that particular incarnation. It appears that the incarnation being represented is Phase 17 (AVB 200), and despite some initial confusion, Yeats’s
description of the movement of Husk suggests that Mask should really be situated at Phase
3, while Will should be placed at Phase 17. The correct formulation of Husk’s movement
is thus as follows: “The gyre of the Husk starts at the centre (its Phase 1), reaches its Phase
8, where the circumference can be marked [Will], and returns to its centre for Phase 15,
passes from its centre to its Phase 22, where the circumference can be marked [Mask],
and finishes at the centre” (AVB 198). The movement of Husk from Phase 1 to Phase
15 represents the completion of half an incarnate phase, or as Yeats writes: “While Will
(Will on circumference [marked by Phase 17 in Figure 2]) is passing through half a phase,
Husk is passing from Phase 1 to Phase 15, the Faculties [which represent the conditions
of this particular phase] complete their full movement, Phase 1 to Phase 28, and when
their movement represents an incarnation disappear at its completion [for the Faculties
are confined to the lived experience alone]” (AVB 201). The completion of one phase
of the greater lunar circuit, used to represent the movement of the Faculties through the
twenty-eight incarnations, coincides with the completed activity of the Principles. The entire movement of Will through one incarnation can be equated to the movement of Husk
through all the phases of the hourglass, as well as the movement of the Spirit through the
signs represented on the diamond.
Every phase of a lunar cycle, used to represent the twenty-eight incarnations an
individual Spirit is set to embody, can be considered to include not only the experience
of life but the process of death as well. The function of the Principles is not only to facilitate the being’s bodily incarnation, or its apprehension of the antinomies of material
existence, but to allow it to progress from one incarnate phase to the next: “The Principles
thereupon [the moment of death] take their place defining the state between death and
birth” (AVB 201).
III. The Discarnate States of the Soul
Having explored the process of incarnation and the conditions of material existence, it
is possible to present an elucidation of the system’s account of death, according to which
the Spirit is subject to a series of processes, where it is systematically purified of its recent
material experience. The purpose of this clarification, as it is more appropriately referred
to, is to facilitate the Spirit’s passage from one incarnation to the next. Ideally, the Spirit
must be purged of its foregoing material experience before it incarnates again. In order for
this to happen, it must be clarified by the Celestial Body, which is the driving force of the
Spirit’s discarnate experience.
“The period between death and birth,” according to Yeats, “is divided into states analogous to the six solar months between Aries and Libra” (AVB 223), which he clarifies “cor-
“The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work”
71
respond roughly to Phase 22, Phases 23, 24, 25, Phases 26, 27, 28, etc., upon the wheel of
the Faculties”(AVB 223n). The moment of death coincides with the point marked by Aries
on the diamond of Figure 2. At this very point the balance between the Principles shifts.
From the transcendent perspective, during life consciousness was located in the Husk,
which, together with the Passionate Body, prevailed over the Spirit and Celestial Body. “At
death,” Yeats writes, “consciousness passes from Husk to Spirit; Husk and Passionate Body
are said to disappear” (AVB 188). Husk and Passionate Body cannot contribute anything
new to the Spirit’s intellectual record of life. They can only hamper its progress through
the discarnate states by persisting in the earlier stages of the process.
While Yeats’s discussion of death seeks to provide clear-cut distinctions between the
discarnate states, there is in truth no direct, one-to-one correlation between the states
and the solar months of the wheel of the Principles. The motive for this effort derives
from Yeats’s elucidation of “The Completed Symbol,” which is arguably A Vision B’s most
remarkable achievement, since it provides a degree of cohesion that was lacking from his
first attempt to elucidate the system. The idea that the discarnate states of the soul correspond to the six solar months between Aries and Libra suggests that the states are of a
uniform length, which as we will see is not the case. Certain states are simply longer than
others. However, by seeking to correlate the states with the solar divisions between Aries
and Libra, Yeats inserts the period between lives into the system’s most essential geometrical symbol. By doing this he provides a completed geometric representation of the system’s
treatment of both life and death.
Be that as it may, the Spirit’s experience of death could just as well have been characterized according to the various processes involved in its passage from one life to the next,
which include: the vision at the moment of death, the burial of the dead body, the separation of the Principles, the dreaming of the Passionate Body, the Spirit’s Dreaming Back, the
Teachings, the Return, the Phantasmagoria, the Shiftings, the Vision of the Clarified Body,
the Beatitude, and the return to the pre-life stages of the Purification and Foreknowledge.17
It is, indeed, possible to explore all the processes individually and to situate each within
the relevant discarnate state. The following table presents the name of each discarnate
state, the Principles that are active in each, and the sign of the zodiac that each state corresponds to:18
State
No.
Name of the
State
Principles active:
1
The Vision of the
Blood Kindred
All four, with the vision synthesizing the Husk, which should
disappear at the end, after consciousness passes into the Spirit.
Corresponding to:
Aries
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
72
State
No.
Name of the
State
Principles active:
Corresponding to:
2
Meditation, Dream- While the Husk can persist into
ing Back, Teachings, this stage, the Celestial Body,
and Return
Spirit and Passionate Body predominate. The aim is to liberate the Spirit from the Passionate
Body.
Taurus
3
Shiftings
Celestial Body and Spirit, with the
latter being purified of good and
evil, viz. the primary and antithetical Tinctures.
Gemini
4
Beatitude
Spirit is absorbed into the sphere
momentarily as the Celestial
Body falls away.
Cancer
5
Purification
Celestial Body and clarified Spirit.
The latter is given the opportunity to resolve past experiences
through the help of the living.
Leo
6
Foreknowledge
Celestial Body and Spirit, with
new Passionate Body and Husk
formed out of the Anima
Mundi.19
Virgo
This table maintains Yeats’s association of various processes with the discarnate states, and
does not serve to restructure his template for the period between lives. It is important to
note, however, that certain aspects of the discarnate states could just as well have been
classified differently. The Meditation in particular appears to be out of place in the second
discarnate state and could have been placed within the domain of Aries.20 By including it
along with the Dreaming Back, the Teachings and the Return, the second discarnate state
tends to resemble a hotchpotch of different processes.21 Be that as it may, the reason for
its inclusion in the second discarnate state could be (since it entails the Spirit’s meditation
upon the dissolution of the Passionate Body, which the Celestial Body serves to bolster),
that it involves the interaction of the three Principles that are principally active in this
discarnate state.22
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73
1. The Vision of the Blood Kindred
According to Yeats, The Vision of the Blood Kindred is a “vision of all those bound to us
through Husk and Passionate Body” (AVB 223). This vision represents the synthesis of the
Spirit’s apprehension of all those beings it has encountered in the Passionate Body through
the Husk. The purpose of this vision is to cause the disappearance of the ability to sense
within materiality, which results in the disappearance of the objects of sense as well: “Apparitions seen at the moment of death are part of the vision, a synthesis, before disappearance, of all the impulses and images which constitute the Husk” (AVB 223). The vision
seen at the moment of death serves not only to synthesize all that constitutes the Husk,
but allows consciousness to pass from the body, which is defined by the ability to sense
materially, to the Spirit, which has localized awareness during the discarnate states. Yeats
writes, “At death the man passes into what seems to him afterwards a state of darkness and
sleep; there is a sinking in upon fate analogous to that of the individual cones at Phase 22”
(CW13 183; AVA 222). The “darkness and sleep” that is experienced immediately after
death can be described as a momentary lapse in awareness.23
The death of the body entails the cessation of the ability to apprehend material reality
through the organs of sense. This loss of sense is disorientating, because it is unfamiliar to
the recently dead Spirit. It appears, as localized awareness is transferred from the Husk to
the Spirit, that there is an interval of unconsciousness, for the loss of sense causes the Spirit
to be “blind and deaf and dumb” (YVP3 22). As consciousness is centered fully within the
Spirit, it sees a bewildering vision where it meets all its previous blood relatives. At this
point, the “newly dead” Spirit “is surrounded by his kindred, present in their simulacrae
[sic], or in their Spirits when they are between lives, the more recent dead the more visible.
Because of their presence it is called the Vision of the Blood Kindred” (CW13 183; AVA
222). This is elucidated in the automatic script as follows:
3. What is the state of the spirit immediately after separation from body. For
instance does it see the old objects still.
3. It remains with the body for some days – then it sees as though in the body
4. Is it quite alone?
4. Yes it hears & sees but is alone & isolated
5. Yet in many death bed visions people see those they have loved as if coming
for them?
5. Yes but during the watching over the body they are alone – they are received
at the moment of death & then left alone
6. Why are they left alone?
6. To meditate [emphasis added]
7. Who receives them?
7. Friends kindred spirits guides
8. Is there a period of unconsciousness?
8. There is a period of unconsciousness at the moment of death
(YVP1 312)
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
The first discarnate state of the soul commences, then, upon the moment of death. The
instructor, Dionertes, suggests an additional reason for the deathbed vision: “The purpose
of this vision which I cannot myself understand at this time is to [be] seen by those others
rather than myself to see. They bring me back & I return into the dead body” (YVP3 22).
The reason for the vision is thus to make the recently dead Spirit visible to other disembodied beings, which means the vision that the Spirit is led to does not assist it through
the process of death. The Spirit is taken away from the dead body by its “Friends kindred
spirits guides” and is given a brief vision of its future life, which is set to commence at the
“end of all cycles”:
9. What takes place during unconsciousness?
9. The soul is rapt away by the guides & angels to a momentary vision of future
life – then as consciousness returns it returns to its own life
10. You mean its future life in next world
10. Its ultimate life
11. at end of all the cycles
11. Yes
(YVP1 312–13)
This “ultimate life” is the life the Spirit is meant to return to at the end of its separation
from the “ultimate reality.” This life represents the Spirit’s final and permanent union
with the “divine influx”: a life lived beyond the antimonies of material existence, one
that cannot be defined by either “Concord” or “Discord,” and which cannot be known
or conceived by beings that have separated from the phaseless sphere. After a momentary
glimpse of its union with the “ultimate reality,” the Spirit returns to the dead body to
“meditate” (answer 6). The first state of the soul in death ends as the Spirit returns to the
dead body.
2. The Meditation, Dreaming Back and Return
The second discarnate state consists of various stages in itself, of which the Meditation is
the first, and which could just as readily have been placed in the first state. In addition to
being referred to as the Meditation, this discarnate state, which was made to correspond to
Taurus, is also referred to as the Dreaming Back (AVB 225) and the Return in the second
edition (AVB 226). The reason for the various names given to this state is that various
processes constitute this stage of the clarification process.24 It appears that Yeats grouped
these processes into the second discarnate state, because they all involve the interaction
of three Principles: Celestial Body, Spirit and Passionate Body. During this state “the Spirit
and Celestial Body [are said to] appear” (AVB 223). The strength of these two Principles
grows significantly after the first discarnate state has ended. The Celestial Body is a source
of strength for the Spirit, in so far as it provides the latter with the impulse to resolve its
apprehension of materiality, while the Spirit is charged with reconciling its experience of
life, and, in the process, with dissolving its links to the Passionate Body. All three processes
(the Meditation, Dreaming Back, and the Return) have this as their major objective: the
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75
Spirit’s liberation from the Passionate Body, which appears to be the reason why they are
made to constitute the second discarnate state.
Upon its return to the body the Spirit is tasked with the objective of meditating “on
the dissolution of the passionate body” (YVP1 313). In A Vision B Yeats explains that the
second state of death has “for its object the Spirit’s separation from the Passionate Body,
considered as nature, and from Husk considered as pleasure and pain” (AVB 226). The
Spirit’s endeavor during this meditation is to sever its attachments to the material objects
of sense and the ability to sense within a body, which should ideally have vanished during
the first state. It must, essentially, accept that bodily existence is no longer a possibility
and that its material life has ended. The Spirit’s meditation ends once the body has been
buried, or rather, once the funeral rites have been conducted, for Yeats is informed that
the “ceremonial of burial climaxes the meditation” (YVP1 315). The burial ceremony is
necessary to the Spirit’s meditation upon the dissolution of the Passionate Body. The Spirit
is able to separate itself from the Passionate Body as a result of the Celestial Body, which
acts upon the Passionate Body by prayer. This prayer is not conducted by the “newly dead”
Spirit, but by the living.
The instructor Dionertes explains that it is through the prayers and thoughts of the
living that the recently dead Spirit is able to recognize that it is dead (YVP3 22). This
prayer activates the Celestial Body, which provides the Spirit with the strength it needs to
sever its connections with the Passionate Body. The more intense the thoughts and prayers
of the living the more complete the Spirit’s meditation upon the dissolution of the Passionate Body will be. The Spirit’s realization that it is dead strengthens its attraction to the
Celestial Body. Through focusing the attention of the living upon the recently dead Spirit,
the burial ritual serves to increase the links between the founding Principle and the Spirit.
According to Yeats, during the Meditation the Spirit has its “first vision and understanding of the Celestial Body, but that it may do so, it requires the help of the incarnate” (AVB
223). The burial ceremony is, then, crucial to the purification of the “newly dead” Spirit,
since it enables it to realize that it is dead.25
However, if the thoughts of the living are not focused on the blood-begotten Spirit,
the possibility exists that the Passionate Body will not disappear after the burial ceremony.
In this event, the link between the Spirit and Celestial Body is not sufficient enough to begin the process of clarification, because the Passionate Body continues to lure the Sprit into
believing that it is still alive and that it can still sense within the material realm, which in
a sense resurrects the Husk. This emphasizes the Spirit’s need to sever its links to the Husk
and Passionate Body.26
The Passionate Body can persist in death for centuries, which effectively delays the
Spirit’s incarnation into a new phase (the possibility even exists for the Spirit to reincarnate back into its previous phase before the Passionate Body has been dissolved). The result
of the Passionate Body’s persistence in death is that the Spirit is still attached to “nature,”
since the Passionate Body is “considered as nature” (AVB 226). The inability to dissolve
the Passionate Body causes the Spirit to think that it is still embodied within materiality.
This means that the Spirit is still attached to its former life on earth. If, in addition, the
Spirit is unable to sever its link to the Husk, it continues to feel sensuous satisfaction or
discomfort. Or as Yeats explains: “If the Husk so persist, the Spirit still continues to feel
pleasure and pain, remains a fading distortion of living man, perhaps a dangerous succuba
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
or incubus, living through the senses and nerves of others” (AVB 224). The Spirit must
recognize that it is no longer incarnate. If the Spirit fails to do this, the Passionate Body
and Husk persist in death and it does not carry out its natural obligations, which are to be
clarified by the Celestial Body. Yeats explains that the Spirit is attracted to the Passionate
Body if the burial ceremony is not intense enough: “[Spirit] is attracted by PB & does not
therefore realise that the Ego [Will] is dead & separated. It continues life on earth, but
having no individual activities it imitates the dream of the P.B” (YVP3 153).
The burial ceremony is crucial to the Spirit’s gradual purification in death, since it
allows this Principle to recognize that it is dead, to sever its lingering connections with the
Passionate Body, and consequently, to turn with greater force to the Celestial Body.
In the following passage Yeats defines the main function of the Spirit in life and
death, which in the process provides an indication of its discarnate obligations, while explaining the ramifications that result from its persisting attachment to the Passionate Body
after the burial of the physical body:
[The Spirit] has no separate activities. Its function should be to be clarified by the
C.B. During the after life passion after death it should go with the celestial body.
It does not because it is attracted by the passionate body & does not therefore
realise that the Ego is dead & separated. It therefore continues its life on earth,
but having no individual activity it imitates the dream of the P.B. Only when it
realises the death of the Ego does it begin to carry out is natural obligations. (YVP3
154–55; emphasis added)
Since the Spirit has no separate activities in death apart from being “clarified” by the
Celestial Body, or imitating the dream of the Passionate Body, it can either continue to
believe that it is alive in the world, or it can allow the Celestial Body to purify it from its
foregoing incarnation. When the Spirit imitates the dream of the Passionate Body it does
not recognize that it is dead and it cannot enter into the Dreaming Back process.27 Since
the Celestial Body’s clarification of the Spirit occurs during the Dreaming Back, Return and
Teaching, the natural obligation of the Spirit is to recognize that it is dead and so enter
into the purification process.
The Celestial Body and Passionate Body are separate during both the Dreaming Back
process and the Spirit’s imitation of the Passionate Body’s dream. The function of the Passionate Body is to go to the “scenes of its passion” (YVP3 153). It does this regardless of
whether the Spirit acknowledges that it is dead. The function of the Celestial Body, on the
other hand, is to purify the Spirit of the Passionate Body, which is a record of the events
of the Spirit’s previous incarnation. The Celestial Body makes use of the Passionate Body’s
record to conduct the Dreaming Back process and the Teachings. Yeats discovers on 31 January 1918 after the Principles have been separated that they “lose all consciousness of each
other” (YVP1 315). Then the instructor Aymor informs Yeats of the functions of the Celestial Body and the Passionate Body after their separation: “the passionate relives & dreams –
the spiritual relives & renews” (YVP1 315). This indicates that the purpose of the Passionate
Body in death is to relive the events of the foregoing incarnation, which occurs in the form
of sensuous dreams. The Passionate Body goes to “the scenes of its passions” (YVP1 314). If
the Spirit fails to realize that it is dead, it returns to the Passionate Body and continues to live
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77
its life on earth through imitating the Passionate Body’s repetition of its previous life’s events.
When the Spirit allows itself to be clarified by the Celestial Body it “relives” these events as
well, but in the process it is “renewed” or purified of the Passionate Body.
“In the Dreaming Back,” according to Yeats, “the Spirit is compelled to live over and
over again the events that had most moved it; there can be nothing new, but the old events
stand forth in a light which is dim or bright according to the intensity of the passion that
accompanied them” (AVB 226). During this process the Spirit relives the most passionate
events of its life in the order of their intensity. It begins with the most intense experience,
and dreams back upon the events of its life with decreasing pleasure and pain. A notebook
entry explains that in the Dreaming Back, “There is classification only of ‘emotion,’ the
height ‘varying according to depth & extent of passion’ | Classification is not according
to time” (YVP3 172).
However, the Dreaming Back process is more significant than the Spirit’s mere repetition
of its previous incarnation’s events in the order of their intensity. The aim of the Dreaming
Back process is to obliterate those emotions that most affected the Spirit in life. The Dreaming Back frees the Spirit from its attachments to materiality, which effectively severs its links
to the Passionate Body.28 This is achieved by the “destruction of emotion & sense” (YVP3
283). Emotions and sensations experienced in life are negated in what is referred to as the
Teaching or Teachings, for “in every teaching a form of emotion is destroyed” (YVP3 283).29
Two processes are then involved in the Dreaming Back. In the first the Spirit relives the events
of its previous incarnation in the order of their intensity. In the second process, called the
Teaching, the emotions that most affected the Spirit in life are reconciled and obliterated.
After a sleep of 1922, Yeats dictated that during the Teachings the Spirit “is not conscious of being taught, and the teaching follows a period of dreaming back & is followed by
that subjective state which one has described as ‘being in Hell or Heaven,’ though it may be
merely a state of seemingly earthly happiness” (YVP3 106). This indicates that the Teaching
process succeeds a period of Dreaming Back. The Dreaming Back process is, thus, not continuous, since the Spirit dreams back upon an event and then enters into the Teaching. There
is an oscillation between the Dreaming Back and the Teaching. The Spirit relives an intensely
emotional event of life, and is then freed from this event during an interval of Teaching.
The word “teaching” suggests that the Spirit is given insight into the event it has just relived by a third party. Yeats explains: “The Teachings is to some extent a condition of judgement upon what has taken place. The spirit cannot alone achieve this judgement, because it
is biassed, that is why there is a teacher. The Teacher belongs to the Thirteenth Cone” (YVP3
106; emphasis added). This clearly indicates that a Spirit of the Thirteenth Cone conducts the
Teaching. Since the Spirit is still subjective to a certain extent, it cannot free itself from the
event that it has just dreamed through. For this reason a Teaching Spirit judges the event and
the “emotion induced” by an action in life (YVP3 283). The Celestial Body, thus, purifies the
Spirit during the Dreaming Back through a Teaching Spirit of the Thirteenth Cone.
Furthermore, Yeats explains: “During the Teachings there is not only judgement but
a kind of completion. If a man has lived a life of self-control for instance, he will explore
what his life would have been if his life had been uncontrolled” (YVP3 107). A contrary
relation exists, then, between the “Teacher” and the Spirit, since at the end of one interval
of Teaching the Spirit experiences “a kind of completion” (YVP3 107).30 The “Teacher” is
not only able to pass judgment upon the Spirit’s actions in life, but is able to provide the
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Spirit with knowledge of what its life would have been like in opposition, as well. If the
Spirit lived a “life of self-control” then the “Teacher” will provide it with knowledge of
what its life would have been like if it was “uncontrolled” (YVP3 107).31
Since the Celestial Body clarifies the Spirit during this discarnate state, it is evident
that the Celestial Body governs the Teaching and the Dreaming Back. The clarification is
represented geometrically as a single cone, which the Spirit ascends and descends in a spiraling motion. In the automatic script a “funnel” is used to represent the Dreaming Back
and the Teaching. An entry on the “funnel” in Vision Notebook 1 indicates that when the
Spirit is circling in the funnel it is subject to the Teaching, while pauses in this activity
represent its dreaming back upon the events of its foregoing incarnation:
“During the circling the Spirit must be with CB Then comes the pause for
dreaming back. The spirit may then be attracted to PB so break of this pause for
dreaming back cannot occur until Spirit returns to funnell”
“Teaching only possible during gaps between intense dreaming of PB.”
“CB dreams back through the periods in life of Spiritual development. When
it has dreamt back through a complete period the period of teaching begins.”
(YVP3 173)
The Spirit must be with the Celestial Body as it is circling within the “funnel,” since the
latter appears not only to be the source of strength of the former, but undertakes to liberate it from its emotional attachments to life. Once the Teaching period is complete there
is a pause in the liberation of the Spirit from the Passionate Body. At this point it begins
to dream back upon the next emotion or event. As it dreams back upon this event, the
Spirit goes to the Passionate Body, which provides it with a record of the lived experience.
The Teaching, and the Celestial Body’s efforts to clarify the Spirit, can only resume once the
Spirit has returned to the “funnel,” for the Teaching is “only possible during gaps between
intense dreaming of PB” (YVP3 173). The circling of the Spirit during the Teaching can
be represented as follows, according to an entry in Vision Notebook 1:
Figure 4: The Funnel of the Teaching and Dreaming Back (derived from YVP3 173).
“The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work”
79
The Dreaming Back ends when the Spirit has successfully resolved all its emotional and
sensuous attachments to materiality. The process concludes with the Spirit’s final liberation from “nature,” that is, sense and the objects of sense, and with the unequivocal realization that it has entered into the agonizing process of death.
Upon completion, the Return succeeds the Dreaming Back process. The nature of the
Return is different to the reliving of material experiences and events in the order of their
intensity, as is evident in the Dreaming Back. In the Return the Spirit “must live through
past events in the order of their occurrence” (AVB 226). The reason for this is that the
Spirit is compelled to “trace every passionate event to its cause until all are related and
understood, turned into knowledge, made a part of itself ” (AVB 226).
Furthermore, the goal of the Return is to provide the Spirit with “the perfection
of life lived” (YVP3 295). This is realized through “the withdrawal [of the Spirit] from
emotional good & emotional evil from personalised good & evil. It [is] a withdrawal
from the particular to the typical” (YVP3 295). Whereas the Teaching is “personal &
emotional,” the Return is by nature “impersonal” (YVP1 494). During the Dreaming
Back, the Spirit was forced to relive intense emotional experiences so that these emotions
could be destroyed. However, in the Return there is “no emotion” (YVP3 200). The Spirit
is forced, instead, to “withdraw” from personal ideas of “good & evil” (YVP3 200). The
end result of this process is that the Spirit becomes less particular, individual and distinct;
it becomes more archetypal. In other words, during the Return the Spirit withdraws from
the particular to the entire, in the process perfecting its knowledge of the life lived (YVP3
200).32
When one considers that the task of the Celestial Body, during the extension of the
Principles into materiality, is to distinguish Spirits from the “ultimate reality” (referred to
as the “entire”) and subsequently to allow for the separation of individual Spirits, which
then proceed to incarnate, it appears that at the end of the second discarnate state this
effort is reversed, for there is here a return to a form of archetypal existence.33 Yeats writes
in a Vision Notebook entry that the “Return is the destruction of the individuality of the
ego—Dreaming back destroys the link with nature, Return link with Ego by making it
impersonal” (YVP3 200; emphasis added). This clearly indicates that the objective of the
Return is to obliterate the “individuality of the ego” by rendering it “impersonal” (YVP3
200). This is ultimately achieved through the Spirit’s “reliving of life in a moral sphere” at
the behest, again, of the Celestial Body (YVP3 383).
The automatic script of 10 June 1918 contains an exchange between Yeats and the
instructor Thomas who elucidated the Return. Thomas explains: “The return is simply the
reliving of life in the moral sphere” (YVP1 490). Subsequently, Yeats determines that this
life lived is a “replica” of the foregoing incarnation (YVP1 490). The events of the life lived
are repeated in the sequence of their occurrence, while being apprehended from a moral
perspective. In the Return life is lived “as it should have been” (YVP1 491). The life lived
is an ideal alternative to the Spirit’s foregoing incarnation, since it yields perfected knowledge of good and evil. In fact, the goal of the Return is to provide the Spirit with complete
comprehension of good and evil so that it may grow less individual and more typical. The
result is the Spirit’s liberation from individuality.
During the Return the Spirit lives an ideal life, in which it comes to complete its
knowledge of good and evil. The Return is essentially the objectification of personal, biased
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conceptions of good and evil. A person who attained knowledge of evil in life relives this
life in the moral sphere to attain knowledge of good, for “In so far as knowledge of evil is
attained one becomes good” (YVP1 492). This knowledge of evil is not based on ignorance;
instead a person who had knowledge of evil in life attained this knowledge through “a
conquest of good” (YVP1 492). Thomas, the instructor, explains that it is not a “sin to be
evil knowing no good” (YVP1 492). During the Return, an evil person who has conquered
good in life “has an evil soul in a beautiful world” (YVP1 492). The reason for this is to
complete this person’s knowledge of good in light of evil. Living life as an “evil soul in a
beautiful world” creates a balance between knowledge of good and evil (YVP1 492). However, if a person was evil without conquering good, during the Return he “has the same life
as a good man” (YVP1 492). This creates equilibrium between knowledge of good and evil:
in the process the experience of life is perfected.
On the other hand, a person who gained knowledge of good in life achieves this
through “a conquest of evil,” for it is not a “virtue to be good knowing no evil” (YVP1
492). A good person who has conquered evil will live a “Good life” with “good surroundings” (YVP1 492). However, a good person who was ignorant of evil lives in a world where
the surroundings are evil. The aim of the Return is complete comprehension of good and
evil. The Spirit cannot enter into the third state of the soul in death if it has not relived
its life in the moral sphere. The necessity of the Return is that it eradicates emotional and
personal reactions to good and evil, which results in perfected comprehension of these
concepts. Once emotional and personal notions of good and evil have been eradicated,
the Spirit is liberated from individuality.
The second state of the soul in death is complete once the soul has successfully returned to the equilibrium of good and evil. At this point, the Passionate Body and the
Husk have disappeared, but the Spirit still exists within a state of being defined by duality.
After having achieved completed knowledge of good and evil, the Spirit enters into the
third state of the soul in death called the Shiftings, which corresponds to Gemini on the
solar wheel.
While the Spirit may have complete comprehension of good and evil, it has not been
purified of these contraries as yet. The purpose of the Return is to free the Spirit from
emotional and personal good and evil. This means that good and evil remain as generalized concepts. The purpose of the Shiftings is to liberate the Spirit from impersonal good
and evil, which is essentially its liberation from the primary and antithetical Tinctures.
Yeats writes:
At the end of the second state, the events of the past life are a whole and can be
dismissed; the emotional and moral life, however, is but a whole according to the
code accepted during life. The Spirit is still unsatisfied, until after the third state,
which corresponds to Gemini, called the Shiftings, where the Spirit is purified of
good and evil. (AVB 231; emphasis added)
3. The SHIFTINGS
According to Yeats, the main endeavor of the Shiftings is to liberate the Spirit of archetypal
good and evil. The content of each concept has been stripped of its application to localized
“The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work”
81
consciousness. Good and evil have been reduced to general distinctions that serve only
to perpetuate the dualisms between subject and object, life and death, and the Spirit and
Celestial Body. The task of the Shiftings is to eradicate what is the fundamental distinction of separable existence. During this state the Spirit comes to transcend the primary
and antithetical Tinctures, which is a prerequisite for the realization of “Concord.” The
distinction between subject and object, the knower and the known, and between Spirit
and Celestial Body is collapsed and destroyed during the Shiftings. On 6 December 1917
Yeats was given a diagram of the Shiftings to elucidate the process of uniting the Spirit and
the Celestial Body: this diagram was codified in the Card File entry D48 entitled Diagram
Shiftings (YVP3 296). The illustration below is adapted from this and the automatic script
of 6 December 1917:
Figure 5: The activity of the Spirit in the Shiftings (adapted from YVP3 296 and YVP1 147–152).34
This diagram illustrates the process by which the Spirit is freed from the primary and antithetical Tinctures, referred to alternatively as “good” and “evil” (AVB 231). The process
of freeing the Spirit from the Tinctures is summarized in the Card File entry A18, After
Life, as follows:
What in shiftings do “two movements mean” to free the soul from anti & primary of last incarnation but to put into it the essence of good & evil contained
in ego so that the soul may reincarnate at next stage.” “Shiftings always begin at
the axes” “axes in both anti & primary bound together by energy” – no power in
shifting but “slow circling” “movement up good down ward evil or subjective”
(reverse of the third is usual in anti cone). (YVP3 235–36)
The movement upward, from 10 to 1, represents the Spirit’s gradual liberation from the
primary Tincture, whereas the movement downward, from 1 to 10, represents its gradual
liberation from the antithetical Tincture. The purpose of these movements is to “free soul
from anti & primary of last incarnation” (YVP3 235). Yeats explains that the two movements are essentially the perfection of “knowledge of self in relation to the ideal,” and
“knowledge of self in relation to God” (YVP3 233). He writes that the activity in the
Shiftings does not “perfect soul but ‘frees it from imperfection…’” (YVP3 234). This sug-
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gests that, during the Shiftings, the Spirit is purified of the Tinctures, which are barriers to
the perfection of the soul.
Furthermore, the Card File entry A13 reveals that the “Soul is freed from space by
‘anihilation of the earthly anti & primary of the earthly ego’” (YVP3 233). This implies
that once the Spirit is liberated from the antithetical Tincture it exists beyond space, but is
still within time. The annihilation of the primary Tincture results in the disintegration of
individuality. Yeats explains that the Shiftings is “‘a state of immense activity – the soul is
intellectualised as far as possible in a self conscious but unified identity – it lives an active
intense life as the life of the ego on earth’ ‘The ego is a disintegrated identity because it is
composed of discordant elements’ ‘soul has one element only’” (YVP3 236). The “passive”
purpose of the Shiftings is to liberate the Spirit from the “discordant elements” of nature
(YVP3 236). At the end of the Shiftings the Spirit and the Celestial Body unite in a “self
conscious but unified identity” (YVP3 236). This signals the obliteration of the division
between the Spirit and the Celestial Body. At this point the soul “is [still] a disintegrated
identity”; it is composed of conflicting elements (YVP3 236). The possibility of perceiving
“Discord” is impossible once the Spirit and its object unite, for the “soul has one element
only” (YVP3 236). Pure “Concord” is realized at the end of the Shiftings, since the “Soul
is one element after shiftings” (YVP3 233). After the Spirit is free of the Tinctures it unites
with the Celestial Body.
The Dreaming Back process liberates the soul from the Passionate Body, while the
Return destroys the individuality of the Will by “impersonalising it” (YVP1 495). The
purpose of the Shiftings, on the other hand, is to accentuate the “individuality of the
soul,” which it achieves by liberating the soul “from the divisible nature” (YVP1 495).
The use of the word “accentuating” is potentially contradictory. If the aim of the Return is
to destroy the individuality of the ego, then the “accentuating of the individuality of the
soul” during the Shiftings, seemingly counteracts the endeavor of the Return (YVP1 495).
However, the accentuation of the soul is not geared toward yielding an entity that is more
particular. Instead, this process refers to the Spirit’s union with the Celestial Body, which
yields a complete soul. This means that the accentuation of the soul in the Shiftings does
not create further separation between the Spirit and its Ghostly Self. Similarly, the objective
of the Shiftings is not to cause further distinction between one Spirit and another. Instead,
the purpose of the Shiftings is to liberate the Spirit from “divisible nature” (YVP1 495). In
fact, at the end of the Shiftings individuality is completely dissolved. The reason for this
is so that the Spirit and Celestial Body may reunite, in order to constitute a pure Spirit, a
completed soul, containing pure truth. The accentuation of the individuality of the soul
refers to the unification of the Spirit and its object. Thomas explains that the objective of
the Shiftings is: “to remake the soul into one” (YVP1 496).
Furthermore, the definition of the Shiftings is to “take from one place to another – sift
means to pass through a sieve” (YVP1 503). This process essentially entails removing imperfection from that which is being sifted. To reiterate: the Spirit is, firstly, purified from
the Tinctures during this state of the soul in death. In this process there are two movements
to which the Spirit is subject. One movement is “passive” and liberates the Spirit of the
primary Tincture. The other movement is active, which frees the Spirit from the antithetical Tincture, and space. The Shiftings “is repeated several times till complete” (YVP3 233).
Once the Spirit has completed the passive and active movements of the Shiftings, it unites
“The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work”
83
for a moment with the Celestial Body and has a Vision of the Clarified Body. At this point
the Spirit and Celestial Body are one, but still constitute a “funnel.” The Spirit has been
completely clarified by the Celestial Body. This means that the Spirit has successfully been
purified of its last incarnation. In order to enter into the next state of the soul in death the
Spirit and Celestial Body must separate. At this point the Spirit “is taken from CB – CB
remains at wide end [of the funnel]” (YVP1 503).
4. The BEATITUDE and the Conclusion of the Clarification Process
The fourth state of the soul begins when the Spirit is taken to the Ghostly Self, which
produces a “complete soul” (YVP1 497). The Spirit transfers its experience of life to the
Ghostly Self. Yeats explains that upon the union of the Spirit and the Ghostly Self, “all
thoughts or images drawn from the Faculties during the Shiftings or the Dreaming Back, or
that have remained in the Faculties, must be passed into the Ghostly Self and so be forgotten by the Spirit” (CW13 195; AVA 236–37).
Yeats writes: “After the Shiftings the Spirit is for a short time ‘out of space and time,’
and every other abstraction, and is said not to move in a gyre but in a sphere, being as it
were present everywhere at once. Beatitude is the result of the expiations of living man and
disembodied soul, and the final harmony so established” (CW13 193; AVA 235). During
the fourth state of the soul, corresponding to Cancer, the Spirit is perfect and completely
pure. It has now realized the perception of pure “Concord.” The divisions and distinctions
of material existence have been obliterated, for the Spirit is beyond space and time, the
Tinctures, the competing states of subjectivity and objectivity, and “every other abstraction” (CW13 193; AVA 235). The Spirit has been wiped clean. Every moment of its last
incarnation, and all previous incarnations, has been forgotten. It is as though the Spirit
never separated from the “ultimate reality.” The Spirit is described as existing not in a gyre
but a sphere. However, if it is set to reincarnate it is probably more accurate to assert that
the Spirit is within the Thirteenth Cone, but perceives as though it is within the “ultimate
reality.” The Spirit is a complete soul and only perceives this perfected state. Harmony has
been established momentarily.
There is not much information on the Beatitude, since it is incomprehensible to
beings that are subject to the strife between the Tinctures. On the 12 June 1918 Yeats
discovered that the Beatitude is shortest of all the states in death, while the Dreaming
Back is the longest state (YVP1 500). Then he discovered that when the Spirit is united to
its Ghostly Self it is beyond time (YVP1 501). This is the only state in which the Spirit is
beyond time and space. In every other state the Spirit is either subject only to time, or to
both time and space. In the Card File entry A42, After Death, Yeats explains that, “After
the shiftings there is a short period of beatitude & exultation & then the before life state
begins” (YVP3 245).
In A Vision A Yeats explains that the Spirit will reincarnate if it has not completed its
“human cycles” (CW13 195; AVA 236). However, if the twelve cycles of time and space
have been completed the Spirit will remain permanently “united to its Ghostly Self,” and
thus within the “ultimate reality” (CW13 195; AVA 236). Yeats writes that if the Spirit is
“strong enough, or were its human cycles finished, it would remain, as in the Beatitude,
permanently united to its Ghostly Self, or would, after two more states, be reborn into
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a spiritual cycle where the movement of the gyre is opposite to that in our cycles, and
incomprehensible to us, but it will almost certainly pass into human rebirth because of
its terror of what seems to be the loss of its own being” (CW13 195; AVA 236). This illustrates that the Beatitude is a brief taste of the “ultimate reality.” The soul exists momentarily in a state of perception that is singular and harmonious. In A Vision B Yeats explains
that during the Beatitude the soul is in “complete equilibrium after the conflict of the
Shiftings; good and evil vanish into the whole” (AVB 232). The optimal way of describing the state of the soul in the Beatitude is as being perfected, harmonious, ordered and
homogeneous. Yeats writes:
Nor can I consider the Beatitude as any state beyond man’s comprehension, but
as the presence before the soul in some settled order, which has arisen out of
the soul’s past, of all those events or works of men which have expressed some
quality of wisdom or of beauty or of power within the compass of that soul, and
as more completely human and actual than any life lived in a particular body.
(CW13 194; AVA 235)
IV. Conclusion
Yeats depicts the process of clarifying the Spirit and its subsequent exultation in the poem
The Man and the Echo. A dying man muses over the consequences that his life’s work had
on people and society. In what is almost a deathbed vision, the speaker declares that “all
seems evil until I / Sleepless would lie down and die” (VP 632–33, ll. 17–18; CW1 354).
After his echo repeats “Lie down and die” the main speaker of the poem continues:
Man
That were to shirk
The spiritual intellect’s great work,
And shirk it in vain. There is no release
In a bodkin or disease,
Nor can there be work so great
As that which cleans man’s dirty slate.
While man can still his body keep
Wine or love drug him to sleep,
Waking he thanks the Lord that he
Has body and its stupidity,
But body gone he sleeps no more,
And till his intellect grows sure
That all’s arranged in one clear view,
Pursues the thoughts that I pursue,
Then stands in judgment on his soul,
And, all work done, dismisses all
Out of intellect and sight
And sinks at last into the night. (VP 632–33, ll. 20–37; CW1 354)
“The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work”
85
The speaker, “Man,” refers to the “spiritual intellect’s great work,” which is an allusion to
the Celestial Body’s clarification of the Spirit (l. 21). In lines 24 and 25 the speaker states
that there is no work as “great” as “that which clean man’s dirty slate.” This refers to the purification process of the first three states of the soul in death. At the end of the Shiftings, the
third state, the Spirit is completely purified of “divisible nature,” which is a requirement of
material incarnation (YVP3 200). The clarification of the Spirit can only occur in the states
of the soul in death. Only in death can the Spirit attain perfection, purity and harmony.
However, whilst in the body the Spirit is tainted and constrained by the antinomies
of existence, it is bound to the “body and its stupidity.” During bodily existence the
realization of pure “Concord” is impossible. In A Vision B Yeats writes that the Spirit’s
separation from the body can be “described as awakened from its sleep in the dead body”
(AVB 224). In the extract of “The Man and the Echo” above, the body is associated with
ignorance, which implies that the range of human intellect is limited, for once the body
is gone the man “sleeps no more” (l. 30). Once awakened, spiritual intellect “grows sure,”
until “all’s arranged in one clear view” (l. 32). This is a reference to the realization of pure
“Concord” upon the Spirit’s union with the Celestial Body and, subsequently, the Ghostly
Self. Essentially, the first three disincarnate states of the soul in death can be described
as the perfection of the Spirit’s knowledge of emotional and sensuous nature, personal
notions of good and evil, and knowledge of the self “in relation to the ideal,” and “in
relation to God” (YVP3 233). In the process of perfecting its knowledge of the foregoing
material experience, the Spirit is clarified; its slate is cleaned and all is synthesized into
“one clear view” of life. The Spirit transfers its perfected knowledge of life to its Ghostly
Self upon their union. Once its “clear view” of life is passed on to the Ghostly Self, the
Spirit dismisses all that it knows of life. In the poem, as the soul “stands in judgment,”
which refers to the Spirit’s union with the Ghostly Self, all work is done and the Spirit
“dismisses all” (l. 35). At this point, the Spirit is beyond “intellect and sight,” as it “sinks
at last into the night” (ll. 36–37).
The following stanza of the poem describes the Spirit’s entrance into the states before
its new incarnation. The speaker is addressing his echo:
Man
O Rocky Voice,
Shall we in that great night rejoice?
What do we know but that we face
One another in this place?
But hush, for I have lost the theme,
Its joy or night seem but a dream;
Up there some hawk or owl has struck,
Dropping out of sky or rock,
A stricken rabbit is crying out,
And its cry distracts my thought. (VP 633, ll. 39–48; CW1 354)
This stanza illustrates that the Spirit’s reunion with the Ghostly Self lasts for a short period
of time before the pre-life states of the soul commence. Here the speaker is addressing
his Ghostly Self within the fourth disincarnate state. The speaker is not able to prolong
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
his experience of the “night,” which represents the Beatitude. Material forms distract the
speaker shortly after entering into this transcendent state. These distractions signal the end
of the speaker’s union with his echo, which represents the Spirit’s momentary experience
of pure “Concord.”
This essay presented a discussion of the period between lives that considers the system
of A Vision to be composed of an intricately woven series of concepts, tenets and terms
that are still in the process of development. The system and studies pertaining to its theoretical framework constitute an unfolding discourse that has not as yet approached the
final stages of its completion. This discussion of the discarnate states does not lay claim to
finality, or to a definitive account of the system’s theory of death. It was rather orientated
by the thesis that death consists of a number of processes that are all geared toward purifying the transcendent Spirit of its material experience. Accordingly, the Principles and their
inter-relations were elucidated so as to describe the spiritual intellect’s clarification of the
individual Spirit.
Notes
1
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
These lines were later revised and read as follows: “When all works that have / From cradle run to grave /
From grave to cradle run instead” (VP 449; CW1 223). The initial intention is clear enough: to suggest
that Yeats’s thinking about death was altered by the system’s portrayal of it as a process in which the soul is
purified of its material experience.
This quotation suggests that oppositions exist between the Principles that can be represented according to
the light-dark, solar-lunar duality. It will be seen that when representing the movement of the Principles
within a cone it is possible to represent the activity of Husk and Passionate Body by using the phases of the
lunar cycle, while the Spirit and Celestial Body are represented as moving within a solar cycle. The reason is
to maintain the maxim of “solar day, lunar night,” where day represents the release of the Spirit from the
body and night its burial in the mire of human veins.
This view considers all critical material that attempts to increase our knowledge of the system, by studying its tenets, concepts, internal structure, its geometry and its philosophical implications, as constituting
the same body of knowledge, the same discourse, as it were. Accordingly, I consider this very publication
as falling within the ambit of the discourse surrounding “the system,” since it contributes to its development.
This is misleading, since the period between lives was elucidated sporadically throughout the four years of
its development in the automatic script and the Sleep and Dream Notebooks.
While my argument coincides in various ways with, most notably, Colin McDowell’s “The Six Discarnate
States of A Vision (1937),” (YAACTS4 [1986] 87–98), and Barbara Croft’s discussion of the discarnate
states in her “Stylistic Arrangements of Experience”: A Study of William Butler Yeats’s “A Vision” (London
& Toronto: Bucknell University Press, 1987), my approach to the system’s account of death is markedly
different. With the publication of the automatic script, the Sleep and Dream Notebooks, and the various
Notebooks on A Vision, it is acceptable to treat the ideas that constitute the system as forming part of a
discourse. In a sense, it is now possible to suggest different ways of representing and interpreting the ideas
elucidated during communication sessions between Yeats, his wife, George, and their instructors. For this
reason I consider the system of A Vision as still undergoing elucidation and development. By signalling
that every book of A Vision is to some extent incomplete, Yeats allows for further development of its ideas,
tenets and concepts (AVB 23).
“Within these cones move what are called the Four Faculties: Will and Mask, Creative Mind and Body of
Fate” (AVB 73).
Colin McDowell, “‘The Completed Symbol’: Daimonic Existence and the Great Wheel in A Vision
(1937),” YA6 (1988) 195.
Yeats’s use of the phrase “Authentic Existant” (his consistent misspelling of Stephen MacKenna’s “Existent”)
is not entirely accurate and requires clarification that is beyond the scope of this chapter. For more information on this matter see Matthew Gibson’s discussion in “‘Timeless and Spaceless’” in this volume, 105–6.
“The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work”
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
87
Rosemary Puglia Ritvo, “A Vision B: the Plotinian Metaphysical Basis,” Review of English Studies 26, no.
101 (1975): 36.
Matthew Gibson, “‘What Empty Eyeballs Knew’: Zen Buddhism in ‘The Statues’ and the Principles of A
Vision,” YA11 (1994) 145.
Ibid., 145.
This is confirmed in the automatic script of 12 June 1918 (YVP1 500).
Matthew Gibson, “‘What Empty Eyeballs Knew,’” YA11 145.
The temporal associations serve to represent the inverted relations of the Principles and the Faculties. The
scope of this study does not allow for a detailed discussion of what is a very important feature of the relation between these theoretical conceptions of the system. Future studies of the extension of the Principles
into materiality will benefit from a detailed discussion of the temporal nature of the respective Principles
and Faculties.
Embedded in his extract is the suggestion that the solar and lunar circuits can be applied to various levels
of human existence, from the 26,000 years of the solar “Great Year” to the embodiment of a single incarnation.
The phases marked on the circumference of the figure refer to the position of the Faculties for the incarnation being depicted. These are discussed later on in this section.
In what follows I have retained the terms used in the automatic script to name the various processes of the
discarnate states, while retaining Yeats’s later scheme to elucidate the Spirit’s experience of each process and
discarnate state. The reason for this is that I consider the original names to be useful for this exposition, and
because it allows me to avoid musing over Yeats’s alterations to the concepts developed in the automatic
script.
Due to the stance I have taken, which holds that the process of death is a clarification of the Spirit by the
Celestial Body, the so-called pre-life states—The Purification and The Foreknowledge—are omitted from this
discussion. These discarnate states essentially belong to a new lunar cycle (as applied to a single incarnation) and should be considered as states that facilitate the incarnation of the Spirit into a new phase. The
complexity of the pre-life states should really be dealt with in a separate full-length study of the process of
incarnation, and not in what is essentially a discussion of the process by which the Spirit is purified of its
previous life on earth.
Due to the lack of space it is not possible to illustrate that the Passionate Body and Husk are formed out
of the Anima Mundi. It suffices to say that these Principles serve to lock the Spirit into the material realm
through luring it into accepting its future lifeon earth.
In “The Six Discarnate States of A Vision (1937),” McDowell argues that the Meditation properly belongs
to the first state and that the true name of the second state is The Return. He argues strongly for including
the Meditation along with The Vision of the Blood Kindred in the first state. He writes: “There are several
reasons for suggesting that the Meditation belongs to the first after-death state. One is that it is inelegant
to have more names than is necessary for the second state. Yeats unambiguously gives two names for the
whole state, the Dreaming Back and the Return, and both names are drawn from the state’s stages. To add
another name for the state as a whole may make sense in that it would save confusion over whether one
was referring to the state or to one of its stages. However, if that were so, Yeats would not then explicitly
say that the second had a ‘true name’ which was the Return” (YAACTS4 89). I retain the various names
given to it, since my focus is not on the naming of the states but on the processes embedded within them.
One can, on the other hand, follow McDowell’s attempt to clarify the name of the second discarnate state;
he provides a strong argument for placing the Meditation in the first state and for properly considering the
name of the second state as the Return.
I prefer to retain the term The Teachings, since it occupies such an important place in the automatic script’s
elucidation of the purification of the Spirit. McDowell, by contrast, prefers to use the terminology of A
Vision B, and thus uses the Phantasmagoria in place of The Teachings (see note 27).
This is given further attention during my discussion of the second discarnate state.
Dionertes, an instructor, describes the moments after the event of death as follows: “I am dead, for many
minutes I am blind and deaf and dumb – This is because the sudden loss of my physical senses has bewildered my soul – Then I am aware of brilliant light and I see all kin all those of blood relationship in past
lives – They will take me for that moment’s vision which I spoke of to you – It is a vision of all past &
future & of the highest Gods” (YVP3 22).
According to Yeats’s instructors this is the longest and most arduous of the discarnate states.
Once the Spirit is buried, and its attachments to the Passionate Body and the Husk have been dissolved, the
88
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Four Principles separate. Yeats explains in a footnote to “The Soul in Judgment”:
An automatic script describes this Meditation as lasting until burial and as strengthened by
the burial service and by the thoughts of friends and mourners. I left this statement out of the
text because it did not so much seem a necessary deduction from the symbol as an unverifiable
statement of experience. The meaning is doubtless that the ceremonial obliteration of the body
symbolises the Spirit’s separation from the Husk [emphasis added]. Another automatic script
describes the Spirit as rising from the head at death, Celestial Body from the feet, the Passionate Body from the genitals, while the Husk remains prone in the body (the Husk itself seen
objectively) and shares its form. The Spirit is described as awakened from its sleep in the dead
body. (AVB 223–24n)
Yeats did not deem it necessary to discuss the separation of the Four Principles in A Vision B. The reason
could be that for reasons of space he decided to deal with this in a brief and concise footnote. It is also likely
that he did not deem this phenomenon important to the six discarnate states. However, in A Vision A he
explains that the separation of the Principles is instigated by the Daimon, a representative of the Celestial
Body: “The separation of the Principles from the body is caused by the Daimon’s gathering into the Passionate Body memory of the past life—perhaps but a single image or thought—which is always taken from the
unconscious memories of the living, from the Record of all those things which have been seen but have not
been noticed or accepted by the intellect, and the Record is always truthful” (CW13 184; AVA 222). This
describes the main role of the Daimon (defined in this study as a personal emissary sent by the Celestial
Body to the Spirit) in the discarnate states. The Daimon collects records of the foregoing incarnation into
the Passionate Body, which “is now inseparable from the Body of Fate and inaugurates what is called the
Dreaming Back” (CW13 130; AVA 161). The Passionate Body begins to dream back upon the events of
life. It elicits these events from the Body of Fate, which is now part of its record of life. The Dreaming Back
process begins after the Principles separate. Yeats explains: “When physical body is buried, the passionate
body goes then to the scenes of its passion” (YVP3 153).
Yeats discovered this during an exchange with the instructor on 31 January 1918:
16. Does the passionate body long survive the phisical?
16. Perhaps for centuries.
17. Why this meditation upon its disolution.
17. Because it should dissolve soon after death
18. Does it normally do so.
18. No normally only after some [?fury]
19. Does first stage after death last until its disolution?
19. No sometimes the soul reincarnates before it has dissolved
20. Is the soul earth bound while passionate body remains?
20. No
21. What quality or defect of ego gives long life to passionate body?
21. In the subjective phases it has a long life – at 8 & 22 practically – from 11 to 23 & 25 it has long
life – longest in phases 12 13 17 18 22 8 (YVP1 313).
Aymor explains on 16 March 1918 that the dream of the Passionate Body and the Dreaming Back are two
separate processes: “the two processes are separate & quite different in nature” (YVP1 384). This difference
is signified as follows: “Dreaming back & pb dream” (YVP1 384). Aymor explains that the Dreaming Back
is “a moral issue,” whereas, the dream of the Passionate Body is a “sensuous image only” (YVP1 385).
In the Card File entry D18, titled Dreaming back, Yeats codified the automatic script of 2 April 1918:
“How in DB is soul freed from nature?”
“By destruction of emotion & sense”
“Is not emotion very intense in DB cone” “Yes” “in every teaching a form of emotion is destroyed” by intensification of emotion felt “emotion induced by action in life destroyed” “ego feels the emotion as intensely
as is possible it could be felt & is then immune” (YVP3 283; all emphasis added).
In A Vision B this process is given a different name, it is called the Phantasmagoria “which [according to
Yeats] exists to exhaust, not nature, not pain and pleasure, but emotion, and is the work of Teaching Spirits
[of the Thirteenth Cone]” (AVB 230). The Phantasmagoria and the Teaching refer to the same endeavor, that
of destroying emotion and thereby the Spirit’s connection to the Passionate Body.
Yeats explains that “if the life was evil, then the Phantasmagoria is evil, the criminal completes his crime”
(AVB 230).
The instructor Thomas explains on 10 June 1918 that the Teaching is “the reversal of action – good action
“The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work”
89
becomes evil action & so on” (YVP1 494). The result of this is the complete knowledge of emotion, for the
Teaching is “personal & emotional” (YVP1 494).
32. According to Yeats, the Celestial Body is yet again the driving force behind the Return: “In the Return,
upon the other hand, the Spirit must live through past events in the order of their occurrence, because it is
compelled by the Celestial Body to trace every passionate event to its cause until all are related and understood,
turned into knowledge, made a part of itself” (AVB 226; emphasis added).
33. The Celestial Body’s role is to make Spirits “Separable & divisible from the entire into the particular & then
incarnate” (YVP1 499).
34. The automatic script of 6 December 1917 explains that “10 is axis” (YVP1 147). This means that the tenth
stage is the axis. The 10 stages represent the perfection of “good & evil” (YVP1 148).
ANCIENT FRAMES: CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY IN YEATS’S A VISION
by Charles I. Armstrong
I
n both its 1925 and 1937 versions, W. B. Yeats’s A Vision is a text that self-consciously
frames its own argument. In the latter edition, the prefatory material collected in “A
Packet for Ezra Pound” repeatedly dwells on the issue of geometrical abstraction, and
how the text’s doctrines may present an overly austere challenge to the reader. Even before
any explicit mention, the opening sentence’s evocation of the Rapallo landscape anticipates the spatial frameworks of the main doctrine:
Mountains that shelter the bay from all but the south wind, bare brown branches of low vines and of tall trees blurring their outline as though with a soft mist;
houses mirrored in an almost motionless sea: a verandahed gable a couple of
miles away bringing to mind some Chinese painting. (AVB 3)
The relationship between the gyres and cones at the heart of A Vision and the architecture of Yeats’s thought may be construed in two different ways, both suggested by this
quotation: will the former provide sheltering solidity for the latter, like the mountains
surrounding Rapallo, or will the forbidding abstraction of the gyres and related paraphernalia instead envelop and obscure the text’s main contents “as though with a soft mist”?
Later in “A Packet for Ezra Pound,” Yeats goes on to write of the intricate articulations of
Pound’s cantos, expressing a hope for clarity that also is relevant for his own work: “I may,
now that I have recovered leisure, find that the mathematical structure, when taken up
into imagination, is more than mathematical, that seemingly irrelevant details fit together
into a single theme” (AVB 5). But the later pages of the introduction are full of reservations about the “arbitrary, harsh, difficult symbolism” that lies at the text’s heart (AVB
23). Yeats wistfully evokes the possibility of leaving behind the rigors of that symbolism
once it is mastered: “We can (those hard symbolic bones under the skin) substitute for
a treatise on logic the Divine Comedy, or some little song about a rose, or be content to
live our thought” (AVB 24). The skeleton of these “bones under the skin” is indeed sufficiently bare, for Yeats’s sources—the mysterious instructors that allegedly communicated
the system via his wife’s mediumship—to complain: “if my mind returned too soon to
their unmixed abstraction they would say, ‘We are starved’” (AVB 12).
Are the geometrical and symbolical articulations of A Vision an essential framework
that upholds the whole—like a spine, say—or is it an external generalization, an abstraction, that can be left behind like the “coat / Covered with embroideries / Out of old
mythologies” in his poem “A Coat” (VP 320; CW1 127)? Functioning very much like
metaphors—indeed, they are embraced as metaphors in Yeats’s poetry—are these framing
devices merely external ornamentation, or do they possess valuable heuristic or mimetic
force? Yeats was not sure, but he was in any case uneasy. This sense of structural vacillation
also affects his deployment of classical philosophy as a source in order to elucidate the
system. Yeats’s use of numerous thinkers of the Platonic tradition can both be explained as
Classical Philosophy in Yeats’s A Vision
91
innate to the very workings of A Vision, and as a superficial philosophical coating added
to the firm outlines of a canvas provided by his supernatural instructors. This essay will
pursue the related facets of the difficult issue of framing: it will be more engaged in scrutinizing the multiplicity of structural effects that occur in Yeats’s use of Plato, Plotinus, and
other ancient philosophers, than in providing anything close to an exhaustive summary
of actual doctrinal overlaps and discrepancies involved. Jonathan Culler has distinguished
between frames and contexts in a way that is relevant here:
the notion of context frequently oversimplifies rather than enriches discussion,
since the opposition between an act and its context seems to presume that the
context is given and determines the meaning of the act. We know, of course,
that things are not so simple: context is not fundamentally different from what
it contextualizes; context is not given but produced; what belongs to a context is
determined by interpretive strategies; contexts are just as much in need of elucidation as events; and the meaning of a context is determined by events. Yet when
we use the term context we slip back into the simple model it proposes. Since the
phenomena criticism deals with are signs, forms with socially-constituted meanings, one might try to think not of context but of the framing of signs: how are
signs constituted (framed) by various discursive practices, institutional arrangements, systems of value, semiotic mechanisms?1
The framing questions guiding this essay are: What role does philosophy have in the
system presented by A Vision? What kind of thought does Yeats want from his classical
philosophers, and how does he relate them to the system already largely established by the
mystical instructors that communicated with him via his wife’s mediumship? How does
Yeats relate to the framing question of genre, for instance in terms of classical precedents
such as Platonic dialogues and the pre-Socratics’ fragments? And, finally, how does A
Vision’s engagement with Plato, Plotinus, and other ancient philosophers relate to more
encompassing ideological frames? Received opinion on the role of classical philosophy in
A Vision emphasizes that this is an influence especially relevant to the second, 1937 version of Yeats’s work. The relative paucity of philosophical references in the earlier version
reflects Yeats’s respectful subservience to the advice of his instructors, who did not want
him to mix up the systems and concepts of others with their own: “they asked me not to
read philosophy until their exposition was complete, and this increased my difficulties.
Apart from two or three of the principal Platonic Dialogues I knew no philosophy” (AVB
12). Yeats typically accepts a distinction between true instructors and so-called “frustrators” who deliberately gave misleading or erroneous knowledge, but in this respect even
the former seem to frustrate him. In retrospect, the lifting of the embargo against philosophy is presented as a liberating experience, the effects of which were felt simultaneously
with the 1925 publication of the first version: “When the proof sheets came I felt myself
relieved from my promise not to read philosophy” (AVB 19). Even if Yeats exaggerates a
little here—after all, both the first edition and the automatic script clearly indicate some
philosophical reading took place prior to 1925—there certainly is a large difference in
emphasis between the 1925 and 1937 editions of A Vision.2 When Yeats looks back at that
first version, it is with deep misgivings:
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
The first version of this book, A Vision, except the section on the twenty-eight
phases, and that called ‘Dove or Swan’ which I repeat without change, fills me
with shame. I had misinterpreted the geometry, and in my ignorance of philosophy failed to understand distinctions upon which the coherence of the whole
depended. (AVB 19)
Philosophy, then, is largely a supplementary addition coming after 1925, yet still provides
more than mere extraneous scaffolding to Yeats’s system. For “the coherence of the whole”
only comes about, only becomes understandable, through philosophical treatment. Interestingly, something of the same doubleness is present even earlier in the gestation of A
Vision. On a surface level, philosophy might seem to be banished from the proceedings
that generated the automatic script, as Yeats obeyed the instructors’ embargo. On the
other hand, a notebook entry of 11 January 1921 arguably identifies Plato as a presiding genius for the foundation of the crucial dichotomy between primary and antithetical
phases. Yeats states that:
in a recent sleap [sic] communicator said that all communications such as ours
were begun by the transference of an image later from another mind. The image
is selected by the daimon from telepathic impacts & one is chosen not necessarily a recent one. For instance the script about black & white horses may have
been from Horton who wrote it to me years before. (YVP3 65)3
The mention of the horses appears the first day of preserved automatic script (5 November
1917) as the instructor Thomas of Dorlowicz’s reference to “one white one black both
winged both necessary to you” (YVP1 56). According to Yeats’s explanation, this again
refers even further back, to a scrap of paper presented to him by his friend W. T. Horton,
and an automatic script stemming from Edith Lyttelton in 1914, both of which ultimately refer back to Plato’s Phaedrus and Socrates’ allegorical account of the soul in terms
of “the composite nature of a pair of winged horses and a charioteer.”4
Despite having a seemingly crucial role for Yeats’s system, Plato largely drops out of
sight in the automatic script—his dichotomy establishes what might be termed the vital
germ or seed for the system, but its contents are subsequently modified and husbanded
by seemingly external frameworks. Barring an off-hand reference, in the dedication to
the first edition, to Horton’s living “through that strange adventure, perhaps the strangest
of all adventures—Platonic love” (CW13 liii; AVA x), and a few other passing mentions,
Yeats conceals the original importance of Plato’s understanding of love to the proceedings
of the automatic script. In particular it was crucially linked, at the beginning of the automatic script, to his balancing interpretation of his relations to the most important women
of his life. Nevertheless, Plato and the entire mainstream of Western philosophy are for
the most part conspicuously absent during the automatic sessions—and they are so for a
reason. In the script of 1 January 1918, Fish expressed skepticism concerning “Wisdom
of thought,” claiming, in a rather Nietzschean vein, that “a metaphysician is a nihilist not
a creator” (YVP1 184). On this premise, both Kant and Hegel were said to possess no
true wisdom. Yet only days later, on January 14, another instructor made a distinction
between different philosophies. Responding to Yeats’s question, “When you are giving
Classical Philosophy in Yeats’s A Vision
93
me a profound philosophy why do you warn me against philosophy,” Thomas responded:
“I warn you against the philosophy that is bred in stagnation—it is a bitter philosophy a
philosophy which destroys—I give you one which leads—I give you one which is from
outside—a light which you follow not one which will burn you” (YVP1 252). Here an important, but far from water-tight, distinction is established. At one level it might simply be
taken as setting down a clear opposition between the rationalism of academic philosophy
and the mysteries of esoteric thought, yet the very existence of “philosophy” as a common
term here indicates both continuity and room for overlap. The 1937 version of A Vision
explores this common ground with some diligence, and classical philosophy will play an
especially important role as a kind of thought that is, presumably, “from outside”—even
as it is accepted within the institutional framework of mainstream philosophy.
The framing distinction between inside and outside is germane, if one is to articulate
how philosophy intersects with the thought of A Vision. As in the automatic script, large
parts of Western philosophy are effectively sidelined also in the published versions of
Yeats’s work. Especially in the second version, classical philosophy looms large but does
so to the detriment of most of the philosophical heritage—with minor exceptions in
figures such as Berkeley, Croce and Whitehead—coming after Plotinus. Effectively, this
means that, for instance, the important critical philosophy of Kant, as well as modern
aesthetics, is simply shunted aside. Insofar as Yeats’s philosophical recidivism acknowledges these developments, it is only to dismiss them, instead emphasizing a cosmological
tradition, speculating on concrete essences behind universal world processes, that was
effectively brought to an end as a central philosophical concern with Kant and his more
linguistically-oriented successors. For Yeats, however, the benefits probably outweighed
any possible drawbacks—for not only do the pre-Socratics, for instance, give him access to
a kind of thinking which does not clearly distinguish reason from irrationality, or science
from magic, but their thought also permits him to aspire to prophetic powers: “What if
there is an arithmetic or geometry that can exactly measure the slope of a balance, the dip
of a scale, and so date the coming of that something?” (AVB 29). Yeats’s chosen classical
philosophers were also eminently qualified to deliver, and develop, the “metaphors for
poetry” (AVB 8) that were supposed to issue out of the system. Never far separated from
ontic determinations and mythical narratives, thinkers such as Plato and Empedocles
could provide a far more full-flavored diet than the seemingly murderous abstraction of
modern philosophy. This is touched upon in the automatic script, where Yeats uses the
relative level of concretion of the “figurative” symbolism of Platonic myth as a point of
reference for understanding the status of the images and diagrams passed on to him by his
instructors (YVP1 126, 141).
If Yeats’s privileging of classical philosophy excludes most later philosophical developments, it is also highly selective within the confines of ancient thought. Within the
Greek tradition Yeats’s cosmological bias means that important political and ethical issues, for instance, are marginalized. A major figure such as Aristotle is largely ignored,
as Yeats squarely focuses on Plato and his pre-Socratic forerunners. Even within Plato’s
writings, the Socratic elenchus—a form of logical refutation of a position through proving
an opposite point—is only one of many important dimensions eschewed or overlooked.
A broader focus would have been possible: certainly, the run-through of the twenty-eight
incarnations is, for instance, rich enough to open up for interesting echoes of Greek and
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Roman thought on practical philosophy (particularly with regard to the issue of the good
life) and epistemology. Yet after “Plato and Aristotle,” Yeats claims in the historical summary of the “Dove or Swan” section of A Vision, the mind was “exhausted” (AVB 272; cf.
CW13 153; AVA 184). As a result, Roman thought tends to be ignored and the Stoics can
be ingenuously disparaged as “the first benefactors of our modern individuality, sincerity
of the trivial face, the mask torn away” (AVB 272; cf. CW13 153; AVA 184).
Yeats wanted to use classical philosophy for other purposes: he especially wanted to
use it to buttress his own recourse to framing diagrams. The schematic use of gyres and
other geometrical symbols constitutes one of the key deployments of ancient thought in
A Vision. In the 1925 version, Book II is opened with the poem “Desert Geometry or the
Gift of Harun Al-Raschid,” which evokes Parmenides as a possible, but actually erroneous, source:
The signs and shapes;
All those abstractions that you fancied were
From the great Treatise of Parmenides;
All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight things
Are but a new expression of her body.… (CW13 102; AVA 126)
In the 1937 version, the important two first parts of Book I, “The Great Wheel,” are
significantly marked by ancient thought. The opening paragraph features a lengthy quotation of Empedocles on the interplay of Discord and Concord in a single vortex, and
goes on to claim (in an imprecise rendering of the forty-fourth fragment, as presented by
Burnet) that it was “this Discord or War that Heraclitus called ‘God of all and Father of
all, some it has made gods and some men, some bond and some free’” (AVB 67). With this
opening, Yeats strikes two keynotes of considerable importance for his system as a whole:
he will create a geometrical system in order to grasp the underlying patterns of existence,
but he will also stress aspects of tension and strife in the process.
Heraclitus and Empedocles are, however, only used as examples—as it does not take
long for Yeats to point out that linking together one vortex for Concord (which Yeats later
identifies with the objectivity of the primary Tincture) with another for Discord (equated
with antithetical Tincture) gives “the fundamental symbol of my instructors” (AVB 68).
One gains a sense that classical philosophy is here cast in a secondary, supporting role,
somehow buttressing Yeats’s system—a sense not contradicted by the subsequent quick
references to Yeats’s favorite quotation from Heraclitus (“Dying each other’s life, living
each other’s death”) and the observation that the “first gyres clearly described by philosophy are those described in the Timaeus” (AVB 68).
Hazard Adams has perspicaciously noted the peculiar effect this creates:
There is something oblique about these predecessors as authorities invoked to give
status to Yeats’s endeavor. Not one of them presents a figure quite like Yeats’s principal symbol. Empedocles’ concord and discord are not quite the same as Yeats’s
primary and antithetical (though it will take a little while for this to become
clear). Neither is Yeats presenting what verges on a physical theory, as in Timaeus.
Same and other have some relation to primary and antithetical, but it is oblique.5
Classical Philosophy in Yeats’s A Vision
95
The same discrepancy between old and new is evident if one inspects the comparable
passage in the first edition (cf. CW13 106–7; AVA 182–88). Adams’s explanation for this
effect, namely that Yeats wants to contrast his own “tradition of iconic creativity” with
one of “dogmatic authority,” is less than entirely convincing. The identified problem can
however open up a fruitful questioning: it is not quite clear what function Yeats wishes to
give his cited, ancient sources. The common opinion, suggested by Yeats’s own prefatory
comments to A Vision, has been that the thinkers of the Platonic tradition are there to
bring clarification: Yeats is using the lucidity of those minds to make his own system more
transparent. Not incommensurable with this reading is the idea, sometimes suggested
in passing by Yeats himself, that his own instructors actually were inspired by these predecessors. Thus the introduction presents Empedocles as influence rather than example:
“Although the more I read [after the first edition] the better did I understand what I had
been taught, I found neither the geometrical symbolism nor anything that could have
inspired it except the vortex of Empedocles” (AVB 20). But, insofar as the ancient models
are subtly different from those provided by Yeats’s instructors, there is a risk of merely
further muddying the waters. Hence the interpretative need for other, supporting explanations, such as the one provided by Adams in passing here: the ancient thinkers may also
have a legitimizing function. Reaching out to a wider, less exclusively esoteric audience
in the second edition of A Vision, Yeats thus brought increased respectability to his own
system and its “unfashionable gyre” (“The Gyres,” VP 565; CW1 299) through classical
references and allusions. Claiming that much of his own system was “as old as philosophy” (AVB 71) would ensure that it avoided any accusation of idiosyncrasy—as well as
the incomprehension that dogged William Blake’s potentially comparable system. It also
ensured that Yeats’s system was less vulnerable to being interpreted as being in any way a
mere reformulation of Blake’s.6
Alternatively, Yeats can be seen as effectively testing his theory in light of the wisdom
of tradition, using the thought of Empedocles and other classical thinkers as the philosophical equivalent of an Arnoldian touchstone. Rather than simply finding fault with the
insufficiency of his precursors, Yeats may in fact be engaged in a process of adjusting his
own invention in the light of tradition. This is, after all, an author who stated: “Talk to
me of originality and I will turn on you with rage” (CW5 213; E&I 522, “Introduction”).
Indeed, Yeats may be doing several different things at once. Matthew DeForrest, in a close
inspection of Yeats’s use of some of the sources for A Vision, encapsulates this well when
stating that Yeats’s “purpose” in using Plotinus is “twofold”: it is both an attempt to “validate his system” and to “illustrate” the instructors’ material “through an examination of
comparable material.”7 Yeats may on occasion be deflating tradition, but he might just as
well be submitting to it as an arbiter in what amounts to a complex double bind. Several
rhetorical functions may in fact be at work in any given passage, so complex are the shifts
of tone and so surprising the juxtapositions one finds in A Vision.
If such questions of rhetorical function have previously been relatively neglected, the
key doctrinal overlaps between Yeats and the parts of the tradition that he finds relevant
to his interests have nevertheless been mapped in some detail. There is a general consensus
that a Platonic worldview, with a dualism between spirit and matter, and an important
mediating role played by the intermediary beings called Daimons, is crucial to A Vision.
Despite its own intentions, James Olney’s overly systematic run-through of Yeats’s links
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
to Plato and the pre-Socratic quartet of Pythagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Empedocles makes it obvious that Yeats’s interest was not evenly divided: although he respected
Pythagoras’s geometrical impulse (see for instance the mention of his perfect sphere in
CW13 107; AVA 188) and made colorful use of Parmenides, as mentioned earlier, in “The
Gift of Harun Al-Raschid,” neither of these thinkers really made much of an impact on
Yeats’s thought in A Vision. The relevance of Empedocles’ overall conception is, however,
hard to dispute: “the system that Yeats’s Instructors revealed to him…was, at least in its
basic configuration and its largest outline, an Empedoclean system of continually alternating half-cycles set in a time without beginning and without end.”8
Other commentators have avoided Olney’s general dismissiveness towards the NeoPlatonist tradition. Rosemary Puglia Ritvo’s close reading of the overlap between the 1937
Vision and Plotinus’s thought makes it clear that Yeats’s praise for Stephen MacKenna’s
“incomparable translation” (AVB 20) amounted to far more than window-dressing. She
especially demonstrates the detailed concordance that exists between Yeats’s four Principles
(Husk, Passionate Body, Spirit, and Celestial Body) and Plotinus’s metaphysical hypostases,9 but also for instance points out the crucial agreement between the two with regard
to “the notion of Person at the highest levels of existence.”10 While opposing Harold
Bloom’s gnostic reading of Yeats’s thought, Brian Arkins basically affirms Ritvo’s central
thesis: “Yeats subscribes to Plotinus’s hierarchical world-view, founded on, but by no
means identical with, the dualism of Plato.”11 However, Arkins goes further in highlighting Yeats’s small, but important differences from Plotinus—differences which become
very important indeed in a poem such as “News for the Delphic Oracle” (VP 611–12;
CW1 345–46). Where Ritvo asserts in passing that Yeats’s Daimon is more closely drawn
to the sensory world than Plotinus’s guiding spirits, Arkins points towards a more general
tendency in Yeats to contradict Plotinus’s privileging of the spiritual over the material
world. In general, Plotinus’s stress on unity is counteracted by Yeats’s insistence upon the
dynamic and conflictual aspects of the pre-Socratics, even using Heraclitus as a stick with
which to beat Marxism: “It is the old saying of Heraclitus, ‘War is God of all, and Father
of all, some it has made Gods and some men, some bond and some free,’ and the converse
of Marxian Socialism” (AVB 82n).
Matthew Gibson’s recent article on Yeats and classical philosophy shows that Yeats
misreads Plotinus, collapsing the individual into the universal, but also points out that
this is a creative misreading that is understandable given Yeats’s aims.12 Gibson also provides valuable archeological work on Yeats’s use of the ancient idea of the Great Year. He
demonstrates how a close reading of Pierre Duhem’s modern account of ancient thinkers,
such as Proclus and Simplicius, in Le système du monde informed Yeats’s historical scheme,
whereby the Great Year was understood to span 26,000 years, involving lesser units of two
millennia. This unearthing of the formative importance of a secondary source is in line
with Gibson’s tendency to stress the mediated nature of Yeats’s Platonism, mentioning
not only contemporary sources such as Pater and MacGregor Mathers, but also the Cambridge Platonists and Plutarch. This can be taken further, however, as the main focus for
Gibson, Arkins, Ritvo and Olney—the existence of similarities and differences between
Yeatsian and classical thought—only gains significance from several more encompassing frameworks. These commentators have frequently pointed out that, even while there
is general concordance in his prose, Yeats’s poetry is less than simply affirmative of the
Classical Philosophy in Yeats’s A Vision
97
Platonic tradition. Arguably, though, such a neat division presupposes that one reads A
Vision as a straightforward positing of doctrine, devoid of any of the irony and ambivalence found in Yeats’s literary work. Even the central chapters would seem to be informed
with a gentle sense of irony, as Yeats—more than once misspelling John Burnet’s name,
misquoting various sources, and even mixing up Heraclitus and Empedocles on one occasion—engages in an obtuse parody of scholarly prose. It would make more sense to read
these parts as partially anticipating, say, a work such as Nabokov’s Pale Fire than simply as
a poet’s bungling attempt to pull off an alien, academic genre. In 1915, in “The Scholars”
(VP 337; CW1 141), Yeats had poked fun at the “Old, learned, respectable bald heads”
engaged in literary philology, and that irreverent distance from the scholarly community
did not desert him overnight.
The overlap here is not only with the style of contemporary academics, but also with
that of the ancient philosophical commentators on Plato and Plotinus that Yeats had
studied. Further, the generic diversity of the primary sources also has an effect on A Vision. The fragmentary nature of the pre-Socratics’ writings can be linked to the elliptical
way in which Yeats’s system appears to its readers. In the first edition, Owen Aherne writes
that the whole philosophy was originally “expounded in a series of fragments which only
displayed their meaning, like one of those child’s pictures which are made up out of separate cubes, when all were put together” (CW13 11; AVA 11). Of course, the writings of
figures such as Heraclitus and Empedocles are fragmentary for a reason: they are handed
down to us via the more complete manuscripts of thinkers such as Theophrastus, a student
of Aristotle. According to Walter Pater, the rephrasing or rearticulation of other thinkers
was in fact characteristic of Plato, whom he presents very much as an anticipation of the
postmodern bricoleur:
in truth the world Plato had entered into was already almost weary of philosophical debate, bewildered by the oppositions of sects, the claims of rival schools.…
In the Timaeus, dealing with the origin of the universe he figures less as the
author of a new theory, than as already an eclectic critic of older ones, himself
somewhat perplexed by theory and counter-theory.13
A view of Plato as more of a mediator of others’ ideas than an original purveyor of doctrine
may go against the grain for many, but it is actually in line with more recent, postmodern
treatments of his oeuvre.14 When Yeats provides extensive prefatory material before the
central argument of A Vision, hedging his bets and expressing serious reservations about
the truth-value of his system, is he really closer to this variant of what he called “Platonic
tolerance” (“Two Songs from a Play,” VP 438; CW1 217) than he would have been if he
merely had presented his thoughts in a doctrinal tract in the manner of the Enneads? Olney seems to suggest as much:
Hence, the myth of Aherne, Robartes, the Judwalis, and the Speculum (not to
mention the Instructors) that Yeats wraps around his Vision, though he could
scarcely be said to keep a very straight face in narrating it, has a kind of daimonic
logic of its own, as do all the myths in Plato, and is neither trivial nor outrageous, as might at first seem to be the case.15
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Thus, when Thomas Parkinson puts “A Packet for Ezra Pound” down as a collection
of “numerous droll and evasive preambles,” he is missing an important point.16 Whether
or not we believe Yeats when he claims, at the end of the “Introduction to ‘A Vision,’” that
the whole system provides no more than “stylistic arrangements of experience comparable
to the cubes in the drawing of Wyndham Lewis and to the ovoids in the sculpture of Brancusi” (AVB 25), this expression of suspended disbelief has an illustrious predecessor. If A
Vision gives him merely a flexible frame through which to perceive the world, it functions
rather like mythology did for Socrates. In a passage from the Phaedrus, which Yeats himself quoted at the end of an introduction early in his career, Socrates defends his own use
of mythology, claiming that he has “not time for such enquiries” as those made by skeptics
who want to explain away the myths (CW6 8–9; FFTIP xvi–xviii).17 He has use for those
latter myths, without worrying about their lack of verifiable truth-value. Something comparable also occurs in Yeats’s 1937 discussion of the Great Year. Coming across a number
of different interpretations of the Great Year, Yeats returns to the conception presented in
the Timaeus: “Plato may have brought such an ideal year into the story, its periods all of
exactly the same length, to remind us that he dealt in myth” (AVB 212–13). Yeats’s section
on “The Completed Symbol” constantly worries about the discrepancy between symbol
and reality, and it is Plato’s obviously playful stance that leads the Irishman to a point of
crisis: “Will some mathematician some day question and understand, as I cannot, and
confirm all, or have I also dealt in myth?” (AVB 213).
The open-ended form of the Platonic dialogue plays a significant role in Yeats’s later
poetic output, finding a modern analogue in the dialogue between Owen Aherne and
Michael Robartes that appears at the beginning of A Vision. Margaret Mills Harper has
emphasized what she calls the “dialogic method” of the automatic script that preceded
the writing of A Vision, but it is possible to see the tentative and exploratory nature of
this genre as infecting the final product of the latter work, too.18 Initially, of course,
the ideas on which it built were meant to be presented (as Yeats stated in a letter to
John Quinn) in “a dialogue in the manner of Landor” (29 November 1917 cit. YVP4
2). There may have been more than a trace of anxiety of influence to explain Landor’s
dislike of Plato—but in any case Yeats was, in his own fashion, following both of their
examples in toying with the genre.
In a reading of how frames operate in Kant’s aesthetics, Jacques Derrida claims that
“what has produced and manipulated the frame puts everything to work in order to efface the frame effect.”19 The self-conscious bravado with which Yeats framed his use of
the ancient philosophers makes sure we never lose sight of the fact that his access to them
was far from immediate. He may at times have believed he was engaged in an anamnesis
of timeless truths, of a kind sketched by Pater: “Pythagoreanism too, like all the graver
utterances of primitive Greek philosophy, is an instinct of the human mind itself, and
therefore also a constant tradition in its history, which will recur.”20 Yet Yeats’s understanding was embedded in concrete historical contexts, and even his intentions in, say,
quoting a pre-Socratic fragment were to some degree following established conventions.
As a member of the Golden Dawn and a long-time student of Theosophy, for instance,
Yeats had the precedent of other recent esoteric literature at the back of his mind while
writing A Vision. In Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, for instance, we read:
Classical Philosophy in Yeats’s A Vision
99
It was not Zeno alone, the founder of the Stoics, who taught that the Universe
evolves, when its primary substance is transformed from the state of fire into that
of air, then into water, etc. Heracleitus of Ephesus maintained that the one principle that underlies all phenomena in Nature is fire. The intelligence that moves
the Universe is fire, and fires [sic] is intelligence. And while Anaximenes said the
same of air, and Thales of Miletus (600 years B.C.) of water, the Esoteric Doctrine reconciles all those philosophers by showing that though each was right the
system of none was complete.21
Yeats’s former spiritual teacher also quotes figures such as Plato and Pythagoras quite
copiously. Another important esoteric forerunner, MacGregor Mathers’s The Kabbalah
Unveiled, similarly appropriates Pythagoras to his cabalistic purposes.22 While one should
not underestimate important differences in both purpose and detail—Madame Blavatsky
does not, for instance, refer to Plotinus at all, having no Stephen MacKenna to inspire
her—there is something of a generic precedent for Yeats’s work here. Graham Hough’s
insistence on how Yeats’s thought takes place within an occult heritage is still valid, and A
Vision must be read as a text that at least partially places itself within an existing literary
tradition of that particular heritage.23
As a result of that ancestry, Yeats’s use of classical philosophy places itself in the very
outer margins of British Hellenism—an ideological framework of considerable importance and scope in the context of the imperial ideology of Victorianism and its aftermath.
At one stage in “The Soul in Judgment” (Book III of the 1937 A Vision) Yeats denounces
as illusory “the pure benevolence our exhausted Platonism and Christianity attribute to
an angelical being” (AVB 230); this is characteristic of an important distance between
his own appropriation of ancient thought and that of many others. While figures such
as Benjamin Jowett and George Grote expended much energy on reconciling Plato with
modern Christianity and morality, for instance finding parallels between the Athenian
polis and modern British politics, Yeats could approach the Greeks from a rather different
perspective.24 Historically, his stress on Heraclitean flux and strife, as well as Empedoclean
circularity, rather than the ideal state of Plato, is indicative of the post-war disillusionment
with Victorian ideals that looms so large in a poem such as “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” (VP 428–433; CW1 210–14). In this respect, Nietzsche—who listed Heraclitus
and Empedocles as two of his own most important inspirations—is a significant forerunner.25 Yeats also situated himself at some remove from the homosexual aestheticism that
played such a large role for writers such as Pater, Symonds, and Forster,26 although that
movement’s cult of beauty—also important for aestheticism during the latter stages of the
Victorian era—is closely related to the beautiful bodies and “immovable trance” (CW13
59; AVA 70–71; AVB 136) characteristic of Yeats’s Phase Fifteen. More unexpectedly,
perhaps, the esoteric context of A Vision places this work at an oblique angle to one of
Yeats’s major uses of the classical heritage—it in no way replicates the blatantly nationalist
use Yeats made of ancient Greece earlier in his career. At a surface level, and despite the
fact that Yeats’s attraction to Plotinus was in part motivated by the fact that this philosopher’s most eminent modern translator was an Irishman (MacKenna), there is no strong
Irish dimension to Yeats’s use of the classical past at this stage. Claire Nally has recently
argued for a presence of nationalist discourse and themes in A Vision, yet this is largely a
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subterranean affair.27 Concomitantly with a vastly expanded knowledge of the traditions
of Western metaphysical thought, this apparent distance to local matters enabled Yeats to
reinvent himself as a wide-ranging, philosophical poet of considerable speculative verve,
with the kind of international relevance that would merit a Noble Prize, during the later
stages of his career. Ultimately, though, he could not withstand the temptation of using
this philosophical power as an explicit tool in the ideological struggles within Ireland.
In “The Statues,” for instance, the concluding stanza belligerently declares the ancient
ancestry of the Irish, using the Easter Rising’s upsurge of national identity to contrast the
Irish identity’s classical roots to the deracinated decadence of the “filthy modern tide”
(VP 611; CW1 345). For better or for worse, without scrutinizing Plotinus and his Greek
predecessors, Yeats would never have had the bravery to confront the particular dogmas he
opposed in the head-on way characteristic of his late writings. As he puts it in “The Need
for Audacity of Thought”:
We must consider anew the foundations of existence, bring to the discussion—
diplomacies and prudences put away—all relevant thought. Christianity must
meet to-day the criticism, not, as its ecclesiastics seem to imagine, of the school
of Voltaire, but of that out of which Christianity itself in part arose, the School
of Plato.… (CW10 201; UP2 465)28
Those philosophical gains are perhaps the most indisputable ones of Yeats’s use of
classical thought in A Vision. Although selective and at times misleading, the philosophical formulation of Yeats’s esoteric system is in any case a complex and fascinating
phenomenon. It never represents a simple mirroring, or taking over, of timeless truths,
but should rather be conceived of as a complex and many-faceted act of mediation.
Like Walter Pater before him, Yeats had too much respect for the sensual side of life to
not be suspicious of “the ascetic pride which lurks under all Platonism, resultant from
its opposition of the seen to the unseen, as falsehood to truth.…”29 Thus, although he
embraced the dualism and much of the idealism of Plato and Plotinus, he tempered it
with the stress on temporal flux and conflict found in the pre-Socratics. Yet classical
philosophy did more than supply Yeats with warring dogmas; it also provided him with
the precedent of a mode of thinking flexible enough to question its own verities through
generic multiplicity, skepticism, and sheer ludic energy. Although his approach to them
was inevitably subject to numerous conventional and mediational contingencies, Yeats’s
ancient philosophical sources provided the basis for an invigorating reframing of the
concerns endemic to A Vision.
Notes
1
2
3
4
Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and its Institutions (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), ix.
As early as 17 October 1918, the instructors were advising Yeats to spend “half an hour a day reading
philosophic literature” (YVP2 82).
For a discussion of this episode, see George Mills Harper, MYV1 9–12, as well as his W. B. Yeats and W. T.
Horton: The Record of an Occult Friendship (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980), 59–63.
Phaedrus, 246a, in Plato, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, translated by Harold North Fowler, Loeb Classical Library, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1914), 471. The Yeatses owned
Jowett’s translation: WBGYL 1598 (YL 1586).
Classical Philosophy in Yeats’s A Vision
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
101
Hazard Adams, The Book of Yeats’s Vision: Romantic Modernism and Antithetical Tradition (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1995), 70.
Blake played an important role in the first version of A Vision, and George Mills Harper’s commentaries
on the automatic script point out several important parallels from the very beginning: see YVP1 12, 26,
28; YVP3 2.
Matthew DeForrest, “Philosophical Differences and Yeats’s Corroborative System in A Vision,” South Carolina Review 32, no. 1 (Fall 1999): 224.
James Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower: The Perennial Philosophy–Yeats and Jung (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1980), 150.
Rosemary Puglia Ritvo, “A Vision B: The Plotinian Metaphysical Basis,” in Review of English Studies 101
(1975): 34–46.
Ibid., 35n. Although Ritvo does not contextualize her reading, it is most likely Yeats’s receptivity to Romantic tenets that makes possible an agreement with what Pierre Hadot has called “Plotinus’ central
intuition: the human self is not irrevocably separated from its eternal model, as the latter exists within
divine Thought” (Plotinus, or The Simplicity of Vision, translated by Michael Chase [Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993], 27).
Brian Arkins, Builders of My Soul: Greek and Roman Themes in Yeats (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1990),
35.
Matthew Gibson, “Classical Philosophy,” in ed. David Holdeman and Ben Levitas, W. B. Yeats in Context
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 276–287. In personal correspondence with the author,
Gibson has also pointed out how Yeats’s use of his sources regarding the concept of the Eternal Return
changes. While it is presented as a mainly Nietzschean idea in the first edition (CW13 142; AVA 176),
Yeats takes the concept back to ancient Greek thought in the second.
Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures (Amsterdam: Fredonia Books, 2002), 2. The edition
in the Yeatses’ library was published by Macmillan in 1894 (WBGYL 1549; YL 1538).
See for instance Catherine H. Zuckert, Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower, 226
Thomas Parkinson, “This Extraordinary Book,” YA1 (1982) 195–206 at 195.
The same passage is referred to again in “Enchanted Woods” in The Celtic Twilight (M2005 41–42; Myth
63).
Margaret Mills Harper, Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual and Literary Collaboration of George and W. B. Yeats
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 135.
Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 73.
Pater, Plato and Platonism, 64. Yeats presents Platonic anamnesis as “a relation to the timeless” in John
Aherne’s letter (AVB 54).
H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, 2 vols. (London:
Theosophical Publishing Company, 1888), 1:76–77.
See S. L. MacGregor Mathers, The Kabbalah Unveiled, (1887; London, Boston and Henley: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1981; WBGYL 1305 [YL 1292]), 21 and 214n.
Graham Hough, The Mystery Religion of W. B. Yeats (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984).
Interestingly, two of Yeats’s most important scholarly sources—A. E. Taylor and John Burnet—pointed in
opposite directions. According to Frank M. Turner, in Taylor’s work “both Socrates and Plato emerged as
proto-Christians who had been primarily concerned with the tendance of the soul, which Taylor equated
with the modern concept of ‘the development of “moral personality”’” (The Greek Heritage in Victorian
Britain [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981], 382). On the other hand, John Burnet’s
work on Plato and Socrates—concurrent, in this respect, with his later work on early Greek philosophy—
was “part and parcel of the more general late-Victorian and Edwardian effort to examine sympathetically
those features of Greek religion, philosophy, and society that earlier rationalist authors had largely discounted in order to discover an ancient positivistic age” (ibid., 317). Richard Jenkyns has contradicted the
tendency to simplify the Victorian stance here: “it was also characteristic of the age, or of its more enquiring members, to feel that between faith in Christianity and the love of Greece there must be a tension” (The
Victorians and Ancient Greece [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980], 70).
Yeats’s passing, disparaging comparison of Platonic thought to death and Christian asceticism in “Dove
or Swan” (see CW13 153; AVA 183; AVB 271) is also decidedly Nietzschean in tone: see Otto Bohlmann,
102
26
27
28
29
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Yeats and Nietzsche: An Exploration of Major Nietzschean Echoes in the Writings of William Butler Yeats (Totowa: Barnes & Noble Books, 1982), 88–89.
See Chapter 1 of Sarah Cole, Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
See Claire Nally, Envisioning Ireland: Occult Nationalism in the Work of W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Peter Lang,
2009).
On the late Yeats as a philosopher-poet, see Matthew Gibson, Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage (Basingtoke: Macmillan, 2000).
Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean, edited by Michael Levey (London: Penguin, 1985), 147. Cf. WBGYL
1548 (YL 1537).
“TIMELESS AND SPACELESS”?—YEATS’S SEARCH FOR MODELS
OF INTERPRETATION IN POST–ENLIGHTENMENT PHILOSOPHY,
CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGY AND ART HISTORY, AND
THE EFFECTS OF THESE THEORIES ON “THE COMPLETED SYMBOL,”
“THE SOUL IN JUDGMENT” AND “THE GREAT YEAR OF THE ANCIENTS”
by Matthew Gibson
Introduction
W
hile Yeats declared in the second edition of A Vision (1937) that he was told
by the instructors not to read philosophy until his book was completed, he
nevertheless admitted that his failures in understanding the geometry and
“distinctions upon which the coherence of the whole depended” were due to “ignorance
of philosophy” (AVB 19). Philosophy was of immense importance to him in organizing
the movement of Faculties, Principles and Thirteenth Cone in the second edition, in accordance with existing ontological and epistemological ideas. The following study seeks to
explain how his reading of philosophers as diverse as Plotinus and Oswald Spengler helped
him to develop the Principles into a theory of perception and experience, to comprehend
the mutual and dependent relation between incarnate and discarnate life, and to style the
Great Year of the ancients as a theory of civilization akin to the views of ethnographers and
anthropologists current to his age. Above all, however, it will be shown how Yeats’s occultist background made him reinterpret the work of previous and contemporary scholars to
become part of his own individual theory, a theory which melds classical conceptions of
history with the contemporary.
I. Sequence and Eternity—The Role of Kant, Gentile,
Plotinus, Berkeley, McTaggart and Dunne
Kant and Gentile1
Yeats’s first use of modern philosophy in the 1937 edition of A Vision occurs with the appropriation of Giovanni Gentile’s view that time is spatialization into the description of
the symbolism of the gyres. Originally, as in the first edition, Yeats begins his exposition of
the symbolism by discussing the relationship of time to space as a corollary of subjectivity
to objectivity:
A line is a movement without extension, and so symbolical of time—subjectivity—Berkeley’s stream of ideas—in Plotinus it is apparently “sensation”—
and a plane cutting it at right angles is symbolical of space or objectivity. Line
and plane are combined in a gyre which must expand or contract according to
whether mind grows in objectivity or subjectivity.
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
The identification of time with subjectivity is probably as old as philosophy;
all that we can touch or handle, and for the moment I mean no other objectivity, has shape or magnitude, whereas our thoughts and emotions have duration
and quality, a thought recurs or is habitual, a lecture or a musical composition
is measured upon the clock. At the same time pure time and pure space, pure
subjectivity and pure objectivity—the plane at the bottom of the cone and the
point at its apex—are abstractions or figments of the mind. (AVB 70–71)
Yeats illustrates time and subjectivity, space and objectivity, with the following images:
Figure 1
The single cone serves two purposes. Firstly, it provides some metaphorical justification
for the cone as an image of the growth and expansion of subjectivity and objectivity. Yeats
quickly replaces it with the opposed double gyre, however, whose logic inherently contradicts the seemingly commensurate growth of the two. Secondly, it links the dispositions
of the antithetical and the primary—which is what these two conditions become—with
the philosophical understanding of time and space.
While in the first edition Yeats had been happy to ascribe the origin of his symbol
(erroneously) to Berkeley’s apparent view that time and space are a priori forms in the
mind (CW13 104; AVA 129), his more recent reading of Kant and the Italian philosopher
Giovanni Gentile were now brought to bear. Kant had famously argued that the transcendental aesthetic (our consciousness of the manifold) was a result of the a priori forms of the
mind—the sense of “outness,” space and the internal sense of consecution, “time”—which
bestowed continuity to phenomena and allowed the Understanding (Verstandt) to make
cognitive judgments of experience.2 A more recent post-Hegelian philosopher, Giovanni
Gentile, argued that while Kant’s a priori forms were essential in organizing the manifold,
time was really the spatialization of space, since any point of time in the spirit’s immediate
experience multiplies spatially if prolonged, suggesting that apprehension of the manifold
is a result of the spirit’s continual becoming.3 In a footnote to the passage on the single
gyre, Yeats noted Gentile’s description of Kant’s time and space as the “internal” and the
“external,” since it appeared to relate them to the antithetical (subjective) and the primary
(objective). He was also clearly interested in Gentile’s own portrayal of their relation, since
it accorded with some of the ways in which time and space had been discussed in the
automatic script as “sequence” and “allusion” (YVP1 388; 17 March 1918). He declared
later that “Time spatialises” in both Husk and Creative Mind: a most unclear statement,
perhaps reflecting a desire to import Kantian terminology into his own epistemology. He
“Timeless and Spaceless”?
105
may mean by it that the Husk’s incarnation of images gives sensory form and thus continuity to phenomena which in fact exist spiritually and outside image or sequence, and
that the Creative Mind, the “knowledge of Universals,” helps to give a kind of categorical
form—or knowledge—to these phenomena through judgment (AVB 70n; 192).4
Plotinus and the PRINCIPLES
As was demonstrated in Graham Dampier’s essay, the movement of the Faculties over the
gyres in life is but one half of the movement of the Wheel of the Principles. The Principles
“inform” the Faculties and constitute their “innate ground” (AVB 188), but have a life
and movement of their own. To recapitulate: the Principles are Husk and Passionate Body
(“sense…and the objects of sense” [AVB 188]), and Spirit and Celestial Body (“mind and
its object” [AVB 189]). The Husk and Passionate Body reflect as Will and Mask in the
Faculties, while the Spirit and Celestial Body would seem, from Yeats’s triangle figure (AVB
194), to have an influence on Creative Mind and Body of Fate (are Spirit and Celestial Body
not also the “innate ground” of the Faculties?). However, this is never made explicit in the
second edition, unlike in the first (CW13 119; AVA 146).
When comprehending the ontological make-up of the Principles, Yeats drew upon
the Enneads of Plotinus, a classical philosopher whose hierarchy of being Yeats nevertheless used frequently when discussing ideas of time and ontology espoused by more
modern philosophers like Berkeley and McTaggart, thus making a discussion of his work
crucial in relation to theirs as well. Through his rigidly defined hypostases, Plotinus had
forged a full system from Plato’s earlier description of ideal forms, transmigration of souls
and realms of being and becoming. Plotinus introduced the two converse movements of
emanation and contemplation to explain how the One and the Many, the higher and the
lower in the different areas of Plato’s latent “system,” actually caused and communicated
with each other. In Plotinus’s universe there are four major hypostases, beginning with the
One, beyond Knowledge and Being, transcending and containing all. Its goodness overflows into the Intellectual Realm, or nous, which contains the potential separation into Act
and Being, subject and object, but which contemplates that above it. Here what knows is
identical to what is known, and thus is both coalescive and divisive, the initial break-up
of the One into a duad. Here reside the Authentic Existents: what Plato had called the
Ideal Forms. This realm in turn overflows into the Third Hypostasis, the All-Soul, psyche,
in which reside the nature-principles and reason-principles of our sensible universe, and
which also contemplates the nous which has directly caused it. Together with the Second
Hypostasis it emanates into the individual logoi of souls and the condition of discursive
reasoning, which is apparent to the intellect of man. Matter, hule, with which comes the
possibility for imperfection and Evil, is the Fourth Hypostasis.5
Yeats relates the Celestial Body to Plotinus’s “First Authentic Existant” and Spirit to
its “Second Authentic Existant.” The “discarnate Daimons, or Ghostly Selves,” he relates
to the “Third Authentic Existant,” which can then reflect as Passionate Body and then
Husk (AVB 194) to form, effectively, the objects and mechanism of a living man’s sensation (for a fuller account of how Yeats turned his discussion of man, incarnate Daimon
and discarnate Daimon into an idealist theory of perception, see the section on Berkeley
below). However, as Rosemary Ritvo points out, the Spirit and Celestial Body, “Mind and
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its Object,” are in fact Plotinus’s “Second Hypostasis,” or realm of nous (the realm of the
“ideal forms” or “authentic existents”—a term which Yeats confused with “hypostasis”),
but divided into its two mutually conditioning parts of “knowing” and “being.”6 Furthermore, one can see that this attribution collapses macrocosm into microcosm, as though
Spirit and Celestial Body, which are particular to the human soul, constitute the entire nous
of the universe, projecting an individual man’s reason over the complete realm of the discarnate Daimons and the reflected Passionate Body. This is a complete change from Yeats’s
tentative and unsure attribution of Plotinian terms to the Principles in the first edition of
A Vision, in which he suggests: “I am inclined to discover in the Celestial Body, the Spirit,
the Passionate Body, and the Husk, emanations from or reflections from his One, his Intellectual Principle, his Soul of the World, and his Nature respectively” (CW13 142–43; AVA
176). While this was itself an ambitious attempt to see Plotinus’s entire universe repeating
itself in miniature in the soul of man—even, and impossibly, the One itself—it did not
actually collapse all the hypostases solipsistically into the mind of the man, as appears to
be the case in the second edition. Yeats’s reasons for making the later error are partly to
do with his reading of Coleridge’s post-Kantian theories on mind in which “conscious
self-knowledge is reason” (AVB 187n), but also surely derive from Plotinus’s Ennead V.7,
in which it is argued that the Second Hypostasis contains not only the ideal forms or
reason-principles, but also the “archetypes” of individual souls, which leads Yeats to subsume a shared and universal hypostasis within the particularity of the individual soul (cf.
“Introduction to The Resurrection” (1934; Ex 396). Plotinus introduced these archetypes
to explain why all men are not simply the same characters (as they surely would be with
the more generic understanding of man’s pre-existence proposed by Plato).7
This effective collapsing of macrocosm into microcosm is accompanied by other inversions of Neo-Platonic logic. Yeats relates the so-called “Ghostly Selves” or “discarnate
Daimons”—those that have left the cycles of incarnation and constitute spiritual reality—to the “Third Authentic Existant” (Plotinus’s All-Soul), which reflects as Passionate
Body. However, he also sees these purified beings as encompassing the more supersensual
hypostases when seen from another perspective, mentioning elsewhere that these (discarnate) Daimons are “one in the Celestial Body” (AVB 189), or “Mind’s” “object.” Thus the
multitude of Ghostly Selves can be understood as constituting a macrocosm within the
microcosm of the individual soul, but also as effectively conflating the delicate hierarchy
of the Principles, the noetic and the sensory, onto competing axes within that microcosm.
Hence the Passionate Body which reflects the “discarnate Daimons” simply constitutes the
appearance of “certain Daimons” when contemplated sensually rather than supersensually,
when “subject to time and space” (AVB 189).8
The Passionate Body is not a lower, degraded condition of a traditional Neo-Platonic
hierarchy, but enjoys a symbiotic relationship with the spiritual. Hence in the discarnate
phases, from Aries to Virgo in the diamond-shaped cone of the Spirit and Celestial Body, the
Spirit seeks to become one with the Celestial Body, “pure mind, containing within itself pure
truth” (AVB 189), but in doing so must first contemplate the Passionate Body through states
like the Dreaming Back and the Return: an inversion of movement unthinkable in classic
Neo-Platonic terms, in which contemplation is always upwards. Finally, Yeats’s depiction of
the Thirteenth Cone also involves a far more plural conception of godhead than Plotinus’s,
since it is effectively constituted by the Ghostly Selves (AVB 189): Daimons that have come to
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the end of reincarnation and sensory experience but which are still “the source of that which
is unique in every man” (CW13 183; AVA 221): a congeries of realized, Neo-Platonic archetypes rather than a Neo-Platonic One beyond Knowledge or Being.9 The Thirteenth Cone
also involves an unusual understanding of eternal time which is at variance with the purely
Neo-Platonic notion of the eternal, which denies plurality or sensory experience.
Although both the Thirteenth Cone and the Principles are rooted in the automatic
script, two issues which Yeats resolved through reading philosophy were the relationship
of spiritual incarnation through the incarnate Daimon to general sensory perception, and
the preferred articulation of the Thirteenth Cone’s simultaneous unity and plurality, without either deprecating the sensory or denying the ontological priority of the spiritual. The
former he resolved by reference to Berkeley and medieval theologians, the latter also by
reference to the younger Berkeley and to contemporary philosophers of time.
Berkeley10
Berkeley was Yeats’s favorite philosopher. As his long correspondence with the poet and illustrator T. Sturge Moore shows, he was particularly interested in the arguments Berkeley
used to contradict Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities (TSMC
66–67).
Locke had argued that we do not see the primary qualities of shape, extension and
color, merely an object’s roundness, its particular extension and its greenness: or “secondary qualities.” However, greenness and roundness, while immediately seen, still depend on
the more abstract qualities of an object—shape and color—which we know an object to
have due to our understanding the generic nature of greenness and roundness to be color
and shape.11 Hence, while the secondary, or visible qualities are in the mind and have no
independent reality—and can easily change or differ from person to person, and thus be
contradictory—primary qualities, which cannot be immediately seen and cannot change,
are in the external world. Berkeley argued in his Principles and Three Dialogues that (a)
we do not see objects only as round or green but as having color and shape, and thus that
the primary qualities are as mental as the secondary,12 and (b) a sensory image, which is
experienced by the spirit, cannot be caused by something not homogeneous in substance,
since cause must resemble effect (WGB1 32, n19). Hence reality itself must be spiritual
like our minds. Our sensory percepts are the non-sensory percepts of God.
Yeats was enthralled by this, but was particularly delighted by Siris, Berkeley’s late
meditation on the virtues of tar-water, which “proved” that light was the animating substance of the world through allusion to ancient authority, and also argued that it gave
sensory form to spirits and hence the impression of materiality to sense.13 Through various
earlier occult sources, Yeats had understood light as constituting the substance of spiritual
incarnation, mentioning this in Per Amica Silentia Lunae (CW5 23 & 26; Myth 353 &
357) and “The Stirring of the Bones” (CW3 280; Au 372–73). He became particularly
interested in Balzac’s Louis Lambert, which argued that the agent of the will and the five
senses were simply transformations of light (CW5 124–25; E&I 440), which was itself
simply the pure, elemental form of fire, the most active element in the medieval universe.14
Yeats related this theory to Husk and Passionate Body, seeing the Passionate Body as
“identical with physical light”: not the modern-day visible spectrum, but “physical light,
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
as it was understood by medieval philosophers, by Berkeley in Siris, by Balzac in Louis
Lambert” (AVB 190). He also related the Husk and Passionate Body to the mechanism of
perception, explaining that: “Behind the Husk (or sense) is the Daimon’s hunger to make
apparent to itself certain Daimons, and the organs of sense are that hunger made visible.
The Passionate Body is the sum of those Daimons” (AVB 189). Owing to Berkeley’s theory,
Yeats argued continually with T. Sturge Moore that phantom experience, so understood,
was as real as material experience. The concept of “continuity of perception” (“Pages from
a Diary Written in 1930,” Ex 331), which G. E. Moore, his brother, had used to distinguish between the real and the imaginary (which is not continuous) in sensory experience,
Yeats understood as being simply a difference of “degree” not “kind” in the sensory incarnation of the spiritual (TSMC 94; 9 June 1926). This “continuity” he understood to exist
in the “Passionate Body of the permanent self or daimon” (Ex 331), which needs the Husk
(symbolically the human body, and the memory of the Daimon’s past lives) to find sensory
incarnation.15 Hence he explained the seeming stability and regularity of a material world
which is really every bit as spiritual as the fleeting phantoms of imagination.16
Yeats noted that the later Berkeley was a Platonist, who accepted a doctrine of “divine
ideas” that “behold and determine each other” (Ex 304–5). In this he was probably recalling an exchange in the Third Dialogue when Philonous sees all “things perceiving and
things perceived” as “perceived by some mind…the infinite mind of God, in whom ‘we
live, move and have our being’” (WGB1 185). Philonous defines a concept of deity similar
to the coalescive knowing and being inherent to the Authentic Existents that constitute
Plotinus’s Second Hypostasis (rather than the unmoving First), and which in A Vision become the Spirit and Celestial Body which seek to coalesce and become “pure mind” or “the
Divine Ideas in their unity” (AVB 190). However, Yeats’s Berkeleianism actually took him
into conflict with Plotinus, since such Neo-Platonic platitudes, as Yeats noted, may have
been Berkeley’s means of concealing the exciting polytheism mooted in his earlier Commonplace Book (Ex 304). This work also refuted Locke’s primary qualities and materialism,
but appeared to understand reality as a plurality of selves and—dangerously—refused to
accept the omniscience or unity of either a single or three-Personed God.17
Owing to Berkeley’s influence, Yeats understood the incarnation of non-incarnate
Daimons through the Husk and Passionate Body—the “innate ground” of the Faculties
Will and Mask—as constituting the mechanism of perception. This means that the soul’s
perception of material objects in life is as much the result of spiritual incarnation as it is of
remembered phenomena in the six so-called “discarnate” states:18 all sensory experiences
are a result of the incarnate Daimon’s desire to lead the man to the Passionate Body and
incarnate sensory experience through the agency of physical light. As we shall see, it was
the early, polytheistic Berkeley, who, in refuting the “abstractions” involved in monotheism, provided a most important influence on Yeats’s understanding of the supersensual
Daimons or “Ghostly Selves” which inhabit the Thirteenth Cone. This is despite the fact that
Yeats clearly interpreted Berkeley through the prism of McTaggart.
McTaggart and Dunne
In 1932, roughly a year after completing the final draft of A Vision, Yeats wrote a flattering review of George Russell’s highly theosophical Song and its Fountains. He noted with
“Timeless and Spaceless”?
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delight Russell’s distinction between the conscious and prenatal self, how creative inspiration was the distillation of some earlier childhood mood, and the different mystical states
which the creative mind encounters (CW5 115–16; E&I 416). These states are similar to
the various states of consciousness involved in yoga, and the last of these is similar to the
yogic state Turiya, or AUM,19 which distills “in its ecstasy of infinite vision” elements of all
preceding states, the waking conscious self, the dreaming self and dreamless sleep20—states
that Yeats had also very loosely related to the six discarnate phases, labeled Aries to Virgo,
of the diamond gyre, from his own knowledge of the states described in the Upanishads
(AVB 220). However, what appears to have impressed Yeats most of all in Russell’s book
was the seemingly atemporal aspect of Russell’s understanding of the Ancient Memory
and the ability of the adept—or artist—to find all moments of beauty in a simultaneous
moment: an intimation of the soul’s ultimate destiny beyond reincarnation.21 He quotes a
fragment from a Russell poem illustrating it:
I know when I come to my own immortal I will find there
In a myriad instant all that the wandering soul found fair,
Empires that never crumbled and thrones all glorious yet
And hearts ere they were broken and eyes ere they were wet.
Plotinus had not this thought; the Cambridge Platonists, the more exhaustive
ethical logic of Christianity spurring them on, might have discovered it had not
the soul’s re-birth, though it fascinated Glanvil, been a dangerous theme. Now,
however, that McTaggart has made that doctrine the foundation of the first English systematic philosophy, one can invite attention to what may bring all past
ages into the circle of conscience. (CW5 116–17; E&I 417)
The link between Russell’s theosophically taught conception of reaching the highest state
described in the Upanishads after reincarnation and McTaggart’s systematic philosophy,
which “can invite attention to” this (CW5 117; E&I 417), means that George Russell’s
ideas have relevance beyond the world of occult speculation, and in the world of philosophy in which Yeats had recently been immersing himself.
One source to which Yeats turned in attempting to find a more scientific definition
of extra-temporality, mentioned briefly in his review (CW5 115; E&I 414), was J. W.
Dunne’s An Experiment with Time, first published in 1927. Dunne argued that the mind
“moves” through time, since time is the fourth dimension, and as such is simply another
form of the extension of space. Man, however, is forced to observe the three-dimensional
world and so has this four-dimensional movement represent itself through past, present
and future.22 Thus there exist two observers in the mind, and two different times, the
first observer being the moving consciousness attending to three-dimensional space, and
the second one, who surrounds the first from the position of matter’s fourth dimension
properly perceived, absolute time, in which all events are simultaneous. This observer reveals itself in dreams when concentration on the three-dimensional world ceases, and the
observer floats freely between past, present and future, taking its “act of attention” out of
sequential time. The first observer is merely the central focus of the second, to whom the
four-dimensional universe is a timeless reality of the co-present.23
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
In his 1931 introduction to “Bishop Berkeley” (an essay which he had begun writing
late in 1930), while attempting to define Berkeley’s concept of deity as more concrete than
the abstractions of Plotinus, Yeats praises the “prophetic afflatus” in Dunne’s book. He
nevertheless still registers in a footnote his realization of the central problem in Dunne’s
argument: “No heaping up of dimensions, what is successive in a lower dimension simultaneous in a higher, can bring him to the Pure Act or Eternal Instant, source of simultaneity and succession alike” (CW5 352 n25; E&I 402n). Yeats appears to have understood
that Dunne’s “act of attention” is not outside time, and simply has its own new-found
serialism: the dreamer, even if he alters the normal pattern and consecution of events, is
still attending to separate temporal experiences along the substratum in a new sequential
order. The “Pure Act” that Yeats wishes to discover in modern philosophy clearly must
comprehend all individual acts, but must also place all these in absolute simultaneity while
constituting the source for their sequential order, which Dunne’s observer cannot do.
After attacking Dunne in a footnote to “Bishop Berkeley,” Yeats refers the reader
instead to McTaggart, whose system is “consistent with itself and with philosophical tradition” (CW5 352 n25; E&I 402n), but whose name is oddly absent from A Vision (1937).
The reason for this is that Yeats incorporated his ideas into those of the young Berkeley,
and in doing so provided a full, idealist and yet idiosyncratic philosophy in support of his
occult definitions concerning the absolute.
McTaggart attacked the prevailing view, proposed by Bertrand Russell, that the distinction between “earlier” and “later” events constituted the reality of time and that the
distinction between past, present and future was not to do with time, since it only inhered
in the perception of a perceiving subject.24 For McTaggart if time was real, the past, present, future series was as much a part of time as the “earlier than” “later than” series. In any
case, both were unreal.
For McTaggart the contents of any position in time constituted an event, and the
varied, simultaneous contents of a single position were a plurality of events (e.g., Napoleon fighting Wellington as Blücher arrives from Ligny). However, events are in substance
and thus form a connected group, which group must be a compound. Thus any group
of events taking place simultaneously must be one compound event in substance (NE2
10). Thus change in this compound at any one point is change everywhere, and effectively
constitutes the movement of time in space: “The fall of a sand-castle on the English coast
changes the nature of the Great Pyramid” (NE2 11–12). Change, therefore, is the central
element of time, and must be involved in both the “earlier than” “later than” series and the
“past, present, future” series for them to be real series in time.
The “earlier than” “later than” series does not involve change. If one event (M) is
earlier than another event (N), this relation is fixed and unchanging. M does not cease to
be an event (or become unreal) in this series once N comes into being. There is no change
in the series and so this series is not a part of time (NE2 12–13).
The “past, present, future” series does involve change, and so must be a part of time
(NE2 15). However, it cannot be called a series at all. For the series to be true, there must
be consistent relations between the various positions and some term x outside the series (he
provides no example), which does not take part in the “past, present, future” series, and to
which all the terms that are defined as past, present, or future keep a constant relation (NE2
20). No such term can be found, and so the necessary definitions of any event in the A series
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111
as either past, present or future is not constant since the event will partake of more than one
of these definitions in the course of time. Thus they are “incompatible definitions” since
“Every event must be one or the other, but no event can be more than one” (NE2 20) for the
definition of them to be true. In the A series any event is past, present and future at different
times, meaning that the terms of the A series all contain contradictions, and thus cannot be
logically true (NE2 20–21). Put more simply, an event in a series cannot enjoy more than
one definition as either past, present or future if the series is logically true, for if they are
defined as having contradictory qualities the series is not itself true (NE2 22).25
While McTaggart’s “earlier than” “later than” series cannot be part of time because it
does not involve change, he argues that the past, present, future series, which does involve
change, is still experientially a part of time, but not a demonstrably true series in itself.
Rather, it is a series whose objectivity exists in some other way, which he seeks to define
by reference to Hegel, who “regarded the order of the time-series as a reflection, though
a distorted reflection, of something in the real nature of the timeless reality” (NE2 31),
which McTaggart calls the C series.
In McTaggart’s philosophy, therefore, time is unreal, merely the distortion of another
order. He argues further that matter does not really exist, since if matter’s qualities existed
they could be “divided into parts of parts to infinity” (NE2 43–44), as must the C series
or “timeless reality,” which is congruent with substance and necessarily infinite.26 Sensory
perceptions (sensa) are also every bit as unreal as matter (NE2 59). Substance, which does
not include matter, is in fact spiritual, consisting of a community of selves, which all share
the same infinite, self-causing substance, but are nevertheless separable since they cannot
share the same content and parts (such as an “awareness” or “state” [NE2 68]). Spiritual
substance may be universal in essence, as it is in Spinoza’s definition, but the entities which
are formed from it in McTaggart’s understanding are unique. While the substance we see
in events is merely changing “compounds” of an ontologically ideal order, and the selves
which make up that substance (spirit) are the primary parts of the Universe, they do not
all immolate into an “absolute self ” like the Brahman of the Upanishads, and maintain a
particularity of consciousness.27 He further argues that God as a personal, supreme and
good being cannot exist (NE2 84).
In Yeats’s prose McTaggart is variously admired for his adherence to Idealist ontology, for seeing judgment and perception as the same (which in Yeats’s view aligns him
closer to Berkeley [CW5 354 n35; E&I 406n]), and for affirming the rebirth of the soul,
which aligns him closer to Hinduism and Yeats’s own twelve reincarnatory cycles (Ex
396).28 However, where McTaggart made his most important impression on Yeats was in
his depiction of the Absolute beyond time—the C series: or rather, that is, from Yeats’s
understanding of how he describes it.
Discarnate Life
If we return to the passage he wrote in his 1932 article on George Russell’s Song and its
Fountains, we may recall that Yeats praised McTaggart for giving philosophical expression
to the ideas related in George Russell’s poem, in which the narrator contemplates reaching
the resurrection of “what was ‘lovely and beloved’” (CW5 116; E&I 417). Yeats believes
that the soul’s rebirth is an essential component of this idea, since the reincarnated soul
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
restores all its glorious past moments, including the ancient wisdom of other souls, into
“the circle of conscience” (CW5 117; E&I 417). This idea does not translate entirely to A
Vision B, since there the memory of the individual past life alone is what is recalled in the
first three discarnate states. However, in Yeats’s own system this resurrection of all glorious past moments actually corresponds to the soul’s ultimate deliverance, and completed
discarnate life as an all-knowing Ghostly Self.
In the 1930 diary, when defining his Principles through Neo-Platonism, Yeats described
ultimate reality as the realm where “all thought, all movement, all perception are extinguished” (Ex 307), much like Plotinus’s One which is beyond Knowledge and Being, and
in A Vision B he also describes the Thirteenth Cone as the region which “may deliver us from
the twelve cycles of time and space” (AVB 210) as though from movement. However, as
soon as he has declared this, Yeats quotes an esoteric source to elaborate on the complexity of the Thirteenth Cone: “‘Eternity also,’ says Hermes in the Aeslepius dialogue, ‘though
motionless itself, appears to be in motion’” (AVB 211). The Thirteenth Cone intersects the
gyres of the Spirit and Celestial Body, explaining why its Teaching Spirits are able to guide the
Spirit toward the Celestial Body in the discarnate phases (AVB 229). Furthermore, the scenes
of the Dreaming Back involving the Passionate Body incarnate as ghostly phenomena, and
are “repeated until, at last forgotten by the Spirit, they fade into the Thirteenth Cone” (AVB
227), which implies that these repetitive cycles do not actually vanish entirely (being simply
“forgotten”), but still enjoy some form of continued existence.
Nor are the Teaching Spirits—“Spirits of the Thirteenth Cone” who “conduct the Spirit
through its past acts” (AVB 229)—indistinguishable and amorphous. As Yeats describes
them, he cautions:
We must, however, avoid attributing to them the pure benevolence our exhausted Platonism and Christianity attribute to an angelical being. Our actions, lived
in life, or remembered in death, are the food and drink of the Spirits of the Thirteenth Cone, that which gives them separation and solidity. (AVB 230)
These Spirits are never too clearly defined, and can even use “representatives from any
state.” Nevertheless, they can probably be identified with the Principle the Spirit of any
discarnate self, since we are quickly told that they are “those who substitute for Husk and
Passionate Body supersensual emotion and imagery; the ‘unconscious’ or unapparent for
that which has disappeared, the Spirit itself being capable of knowledge only” (AVB 229).
Thus they are probably to be identified with the Spirits of Daimons, or “permanent selves,”
that have found resting-place in the Thirteenth Cone (Ghostly Selves).29 Especially noteworthy here in relation to the concept of the Thirteenth Cone being a congeries rather than a
unity, is that the purified Spirits of the Thirteenth Cone’s Daimons possess a “supersensual”
equivalent of the Husk and Passionate Body’s most obvious sensual qualities, emotion and
imagery. Moreover, they appear to need the constant antinomial contact with the incarnate and sensory—incarnate Daimons and their Principles—leading the dead man’s Spirit
through the imagined, now sensually incarnated acts of his “discarnate” experience (in
this case meaning not simply the post-mortal, but the unapparent/supersensual) in the
Phantasmagoria. This means that the Phantasmagoria performed by the Teaching Spirits on
the Spirit only occurs because the Teaching Spirits themselves desire the opposite: a mu-
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tual exchange of sensual for supersensual rather than the disinterested moral guidance of
“Tutelary Spirits” described by Plotinus in Ennead III.4.30 Thus not only is the Thirteenth
Cone dependent upon the “many” for its unity, but the supersensual and eternal features
of its Daimons are dependent upon the sensual experience of those souls not yet delivered
from time and space, in a continual, symbiotic relationship.
While the Thirteenth Cone in its true form as the phaseless sphere can be “sufficient
to itself,” Yeats envisages it as enjoying an antinomial relation with a person’s combined
mortal life and life between lives, when describing the latter as a single cone but “without
waiting to portion out the Faculties and Principles, and the contrasting cone as the other
half of the antinomy, the ‘spiritual objective’ ” (AVB 210). He continues: “The cone which
intersects ours is a cone in so far as we think of it as the antithesis to our thesis, but if
the time has come for our deliverance it is the phaseless sphere” (AVB 210). In both cases
the Thirteenth Cone is ultimately comprised entirely of the Ghostly Selves, which can also
inhere in different aspects of the incarnate soul’s entire cycle.
However, quite apart from the sensual incarnations of the supersensual induced by
the Thirteenth Cone’s opposition to the cones of experience, Yeats appears to understand
its events as a perpetual repetition even when “sufficient to itself ”: the events of life are not
extinguished once we are “delivered from the twelve cycles of time and space” (AVB 210);
rather, “All things” exist “as an eternal instant,” which can be comprehended by the “Daimon
(or Ghostly Self as it is called, when it inhabits the Sphere)” (AVB 193), which plurality is
reflected by the fact that when the Thirteenth Cone is seen by the living as the Record, or the
“Passionate Body lifted out of time,” “the images of all past events remain for ever ‘thinking
the thought and doing the deed’” (AVB 193). This is a physical representation of the “source
of succession and simultaneity alike” and eternity of “autonomous beings” which Yeats describes in his 1930 diary in relation to Berkeley (Ex 311), and presumably an eternity whose
contemplation requires the necessary serialism involved in Dunne’s failed “act of attention”:
the moveless sphere must be a moving cone as soon as we attempt to observe it in its entirety.
Yeats’s concept of ultimate reality is far different from Plotinus’s: a unified, eternal being, which is also a becoming, comprehending the particular events experienced by autonomous souls in a perpetual simultaneity; a being whose immaterial nature does not negate
equal stature to the sensory perceived through the incarnation of light, since the incarnate
Daimon’s Husk and Passionate Body are necessary to the Spirits of certain discarnate Daimons
(Teaching Spirits) who seek “separation and solidity” (AVB 229). This latter idea is certainly
not permitted by McTaggart, who gave no ontological status to the sensory, any more than
to the material, although he did see the experiencing of it as unique to each self (NE2 61).31
Yeats now takes McTaggart’s theories and combines them with those of the younger Berkeley in A Vision. The ontological pluralism here corresponds to the potential heresy of Berkeley’s
Commonplace Book—as he understood it—in which divinity is simply a collection of active
spirits rather than a single, unified God, and not the Neo-Platonic abstraction and totality to
which Berkeley later—as Yeats noted—subjected his notion of deity (CW5 110; E&I 407; Ex
301). In his introduction to Hone and Rossi’s biography (1931), Yeats reprised a passage from
his 1930 diary where he had juxtaposed the earlier Berkeley with the later, Platonist Berkeley:
Berkeley wrote in his Commonplace Book: “The Spirit—the active thing—that
which is soul, and God—is the will alone”; and then, remembering the mask that
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114
he must never lay aside, added: “The concrete of the will and understanding I must
call mind, not person, lest offence be given, there being but one volition acknowledged to be God. Mem. carefully to omit defining Person, or making much mention of it.” Then remembering that some member of his secret society had asked
if our separate personalities were united in a single will, a question considered by
Plotinus in the Fourth Ennead but dangerous in the eighteenth century, he wrote,
“What you ask is merely about a word, unite is no more.” (CW5 110; E&I 407).
The fear of defining “person” and dismissal of the word “unite” in the section of entries
from which Yeats draws,32 suggest that Berkeley understood deity to be a “congeries of
autonomous beings” (Ex 311) or plurality of spirits. Yeats also takes such plurality to have
meant that Berkeley could see heaven as “an improvement of sense,” or concretization of
the spiritual (CW5 111; E&I 410), combined with the belief that light incarnates spirits.33
In a footnote to “The Completed Symbol,” when discussing the role of light in Berkeley’s
thought as the agent of sensation, he refers once more to the theme of personality, and
elaborates: “In the Commonplace Book he warned himself to avoid the theologically dangerous theme of personality. Did he in his private thoughts come to regard Light as the
creative act of a universal self dwelling in all selves?” (AVB 191n).
In this passage Yeats has remarked well that Berkeley’s “private thoughts” suggest a
position slightly different to those of the formulaic Platonist who eventually put platitudes
concerning the oneness of God and creation in Philonous’s mouth in his Third Dialogue
(and only there). Yeats’s explication of Berkeley—both here and in his introductory essay
to Berkeley’s biography—is nevertheless in tune with the ideas of McTaggart who, unlike
Berkeley, actually used the term “selves” to represent reality, and who redefined its temporal nature as a form of “simultaneity” which contains the basis of “succession”: a C series.
The universal self that dwells in all selves, like the “congeries of beings” and “single being”
(Ex 305) that constitutes Yeats’s own Thirteenth Cone, is a “unity” like McTaggart’s, where
the individual “selves” which make up substance maintain their unique and particular
parts, and do not coalesce (NE2 83). Indeed McTaggart’s self bears similarities to Yeats’s
Ghostly Self as described elsewhere, the “permanent self ” and “source of that which is
unique in every man” (CW13 183; AVA 221).34 Thanks to the work of McTaggart and the
young Berkeley, Yeats could articulate the temporal and ontological oppositions contained
in his understanding of the Thirteenth Cone through the terms of more established traditions of philosophy, and was also able to establish “a reality which is concrete, sensuous,
bodily” (AVB 214): as involving, not negating, the sensory and particular.
In conclusion, we see that Yeats understands human consciousness as a commensurate growth of space and time while paradoxically presenting space and time as contrary
dispositions like the primary and antithetical. He uses the Neo-Platonic hierarchy of the
Enneads to arrange the various levels of his system, but in doing so manages to compress
the macrocosm of the nous, or universal reason, into the mind of man, and variably sees all
reality as part of the individual soul. He uses Berkeley’s ideas to develop an unusual theory
of sensory experience, which presents all experience as consisting in spiritual incarnation.
Due to his reading of McTaggart he understands the time of the ultimate reality or phaseless sphere as “simultaneity and succession” alike (CW5 352 n25; E&I 402n), a realm
where events remain “‘thinking the thought and doing the deed’” (AVB 193): a realm of
“Timeless and Spaceless”?
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individual Daimons all communing with each other, both a unity and a “congeries.” Here
we are delivered from the time and space, or sequence and allusion of the cycles—but not
from the simultaneity and succession which these two incarnate.
II. East and West: Time and Space in Yeats’s Philosophy of History
Discussing the movement of history through a Great Year of 26,000 years—his wheel at
its most macrocosmic—Yeats asks: “Is that marriage of Europe and Asia a geographical
reality? Perhaps, yet the symbolic wheel is timeless and spaceless” (AVB 205). This suggestion in “The Completed Symbol” is interesting not only in that it shows the importance of
seeing the gyres as alternating in Eastern and Western influence—a feature far less defined
in the first edition—but that it would seem to reject the importance of time and space to
the alternations. However, effectively what Yeats is asking is whether the definitions of East
and West which he has just been attributing to the gyres in the previous section, and whose
influence he certainly sees as alternating, should be related to historical Europe and Asia, or
seen as pure primary/antithetical symbolism and not rigidly rooted in specific, geographic
determinations. Yeats elsewhere reneges upon his commitment to see them purely symbolically and appears—at least in discussing the 4,000 or so years of recent history—to give
these polarities a local habitation and a name. With this, however, they continue the struggle between a spatial disposition of the mind and a temporal one in the seesaw movement
between primary and antithetical cultures. Yeats’s reading of Petrie, Schneider, Strzygowski
and ultimately Spengler, allowed him to understand the motivation and the stages behind
the rise and fall of antithetical civilizations, but also gave him the chance to re-characterize
the “Time-mind” of Wyndham Lewis—present in Futurist art and Modernist literature—
as being a form of spatialization and to comment on and explain the art of his own day.
The Geometry of the Great Year and East and West
The following constitutes a brief explanation of the Great Year in A Vision, the changing
relations between East and West in the year’s religious eras (its solar months), and the
further inherence of these eastern/western polarities within the gyres of civilization and
art history (its lunar months). Yeats’s treatment involves complexities in which solar and
lunar wheels are sometimes measured according to different scales and also run in contrary
directions around the wheel. Some of the nuances will, however, be put to one side for the
present, and in the following exposition there will be a discussion of (a) the geometry of
the wheel relating to the Great Year, and (b) an explanation of the uses to which Yeats puts
“solar” and “lunar” gyres when explaining the alternate “begettings” of West on East and
East on West in the “solar” wheel/gyres of religious era against the criss-crossing “lunar”
gyres of the contemporary civilization.
The application of phases to history takes place over what constitutes the most macroscopic use of the wheel, which is the Great Year, or movement of the Faculties considered
as twelve 2,150-year cycles or smaller wheels (AVB 202–3). In “The Completed Symbol”
Yeats describes how the twenty-eight phases of the moon can be reduced to both twelve
calendar months and the signs of the zodiac on the wheel, with Phases 1, 8, 15 and 22
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
each being apportioned a calendar month or sign apiece, and the others being grouped in
threes (AVB 196–98). Hence Phase 15 corresponds to the zodiacal sign Aries (East) in a
primary, solar cycle and March in an antithetical, lunar one: Phase 1 corresponds to Libra
(West) in a solar cycle and September in a lunar. Phases 12, 13 and 14 correspond to the
single zodiacal sign Pisces. While this classification can of course be applied to any version of the 28-phase wheel, Yeats uses it in particular when discussing the Great Year. In
this he sees the movement of Will as corresponding to the movement of the twelve cycles
of civilization (lunar/calendar months), and the movement of Creative Mind to those
of the twelve cycles of religious era (solar/zodiacal signs). Creative Mind always moves
clockwise through the solar signs while Will always moves counter-clockwise through the
lunar months.35 This sometimes causes confusion, as Yeats twice discusses the movement
of Will (the gyre of civilization) when discussing the intended movement of the Creative
Mind through its phases, those of the religious era (e.g., AVB 207; AVB 254): not a contradiction at all for Yeats, since when Will moves, Creative Mind is for him automatically
perceived as moving in its own, clockwise direction, and thus is implicit to the description
of Will’s movement.36
Figure 2
The movement of Creative Mind backwards through the zodiac owes much to both the automatic script and to Yeats’s later reading of writers like Franz Cumont and Pierre Duhem,
who were interested in classical and medieval cosmology and discussions of temporal
movement, and who helped Yeats to interpret the instructors. That said, Yeats would have
known of this retrograde movement through the zodiac, which is associated with the precession of the equinoxes, from his reading of Madame Blavatsky and other Theosophical
sources many years earlier, although he makes no mention of these in either published
edition of A Vision.37
“Timeless and Spaceless”?
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In the automatic script (summer 1918), there are constant exchanges with the controls
concerning the ways in which both the Faculties and the attributed zodiacal signs correspond
to historical cycles, with George Yeats, as medium, drawing up one-thousand-year periods,
two-thousand-year periods (YVP1 467), and a four-thousand-year period when she places
Buddha at “cycle” 12 (Phase 15) and the “new” Christ at “cycles” 6 and 7 (Phases 1–28 [?])
(YVP1 460–1; 26 May 1918).38 Thus throughout these exchanges the 28 phases, and the 12
zodiacal signs, are used to describe variously (in a rounded, classificatory form) one-thousand, two-thousand and four-thousand-year cycles of history, although Yeats infuriatingly
never settles on a fixed count of years for any of these cycles, and the more accurate measurement for the two-thousand-year cycle is probably 2,150 years.39 In the Vision Notebooks the
use of the zodiacal signs reaches its largest articulation when Yeats mentions the “Great Year”
as a means of organizing this most macroscopic form of the wheel into twelve two-thousandyear “months” of history (YVP3 187; 23 Nov [?]1923), inspired by his reading of Masson’s
introduction to Milton’s poetry (YVP3 297).40
Originally a pre-Socratic idea, the Great Year was reportedly computed by Heraclitus, Empedocles and others as a complete movement of the known planets starting from alignment under Cancer, moving through Capricorn and back to alignment
under Cancer, and measured against the fixed stars, or what Plato called the “Circuit
of the Same” (SM1 276). However, in the second century BCE Hipparchus provided
the potential for a different form of measurement, by showing that the “Circuit of the
Same” (the fixed stars beyond the planets) was in fact shifting slightly each hundred
years, and that during the sidereal year—the year measured by the real positions of the
zodiac—the sun was positioned in a different zodiacal sign at the vernal equinox every
2000 years or so (SM2 185): a backwards movement from Taurus to Aries to Pisces etc.,
rather than the forward movement performed by the sun through the year itself. Thus
the Great Year could be measured by the slow shift in position of the vernal equinox;
this is the measurement adopted by Yeats. As Yeats notes, after the discovery of this
“precession of the equinoxes,” the Great Year of the Christian commentators Syncellus
and Nemesius begins at Aries—East—Spring. This is in keeping with the idea of the
world being renewed at this point by a “World-restorer” (AVB 249; cf. SM2 164–66),
when Caesar died and Christ was born at Aries 0°, just before the spring equinox began
to occur in Pisces (AVB 243 & 254). In Yeats’s own wheel this movement corresponds
to the Creative Mind’s movement from Phase 15 (Aries) to 14, 13 and 12 (Pisces) as it
moves through the solar months of religious era (see Figure 2).
Yeats also understands the individual “months” of the Great Year (i.e., each 2,150year cycle) as constituting complete wheels of 28 phases, and as being similarly divisible
into signs and months, with Libra at Phase 1 and Aries at Phase 15 if they are “solar”
months of religious era, and with September at Phase 1 and March at Phase 15 if “lunar”
months of civilization. Hence the above figure can just as easily be used to describe 2,150year eras as it can the 26,000 years of the Great Year, and in this shorter wheel each month
constitutes around 150 to 200 years.
When formulating the relation between the twelve lunar and solar months of the
Great Year, Yeats describes them as beginning in opposition to each other. Each lunar
month of civilization begins when Will is at Phase 1 of a 2,150-year set of gyres, each solar
month of religion at Phase 15. Hence in a 2,150-year era this means that the new gyre of
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
118
civilization will begin at the mid-point of the religious gyre, a fact demonstrated by the
syncopated relation between calendar months and zodiacal signs in Figure 2: hence the
lunar, classical era of civilization began around 1000 BCE with Oedipus solving the riddle
of the Sphinx, a myth Yeats borrowed from Hegel’s Philosophy of History. At its midpoint
(1 CE) there was the beginning of a new solar, religious era, which occurred at Phase 15
of the gyres (Christ’s birth). At Phase 1, or the religious era’s midpoint (around 1000 CE),
came the beginning of a new month of civilization (AVB 204). Thus the midpoint of the
lunar gyre is the beginning of a new solar gyre.
On the solar gyre of religion Yeats also sees this point of change as involving an inversion in the influence of East and West, but one which has an effect on the lunar gyre
as well. Yeats relates the zodiacal Aries (Phase 15) to “symbolical East” and Libra (1) to
“symbolical West” (AVB 211–12), and uses this distinction to convey the idea that every
2,000 years or so there is a reversal of symbolical East (antithetical) and symbolical West
(primary) influence, with the constant interchange between the two being represented
as alternating “begettings,” which produce the new illumination or avatar to an age.
Yeats also discusses this interchange as facilitating a change between European and Asiatic influence, although he does not make the relationship between Aries-East (15) and
Asia a necessary one at all. Being actual geographical locations rather than symbolical
points, the relations between Asia and Europe—and their contributions to each other—
can themselves change on account of the movement of the gyres, and are by turns antithetical and primary (AVB 203). For example, Yeats writes that he disagrees with Hegel’s
definition of Asia as Nature in the riddle of the sphinx, which corresponds to his own
beginning of the two-thousand-year, lunar month of civilization (1000 BCE), and sees
it as only becoming nature—which in this case is primary—at Phase 1, when a primary
West impregnates East. Not only that, but Yeats’s propensity for drawing up larger and
smaller cycles means that he also sees Asiatic and European influence as interchanging
every one thousand years, as in “Dove or Swan” (where “Asiatic” barbarity, beginning
around 1000 BCE, gives way to a Western impregnation around 1 CE [AVB 269]).
Thus Europe and Asia cannot be seen as fixed polarities or as consistently antithetical
and primary like East or West, but as enjoying multiple and contradictory relations due
to a multitude of intersections in their “marriage.” Despite this, Yeats does eventually,
and rather uneasily, attempt to relate geographical locations to the cardinal points on
the wheel in the main interchange between East and West—that is, the beginning of
the 2,150-year religious era—when discussing art history in “The Great Year of the
Ancients.”
Yeats initially depicts the alternation of East and West as follows:
A wheel of the Great Year must be thought of as the marriage of symbolic Europe
and symbolic Asia, the one begetting upon the other. When it commenced at
its symbolic full moon in March—Christ or Christendom was begotten by the
West upon the East. This begetting has been followed by a spiritual predominance of Asia. After it must come an age begotten by the East upon the West that
will take after its Mother in turn (AVB 203).
“Timeless and Spaceless”?
119
Yeats was aware that a solar cycle of 2,000 years inevitably follows a path back to the same
phase or position of lunar-Aries-East (Phase 15), and thus fails to illustrate sufficiently
the alternation in the impregnations of East/West, antithetical/primary. Thus he resorts to
a 4,000-year gyre/wheel on several occasions. In the following passage he is describing a
lunar (civilization) gyre of 4,000 years, from 1000 BCE until a date after 3000 CE, which,
as we shall see, still incorporates the solar, primary gyres of religion:
When, however, one wants to show, as the automatic script generally does, that
each civilisation and religious dispensation is the opposite of its predecessor, a
single revolution constitutes two solar or lunar months. For instance, classical civilisation—1000 B.C. to A.D. 1000 let us say—is represented by the movement
of Will from Phase 1, the place of birth, to Phase 15, the place of death, and our
own civilisation is now almost midway in the movement of the Will from Phase
15 to Phase 1. (AVB 204)
The 2,000-odd years that were taken as a single, complete cycle of civilization (starting
and ending at the lunar point of Phase 1), are now viewed as being simply half of a larger
cycle of 4,000-odd years. The 2,000-year cycle moves within this larger, double gyre from
a designated Phase 1 (1000 BCE) to its completion at Phase 15 (around 1000 CE), 28
phases collapsing to 15. After that there is a movement from Phases 15 to 1, from around
1000 CE (1050 CE in “Dove or Swan”; AVB 266) to a date after 3000 CE, with Yeats’s
own day as the midpoint, nearing the year 2000, marked by the middle of Phase 17 on
Figure 2. This larger, four-thousand-year wheel is effectively the amalgamation of the two
months March (classical civilization 1000 BCE–1000 CE) and April (Christian civilization 1000 CE–3000 CE) on Figure 2 into a single wheel.
Immediately, however, Yeats forgets this four-thousand-year, lunar wheel, and goes on
to describe this large cycle of civilization as being simply those two separate, lunar months
of two thousand years, but as incorporating the alternations of East/West illumination
from a four-thousand-year, religious, solar wheel, which occur at their own midpoints.
He also charts the positions of the lunar months and solar alternations on the much larger
wheel of 26,000 years. Thus he is effectively alluding to three different scales of measurement (2,000 years, 4,000 years and 26,000 years) in two sentences, when he writes:
At or near the central point of a lunar month of classical civilisation—the first
degree of Aries on the Great Wheel—came the Christian primary dispensation,
the child born in the Cavern. At or near the central point of a lunar month
of our civilisation must come antithetical revelation, the turbulent child of the
Altar. (AVB 204)
The midpoints of these two lunar months/cycles of civilization, coming at 1 CE and 2000
CE, correspond to the beginnings of new solar, religious months/cycles. The first of these
midpoints, when Will is in the center of March (1000 BCE to 1000 CE) on the wheel of
the Great Year of 26,000 years, coincides with the degree zero of (the solar month) Aries
in the twelve zodiacal months of religious era, where symbolically Christ was born around
0 CE, and when Creative Mind (and the vernal equinox) was moving across Pisces 30°
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
(identical with 0° Aries) on the same wheel of the Great Year (see Figure 2). Most importantly, Yeats clearly sees the next antithetical revelation, when Creative Mind will be at Pisces 0°, and Will in mid-April, as being a complete opposition to the present primary one.
This complete change-over in influence means that both the solar, religious months
of Aries and Pisces are also understood as constituting one four-thousand-year wheel from
2000 BCE to 2000 CE, with the movement from 1 CE to 2000 CE being like a movement of Creative Mind from its designated Phase 15 (East) to a Phase 1 (West), where an
illumination wholly the opposite of that at 1 CE will occur. Yeats’s terms “child born in
the Cavern” and “child of the Altar,” also show that he sees this point as a major reversal
of eastern and western influence in a solar/religious month/cycle, since, as he explains in a
footnote, he has in mind the “Cavern” and “Altar” discovered by Leo Frobenius. The first
is “symbol of the nations moving westward” (but originating in the East) and the other
“symbol of the nations moving eastward” (but originating in the West). The parallels between these lunar and solar wheels of varied length can best be depicted by the following
line drawing.
MARCH
LUNAR MONTHS
OF CIVILIZATION
(MOVEMENT OF WILL)
1
8
15
APRIL
22
1000 BCE
SOLAR MONTHS
OF RELIGIOUS ERA
(MOVEMENT OF
CREATIVE MIND)
4000 YEAR WHEEL/GYRES
OF RELIGIOUS ERA,
SHOWING ALTERNATING
INFLUENCES OF EAST
AND WEST (MOVEMENT OF
CREATIVE MIND)
Figure 3
ARIES
W
1
8
15
1000 CE
22
1
3000 CE
PISCES
N
E
S
W
N
E
S
W
15
8
2000 BCE
1
22
15
0 CE
8
1
22
15
2000 CE
W
N
E
S
W
1
2000 BCE
22
15
0 CE
8
1
2000 CE
CHILD OF THE CAVERN
(WEST BEGETTING
ON EAST FOR PRIMARY
ILLUMINATION)
CHILD OF THE ALTAR
(EAST BEGETTING
ON THE WEST
FOR ANTITHETICAL
ILLUMINATION)
Yeats later writes, when discussing eastern/antithetical and western/primary illuminations
in history, of “a child born at Phase 15, or East” on a solar, religious wheel, “as acquiring a
primary character from its father who is at Phase 1, or West, and of a child born at Phase 1, or
West, as acquiring an antithetical character from its father at Phase 15, or East, and so on, man
and woman being alternately Western and Eastern” (AVB 211). What this effectively means
is that Creative Mind around Phase 15, East, is a western illumination, and at Phase 1, West,
an eastern illumination, on what must again be seen as a four-thousand- year double cone if
applied to the illuminations of history. Yeats’s use of astrological conjunctions around Phase
15 to explain these different illuminations and reversal of impregnator/impregnated is most
perplexing (AVB 207), and despite Colin McDowell’s brilliant attempt to solve the issue, still
“Timeless and Spaceless”?
121
remains unsolved and probably insoluble due to Yeats’s own confusion.41 Nevertheless, the
belief that the eastern illumination on a four-thousand-year wheel occurs around the western
pole, Phase 1, but is governed from the opposing pole to which it now returns, Phase 15
(AVB 207), has parallels with Frobenius’s ideas, and was also probably stressed in A Vision B
because Yeats realized its wider philosophical import to the struggle between antithetical time
and primary space, since he later relates Frobenius’s two symbols to space and time. As we shall
see, in doing so he was to reverse completely the way the symbols are initially described here.
Figure 4
We can thus see the Aries-East of two smaller, two-thousand-year, solar wheels as
being alternately East and West on a four-thousand-year solar wheel, so that East and
West impregnate each other by turns every 2,000 years or so, primary and antithetical
influences swapping round. This is important not least because even when Yeats discusses
the lunar gyres of civilization, the most important alternation between East and West is
usually understood as an intersection from the solar month/wheel, and as being governed
by religious history. This is partly because the polarities East and West are placed at Phase
22 and Phase 8 on lunar wheels, and not at the more important Phases 1 and 15, although
Yeats makes this more explicit in the first edition than the second (CW13 113; AVA 140).
In summation, Yeats developed a geometry which saw the history of the world as mapped
onto a cycle of twelve months making a single year of 26,000 years; he distinguished
between the twelve lunar cycles of civilization (calendar months) and twelve solar cycles
of religion which it encompasses (zodiac months); he saw these separate types of month
as beginning, in a classificatory (although not actual) sense, at each other’s midpoints;
but he understood the solar gyre of religion as affecting the lunar gyre of civilization as
well, its beginning and end being the midpoints on the months of civilization. Thus Yeats
discerned the movement of the 2,000-year solar months on the wheel of the Great Year as
involving a constant interchange of symbolic eastern (antithetical) and western (primary)
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
influence, and was able also to relate these influences to similar movements between antithetical and primary Tinctures, and time and space.
Petrie and Schneider
In the first edition of A Vision Yeats had used Fritz Hommel’s inferences concerning the Babylonian calendar from Hastings’s Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, which corresponded in time
span to his lunar rather than solar months, to articulate the Great Year’s cycles. He had admitted that the spans were wrong, since Hommel placed the equinoctial point in 1000 BCE at Aries 30º, meaning that Yeats’s starting point of 1 CE falls at the middle or 15º Aries (CW13 122;
AVA 151).42 It was W. M. Flinders Petrie, however, who led Yeats to understand the concept of
the Great Year as pertaining particularly to Etruscan cosmogony, which connection he stressed
further in the second edition. According to the Etruscan sages, cited by Plutarch in his “Life of
Sulla,” there were ten “great years” (not one), the last eight of which corresponded to the eight
races of men.43 Petrie took this to be uncannily proleptic of his own observations of Egyptian
civilization, but added two extra to take in the two millennia since the birth of Christ, and to
make the full number of years twelve. Egyptian civilization enjoyed seven great manifestations
from the Stone Age to the decline of Roman Egypt, followed by the great Moorish civilization of North Africa, whose decline began in the late medieval era (RC 38). Concentrating on
sculpture rather than political freedom (which he considered to be irrelevant in measuring a
culture’s success), he saw eight revolutions of civilization over eleven thousand years, the average length of each being about 1,330 years, some 230 more than the Etruscans’ 1,100 (RC 85).
In the northern Mediterranean (Europe) he saw a similar correlation in the Cretan civilizations,
through to classical Greece and Rome, with the medieval period just before the Renaissance
being the height of our present era in Europe (number 8) (RC 74). Petrie also believed that
racial strength was important for the development of civilization (RC 125), both in terms of the
dynamism of struggle and the blending of two cultures through invasion.44
Yeats referred to Petrie in both A Vision and his 1930 diary as a major source for the
concept of the Great Year, even though his Etruscan temporal concept is entirely different
in length to that of most classical sources. Yeats also interpreted the first phases of humankind through reference to Hermann Schneider’s description of Aurignacian and Neolithic
man, “the hunting age” up until “agriculture” and the invention of solar mythology “symbol of all history and of individual life, foundation of all the earliest civilisations” (AVB
205). For Yeats this occurs when the vernal equinox was at Phases 4 to 5 (presumably the
Will of “universal man”) in the circle of the Great Year (AVB 254). In the description of
the basic wheel this is just where the primary Tincture begins to close and also the point,
in Phase 4, where “the wisdom of instinct” appertaining either to one’s “well-being or that
of the race” (AVB 110) predominates. On the basic wheel the closing itself is where “reflection” begins and man begins to free himself of “Fate” (AVB 111). Hence, beginning from
this point, we can see ten months on the Great Year out of the twelve in which civilization can occur. This occurs not least because the rise of racial instinct is also an important
precondition, since Yeats understands “that conflict or union of races stated by Petrie
and Schneider as universal law” in creating the “new antithetical” after some 500 years,
whose “culture lives only in certain victorious classes” (AVB 205), before dying into the
primary after Phase 22: Yeats commonly complains about primary democracy overtaking
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123
antithetical aristocracy and unity of culture (AVB 81n), an opinion analogous to the ideas
of Giambattista Vico, of which parallel Yeats was also aware (AVB 261).45
However, another contribution was more significant. Petrie argued that the East was
always 365 years further on in its cycles than the West. 46 By East Petrie does not mean
Egypt or the Phoenicians, whose revolutions correspond almost exactly to those of Europe, and are thus part of the West, but Persia, India and China. The difference in time
puts the two in constant struggle. Yeats cites Petrie as making the difference 500 years
(AVB 203n), which is enough to see the East as the antithesis of the West if applied to
Petrie’s own revolution (1,330). Thus Yeats adds more sustenance to his view that the
two battle with each other and create civilizations within both parts of the globe through
alternate begetting and opposition, with the West as primary, the East antithetical. Unlike
Petrie, Yeats still questions whether the “marriage” between the geographical West and
East is real, before insisting that the Wheel has “timeless and spaceless” polarities (AVB
205), meaning that he refuses to impose rigid historical definitions on the points.
Petrie’s views on race are given a more detailed explication by Schneider, who looks at
the various invasions and migrations in Egypt, Babylon, Persia and elsewhere, to establish
when races were most perfectly blended and to create what Yeats calls “race-cultures” (AVB
206), a term which he uses not least because of his interest in eugenics and Theosophical
root-races.47 Yeats was also most impressed with Schneider’s description of solar mythology, “the sacred legend of the sun,” as the basis for all world religions. Like Petrie, Schneider sees gradual peaks and declines in cultures, although he does not try to map out the
“Great Year” with the same precision as Petrie.48
Yeats discerns a difference between himself and Petrie when writing that Petrie sees all
cultures and civilizations as being a continual progression (AVB 261). Rather than there being
progression, Yeats believes that “every phase returns, therefore in some sense every civilisation”
(AVB 206). His understanding of the reason for decline in an era, which Petrie blames, in
Viconian fashion, on political freedom and moral organization, is that there is a descent into
spiritual contemplation followed by tyranny, a movement he illustrates with Schneider’s own
description of Aeneas as a puppet guided by fate in contrast to Achilles’ assertive free will. Yeats
maintains that the cultures, “having attained some Achilles in the first blossoming, find pious
Aeneas in the second” (AVB 206), which corresponds to his description of the Principles overriding the concrete and personal Faculties in the final phases of the wheel (AVB 89). 49
Thus Yeats here finds more respectable support for his belief in the reality of the Great
Year, the alternation between Eastern and Western power, the rise into antithetical aristocracy and decline into primary objectivity, and the importance of race to culture. Schneider, for example, makes reference to the “Indo-German” (HWC1 18–19), as a comparative type throughout his work, understanding this type to have provided the original basis
of European civilization. While Yeats appears to have accepted race as a form of teleology,
his reading of Strzygowski shows that he does not see Aryanism as its motivating force.
Strzygowski
Yeats’s particular organization of art history by geographical influence in “The Great Year
of the Ancients” owes much to a fascination with Josef Strzygowski (1862–1941), an enthusiastic National Socialist. Strzygowski’s basic theory was that the early spirit of Christian
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architecture (and spirituality) came from the East Aryans of Persia and Armenia (the Armenians converting, he believed, some time before Gregory the Illuminator), and that we
must thank them for the domed and vaulted churches of Asia Minor,50 as well as for some of
the less “individual values” of early Christian representative art (OCCA 159).51 The impetus
behind this expression of spiritual purity was the Northern Aryan influence, which came to
Armenia and Persia in the form of Mazdaism, the Northern Aryans inspiring their Eastern
brothers (OCCA 18–19). It was the Semites, however, (in particular the Aramaeans)52 who,
“inspired by their rulers’ lust after power” (OCCA 161), developed the more corrupt representational art of Christianity. They further influenced the Greeks to introduce the bearded
Semitic image into their own art, rather than Christ Pantocrator, the earlier Greco-Roman
image (OCCA 161–62). The emergence of a more geometric, less naturalistic representation
of Christ was a welcome East Aryan influence which entwined with the Greco-Semitic form
of the South as representational art moved eastward to Armenia, where the East Aryans had
been celebrating Christ through purer, non-representational forms.
Strzygowski backs these theories up with his observations of Armenian churches,
seeing in them eastern influences rather than Greek adoptions, such as the use of domed
structures on square bases, which appeared in Armenia before the rest of the Christian
world, including Byzantium (OCCA 63–67). He sees a movement around Mesopotamia
of Northern Aryans (Indo-Germanic tribes) to Eastern Aryans (Persians and Armenians)
to the southern world of Roman Judaea and Greece, with the Greco-Roman world eventually accepting the Semitic form of Christ and replacing the non-representational art of
the East with their own representational images (OCCA 168).
In the first edition of A Vision, Yeats did not link the geographical compass points
described by Strzygowski in relation to art to the movement of the Great Year with any
conviction. He did, nevertheless, admit that, “The cardinal points in the Solar and Lunar
cones are not merely symbols of the Sun and Moon’s path, but are held to refer to the actual geographical points” (CW13 141; AVA 174). Although Yeats depicts the coordinates
in a way bearing some similarities to their description in the second edition, he does not
actually provide examples of places or empires.
The same is not true, however, of the second edition, where Yeats eventually reneges—if hesitantly—on his initial refusal to the link his antithetical East to “not only
symbolical East but to geographical, Asiatic,” as he believes this was the instructors’ original design (AVB 256), despite the fact that he had earlier denied this (AVB 205), and had
understood Asia as being primary when seen separately from the symbolic direction East.
He then immediately relates the wheel to Strzygowski’s geographical coordinates. Yeats
has already described the interchange between East and West at 1 CE (the start of the
Christian religious era of 2,000 years, the midpoint or Phase 15 of the two-thousand-year
lunar month of civilization and the beginning or Phase 15 of the new religious era, on
the two-thousand-year solar month) as constituting a spiritual impregnation of Western
ideas in Eastern form (AVB 211), and has characterized Asia as “Palestine onwards.” Now
he is firmly relating the alternating polarities to the historical and geographical locations
Europe and Asia. Drawing our attention to the woodcut of the wheel, Yeats sees North
and South as being Phases 1 and 15, West and East as Phases 8 and 22 (“East is marked
by a sceptre,” he declares, which is depicted at Phase 22 in the woodcut [AVB 70]). When
delineating this new wheel—and his definitions here leave us inevitably having to substi-
“Timeless and Spaceless”?
125
tute possibilities—Yeats therefore appears to have a doubled, four-thousand-year, lunar,
rather than a solar wheel in mind, like the four-thousand-year wheel first mooted when
discussing the classification of a single four-thousand-year wheel (AVB 204), for which the
East is at Phase 22, the South at 15, the West at Phase 8, like the inner circle in Figure 4
above. Despite the fact that this wheel is lunar, Yeats appears to envisage the movement
over the wheel as being clockwise, like that of the solar Creative Mind.53
In relation to Strzygowski’s attributions of geography to polarity, Yeats notes that “From
the Semitic East [Strzygowski] derives all art which associates Christ with the attributes of royalty,” replacing the “mild Hellenic Christ” (AVB 257). Unlike Strzygowski, however, Yeats allows
the Semitic East to subsume the Aryan East. Misreading his source he declares that, “To him
the East, as certainly to my instructors, is not India or China, but the East that has affected
European civilisation, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Egypt” (AVB 257). Confusingly, Yeats also
describes the “South” of Strzygowski and of his own Phase 15 as corresponding to “Egypt or
India,”54 the duplication of Egypt reflecting the distinction between what Strzygowski wrote and
how Yeats read his definition of East, since for Strzygowski the South comprised classical Greece
and the Ancient Semitic cultures, with the East being reserved for Armenia, Persia and India
or the East Aryans (Strzygowski made no comment on Egyptian civilization before Alexander’s
invasion, any more than he did on Sumerian). For Yeats, East must always be “human power…
stretched to its utmost” (the Semitic “attributes of royalty”), regardless of whether in the wheel
of the Principles or the Faculties (AVB 257), while North and West are “superhuman power.”
Yeats also understands the South (15) as “naturalistic form,” the North (1) as the source of “nonrepresentative art,” the West (8) as a “mirror where all movements are reflected” (AVB 258). He
hesitates to apply Strzygowski’s “geographical” North—the culture of the Northern and Asiatic
nomads—to his symbolic North, but does so any way.
Figure 5
126
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Yeats continues the adaptation of Strzygowski’s geographical determinations to his cardinal points and phases by describing them as periods in history, and as contrary East/West
illuminations. If we were to see this as the movement of Creative Mind (and the movement is
clockwise, like Creative Mind’s) it would represent a movement from North (Phase 1) (1000
BCE) to East (Phase 22) (1 CE, the birth of Christ) to South (1000 CE, curiously Egypt
and India) to the West at 2000 CE, where “the antithetical East will beget upon the primary
West and the child or era so born will be antithetical” (AVB 257). As in the two-thousandyear religious gyres, Christ comes at antithetical East (1 CE), but was impregnated by a West
which will gradually take over, thus constituting a primary “dispensation” (AVB 204).
The complexities and possible inconsistencies of the geometry need not trouble us at this
point (Yeats is himself unsure of the exact parallels), since the intellectual reading of Strzygowski is nevertheless clear. Yeats understands the representational art linked to the East at
1 CE as an antithetical period in the gyres of civilization, but sees the Aryan culture of the
North as representing a decline in personality, which is again predominating as we move back
to a primary phase in our civilization. Yeats therefore merges Strzygowski’s Aryan East with
Semitic East, and strips from the East exactly what Strzygowski understands to be the East’s
most significant contribution: the spirit of non-representational art in Christianity. He instead
sees this as a recurring primary impulse from the North, resulting in a new West, in which “the
non-representative art of our own time may not be but a first symptom of our return to the
primary tincture”: a recurrence from “the nomad Aryans of northern Europe and Asia” who are
“the source of all geometrical ornament, of all non-representative art” (AVB 258).55
This is despite the fact that he agrees with Strzygowski in “Dove or Swan,” written earlier,
that the non-representative character of Byzantine art was an Eastern, Persian impulse, seeing
it as a “superhuman” primary, spiritual influence, which nevertheless combined with GrecoRoman form to create a new antithetical art in Byzantium 560 CE.56 It arrives as a result of
change on an undrawn “horizontal gyre” (AVB 281–82), and effectively replaces the “Doric
vigour” and decoration which had reinvigorated Ionian art 1,000 years earlier, after the defeat
of Persia by Greece (c 500 BCE) (AVB 270). The “horizontal gyre,” which Yeats defines as
lunar in another context, and as at right-angles to the solar (AVB 197),57 would appear to be a
lunar gyre of artistic form and culture which is syncopated with the one-thousand-year solar
gyre/wheel described by Yeats in “Dove or Swan,” its East and West alternations coming in
the middle of one-thousand-year religious epochs, just as the main two-thousand-year solar
and lunar gyres are syncopated elsewhere. The horizontal gyre clearly shows alternations in
the marriage of Asia and Europe which contradict Yeats’s description of Asia and later reading
of Strzygowski here, as Yeats now chooses on a much larger wheel to relate these impulses to
the North, and even attributes some of the Aryan features of Byzantine art which Strzygowski
praised—such as “domed and arched buildings where nothing interferes with the effect of the
building as a whole”—to a “return to the primary tincture.” (AVB 258)
The reason why Yeats transforms the relation between Strzygowski’s East, North and
South, and completely recharacterizes his East in relation to its influence and geographic
location, springs equally from both the inevitable logic of his own East/West alternations
when applied over this time span to Asia and Europe respectively—so that East/Asia must
be antithetical by nature—and from his renewed understanding of art’s future after reading
Spengler’s dire warnings for Western forms of art. The spirit of the Northern Aryans—emotional freedom and superhuman power—is on the verge of winning as Europe slides into
“Timeless and Spaceless”?
127
abstraction, being no longer the subjective, personal culture of the antithetical East—of
Semitic East, of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia—but of an objective, abstract culture: the
abstract element of art praised by Worringer and T. E. Hulme, which had made such an
impression on the Vorticists, and which was also evident in the soulless arches and domes
of Italian Futurism. This abstract, depersonalizing art, which corresponded politically to the
amassing of people into groups (AVB 82n), was another manifestation of the Modernism
and “flux” despised by the antithetical and personality-minded Yeats. He also characterizes
this art as a return to a spatial as opposed to a temporal mind-set.
Spengler and Frobenius
Spengler’s The Decline of the West greatly impressed Yeats with its chronology. The classical
era’s ending at 1000 CE and the Faustian era’s beginning at that same date accorded with his
own understanding of the lunar months of the Great Year (e.g. DW1 167; 185; 201; 235).58
Spengler’s main contention rests on his refutation of Kant’s understanding of number, time
and space, and further belief that modern conceptions of being and becoming do not accord with those of classical man (DW1 60). In particular, number as an abstract relation
was not something which classical man understood. He only saw numbers as the “become”
(DW1 81ff): that is, as figures realized and not as a priori relations of the mind. Similarly,
the idea of becoming, which included the concept of destiny, involved an understanding of
linear time and the physiognomy of change not known to classical man, who understood
simply the actual world of the “become” (DW1 140). History, epoch and the movement
of becoming-in-itself, in contrast to the being which propels it, is an aspect of the Faustian
soul, involving consciousness of time as a form distinct from space (which further explains
the lack of physiognomic distinction between ages in classical man’s understanding of history). Nevertheless, time is not to be understood as the a priori form of sensuous intuition
described by Kant, but is a modern development which has also helped man symbolize the
sense of depth involved in abstract space (since time necessitates symbol [DW1 168]).
Spengler opposes the “Apollonian,” classical space of manifestation and the Faustian,
abstract depth space, which latter we consciously explore and symbolize through time (such
as the spacious magnitude of Gothic cathedrals [DW1 188]). He cites Leo Frobenius’s Paideuma as his source for the Höhlengefühl (DW1 184), or “cavern-feeling,” a corollary of Apollonian space: a point Yeats picked up on.
Yeats himself could never have read Frobenius’s essay in Paideuma on the Ghanaian
tale of Samba Gana and Anallja Tu-Bari, although he did possess a copy of this book in his
private library.59 While Rapallo Notebook E shows that Yeats read Frobenius’s mammoth
The Voice of Africa,60 neither the symbols nor the story explaining the relationship between
the “cavern-feeling” and the “breadth-feeling” are there, although Frobenius does mention
its opposing symbol of the “altar” and sixteen radiating roads in the East in that book.
Frobenius equated this particular symbol with the Etruscans’ mythology of the Templum
and their equal penchant for dividing the cosmos by the number sixteen (which Yeats had
surely observed despite not overtly exploiting it in A Vision when he refers to Frobenius’s
discussion of the Etruscans [AVB 259]).61
In Paideuma, however, Frobenius tells of a mighty hero who died after an eight-year
fight with a snake for the sake of his beloved, and whose burial pyre she built with 8 times
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
80 heroes, not allowing them to stop until she could see Wagana in the West. She then
urged them to go off in all directions and copy Samba Gana, which the German believed
to express the concept of the Weitengefühl or “far/breadth-sense.”62 Frobenius notes that
the opposite form to this was the “cavern/depth-sense,” Höhlengefühl, found in the West,
but symbolizing the nations moving eastward.63 The Weitengefühl, or “breadth-sense,” corresponds to the Diarra people of Ghana, a western people who have spread eastward into
Africa, and become heroes and created works of empire; the cavern corresponds to the
“fanatical” Trarza tribe of West Africa, an Islamic people who have moved west, who understand the earth purely by the limits of the sky, and can only destroy.64
Yeats knew no German and this essay was never translated, and so he was dependent
on either Ezra Pound’s or George Yeats’s ad hoc translation.65 Nevertheless, the combined
reading of The Voice of Africa, Spengler and conversations with Ezra Pound led Yeats to
an understanding that Frobenius “discovered among the African natives two symbolical
forms, one founded upon the symbol of the Cavern, one upon that of the central Altar
and sixteen roads radiating outward” (AVB 258–59).
Yeats informs us that Frobenius thought those peoples around the Cavern symbol
looked eastern, while those domiciled near instances of the roads symbol appeared to have
actually moved east from the Atlantic. Frobenius “found methods of divination based
upon the symbolism of the roads in the furthest East, and the symbolism of the Cavern
in the West” (AVB 259). So the Cavern was a symbol found in the West, but appertaining
to people clearly from the East, while the symbol of the sixteen roads from the Altar was
one to be found in East Africa, but originating from the West. This immediately recalls
the contrary impregnations in the solar gyres, in which we must think of “a child born
at Phase 15 or East as acquiring a primary character from its father who is at Phase 1, or
West, and of a child born at Phase 1, or West, as acquiring an antithetical character from
its father at Phase 15, or East, and so on, man and woman being alternately Western and
Eastern” (AVB 211). A primary dispensation arrives at a phase in the middle of the antithetical half of the Wheel (around 15) (of a double gyre of religious era) an antithetical
dispensation at a primary phase in the middle of the primary half of the Wheel (around
Phase 1), the influx that will determine the character at the end of an era.
Yeats’s understanding of Frobenius takes him into conflict with Spengler’s definition
of space. He identifies the Cavern—the symbol found in the West but originating in
the East—with Time, and declares that Spengler’s association of it with space constitutes
merely a succumbing to the idea of space as the finite form which creates the flux of time:
the Bergsonian time evident in the work of Modernists and disparaged by Wyndham
Lewis.66 The Cavern must be Time and the roads Space, because the Cavern is associated
with the movement of the heavens in the Hermetic fragments, and the roads “could never
suggest anything to ancient man but Space” (AVB 260).67
Yeats suggests that although he associates the Cavern with Time and not Space, he
believes his mind “still runs with” Spengler’s because the German describes the symbol of
the Cavern as though it were time. This is a hard notion to fathom, but probably derives
from the fact that the Cavern clearly defines a conception of space more concrete than the
“Time-philosophy” of Modernism, which latter Yeats believes he discerns in the description of the Faustian soul (AVB 259–60) and hence can see as temporal. Thus the symbol
of Time, Cavern, occurs in the West as a result of an Eastern/antithetical impregnation,
“Timeless and Spaceless”?
129
while the symbol of Space, roads and Altar, occurs in the East but is a Western impregnation. It also represents the abstract, primary art present in the West today. Unfortunately,
this interpretation did not prevent Yeats from accepting Spengler’s and Frobenius’s more
obvious definitions of the two symbols in “The Completed Symbol,” and placing “the
Christian primary dispensation, the child born in the Cavern” at East and the antithetical
“turbulent child of the Altar” at West, when first introducing Frobenius’s concept (AVB
204)—an inconsistency with his later, Lewis-inspired interpretation (see Figure 3), if one
takes East and West as relating to geographical positions, as his inclusion of theories like
Spengler’s and Strzygowski’s ultimately forces Yeats to do.
If we bear in mind that Yeats read Wyndham Lewis and Strzygowski before actually
centering upon Frobenius’s influence in Spengler’s work, we can explain how Strzygowski’s
view of the West as a “mirror” of all other compass points is later interpreted by Yeats as
meaning a primary, abstract art, linked to the sense of space in “Time-philosophy” but not
to antithetical, subjective time (East). This mirror is the ultimate fruition of a “western”
impregnation at East (1 CE)—the Altar and roads—which ends in a return to the primary
tincture at West (AVB 258). We can understand why Yeats recharacterized Strzygowski’s
East and Asia as antithetical “human power” (Time/Cavern), blending Semitic East with
Aryan, and West as primary “superhuman power” (Space/Altar), despite the conflict this
causes with his earlier reading of Strzygowski. He now understands abstraction as a Western impulse that impregnated the East at Christ’s birth, but which has finally come to
fruition in Modernism, rather than the Asian purification of Greek art he had earlier
understood it as being (AVB 281). Finally, we can also see why Yeats divorced the Faustian
soul of Spengler from idealist time, equated it with the mind of Bergson’s organic realism,
and further associated it with the roads, his primary symbol of space, the “Time-Mind” of
Modernism being really a subjugation to the spatial. Yeats’s distaste for Modernism and
its portrayal of time appears to have been central in his reinterpretation of Strzygowski,
Frobenius and Spengler, making the later books of A Vision appear, above all else, an attempt to explain the tawdriness of his own day.
The correlations to both the gyres and Yeats’s description of East-West illuminations,
Cavern and Altar, elsewhere are not quite consistent. Nevertheless, despite inconsistencies,
the relevant results of his reading are that Yeats sees a cyclical relation between East and
West over the solar months, and furthermore raises the spiritual and artistic achievements
of the East over the West. In the struggle the representation of time and subjectivity in
art predominates when the East is male at the beginning of a religious era, and midway in
the gyres of civilization, while that of space and objectivity predominates when the West
is impregnating in the religious era—i.e., the birth of Christ and the arrival of the drilled
eyeball in Roman statuary (AVB 276). In the alternations of historical cycle, Yeats has
wound back to his beginning, the tensions of the single gyre of time and space infusing
his dynamic of world history.
In conclusion, Yeats uses modern philosophy to organize and comprehend the dictates
of the automatic script. The theories of Kant and Gentile he employs to see both incarnate
and discarnate experience as a form of spatialization through time, and the Enneads of Plotinus allowed him to relate the Principles to an existing ontological hierarchy, which he in any
case erroneously conflated into the soul of an individual man. The ideas of Berkeley were
useful to him in reformulating the relation between man and Daimon, and the discarnate
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Daimons, as being a theory of perception within an idealist ontology. The work of the
younger Berkeley and McTaggart further allowed him to see the individual self as both a
particularity which never cedes its uniqueness and as partaking of a wider ontological unity,
being part of a “community of selves.” Ultimately, Yeats used philosophy of time and ontology to express the contradictions of his system: an individual soul which is part of a larger
unity and yet can subsume that universe within itself; a spiritual ontology in which the sensual has an equal and symbiotic status with the abstract; an eternity containing all individual
successive events in a state of simultaneity. Philosophy helped Yeats to balance and articulate
the concrete and sensuous aspects of his system with the abstract.
In relation to history, Yeats takes many different theorists of civilization and anthropologists like Schneider, Petrie and Frobenius, and effectively adapts their ideas in accordance with the logic of his own gyres and the dictates of the automatic script, to understand the movements of culture as an alternating struggle between East and West. This
process of “conversion” frequently and fundamentally alters the theories of the originals,
but in a way which strips them of their original political significance and narrow understandings of racial history, and also progressively roots the compass points of his gyres in
a geographic spatial determination he had originally sought to avoid. In doing this he
manages to relate the philosophical conceptions of time and space promoted by Spengler,
and the racial artistic descriptions described by Strzygowski to the antithetical and primary
Tinctures and to the history of artistic representation, although is led to draw opposite
conclusions to the originals. He employs these contemporary ideas to understand the descent into abstraction of the art of his own era, and ultimately attempts to raise A Vision’s
status from that of an esoteric book to an original essay on the movements of civilization,
race and culture with a unique, spiritual dynamism.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
This section details arguments first related in Matthew Gibson, “Yeats, Kant and Giovanni Gentile: The
Single Gyre of Time and Space,” YA15 (2002) 313–325.
Immanuel Kant, “Prologemena to any Future Metaphysic,” Kant’s Critical Philosophy for English Readers,
trans. and ed. J. P. Mahaffy and J. H. Bernard, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1915 [WBGYL 1062;
YL 1052]), 1:14–17 (chap. 2, pt. 2). Immanuel Kant, “Transcendental Doctrine of Elements. Part First:
Transcendental Aesthetic,” Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn (London: J. M. Dent and
Sons; New York: E.P. Dutton and Co. Inc., 1934), 41–61. Intro. pt. 4, pp. 30–2, Everyman’s Library, ed.
Ernest Rhys, 909.
Giovanni Gentile, The Theory of Mind as Pure Act, trans. H. Wildon Carr. (London: Macmillan, 1922
[WBGYL 752; YL 742]), 19–20 (chap. 3, pts. 3–4).
Kant argued in the Critique of Pure Reason that cognition occurs through judgment, and that while specific
concepts like “chair” or “house” allow objects to be cognized in experience, these a posteriori concepts in
the understanding are themselves only possible due to innate categories of judgment like “unity,” “singularity” and “reality” etc. These categories allow us to make fundamental judgments about what we see and
comprehend, and are involved in all judgments that we make beyond basic perceptual ones. Kant deduces
them not, as a Neo-Platonist like Cudworth or Shelley might, through reflexive-thinking and a kind of
mystical dissolution of the self that then reveals the innate idea (which he believed the mind of man can
never know directly), but through inference from experience and the subjective judgments a priori: judgments which cannot be proven by the law of contradiction, and yet are self-evidently true when we reflect
upon experience. It was a most perceptive comment of Yeats when he declared that “Coleridge restated
Kant in terms of Plato” (TSMC 131).
For a fuller explanation of Plotinus’s system, the reader is referred to Stephen MacKenna’s “Explanatory
Matter” in Plotinus, Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, Vol I: The Ethical Treatises, (London: P. L. Warner
“Timeless and Spaceless”?
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
131
for the Medici Society, 1917), 1:118–25 (WBGYL 1601; YL 1589).
Rosemary Puglia Ritvo, “A Vision B: the Plotinian Metaphysical Basis,” Review of English Studies 26, no.
101 (1975), 34–46.
Plotinus, Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, Vol IV: The Divine Mind, (London: P. L. Warner for the
Medici Society, 1917), 69–72 (WBGYL 1604; YL 1592) and Pierre Duhem, Le système du monde: doctrines
cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic 10 vols. (Paris: A. Hermann et fils, 1913–59), 1:284–85. Duhem was a
most important source for Yeats; referred to hereafter as SM1 etc. in the text.
Illustrative of this conflation is the fact that in the automatic script Yeats is warned by the controls not
to call “‘spirit’” “mind,” but “Nous,” since “mind implies fraternity” (YVP2 289; 25 May 1919). That
he should have renamed it Mind illustrates his ultimate acceptance that the individual soul collapses the
macrocosm into itself.
See Neil Mann, “The Thirteenth Cone,” 159–193 in this volume.
This section in part details—and improves upon—some theories presented in M. Gibson, “Yeats and
Idealism: the Philosophy of Light,” YA14 (2001) 284–297.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: An Abridgement, ed. John W. Yolton (London:
Dent/Everyman, 1977), 58 (bk 2, chap. 8, pts. 9–10).
The Works of George Berkeley D.D., Late Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland, 2 vols (London: G. Robinson; Dublin: John Exshaw, 1758 [WBGYL 161; YL 160]), 1:27–28, n10–n13; referred to hereafter as WGB1 and
WGB2 in the text.
“…fire is a subtle, invisible thing, whose operation is not to be discerned but by means of some grosser
body, which acts as a vehicle to bring it into view. This is the sole use of oil, air, or any other thing that
passes as food of that element” (WGB2 552 n197).
Yeats read Pierre Duhem’s Le système du monde to discover information concerning the medieval theologians Grosseteste and Bonaventura (SM5 356–58). Grosseteste understood light as corporeality while
Bonaventura understood the five senses as simply being transmutations of light, and thus they became
another analogue to the views expressed in Siris (AVB 190n). Yeats’s occult experiences and invocation
of symbolic presences through Cabala had frequently involved stronger experiences of light than were
normal, and despite initially distinguishing between the conditions of air and fire when separating ghosts
and purified Daimons in Per Amica Silentia Lunae (CW5 26; Myth 357), Yeats soon forgot this distinction. Yeats’s central image of the lamp, as a metaphor of mind for romanticism and imagination in the
“Introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse,” is also influenced by Berkeley and Grosseteste (CW5
198; OBMV xxxi). That light was an animating principle in nature was not a new concept for Yeats, being
a central tenet of Eliphas Lévi’s interpretation of the Cabala, to name but one source, see E. Levi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual, trans. A. E. Waite (London: George Redway, 1896), 62.
Yeats conveniently ignores the fact that in The Principles of Human Knowledge, Berkeley argues that imagination and sensation are quite separate, with the former not constituting anything other than private
invention (WGB1 37).
In the 1930 diary he even refers to this as “the multiple Passionate Body” (Ex 332), reflecting the fact that
it is made up of other, discarnate Daimons.
The notes which Yeats particularly liked and which inspired him were S. 724, S. 725 and S. 726, which deal
with the equation of spirit to the Will, the need to avoid defining person, “lest offence be given, there being
one volition acknowledged to be God,” and whether all “volitions make one will,” see George Berkeley, Commonplace Book, ed. G. A. Johnston (London: Faber and Faber, 1930 [WBGYL 160; YL 159]), 87.
As will become clear later in the essay, Yeats does not quite present a consistent interpretation of the
discarnate/incarnate division, although its most convenient description would be a division between the
“supersensual” and the “sensual.”
See “Introduction to The Holy Mountain” (esp. CW5 147–51; E&I 462–66) and “Introduction to ‘Mandukya Upanishad’” (CW5 157–58; E&I 476–77)
George Russell, Song and its Fountains (London: Macmillan, 1932), 63.
Ibid., 48.
J. W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time (London: A. & C. Black Ltd, 1927), 99–105.
Ibid., 151–53.
J. M. E. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence, ed. C. D. Broad, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1927),
2:13–14 (bk. 5, chap. 33); referred to hereafter in the text as NE1 and NE2.
Implicit to McTaggart’s argument are the laws of contradiction and excluded middle. In the law of contradiction if a statement is true then its opposite is not true, for if its opposite is true then the first statement
132
26.
27.
28
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
is not true. If an event is past, then to say it is not past is untrue. To say it is future is to say that it is not
past, therefore it cannot be future. The term cannot contain contradictory qualities. In the law of excluded
middle it is assumed that two contradictory statements about an object cannot be both true.
Like Spinoza, he argues that any substance must be infinite in its attributes, self-causing and unique—although his later conditions for substance are different to Spinoza’s in arguing the non-coalescence of the
selves which constitute substance.
McTaggart argues that all “selves” are immortal and harmonious, and part of an “absolute reality,” Studies
in Hegelian Cosmology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1918 [WBGYL 1216; YL 1203]), 28.
He further argues that “selves have no existence except in so far as they manifest the unity of the Absolute” (Studies, 30). McTaggart nevertheless avoids conferring a coalescent unity upon (ideal) substance,
much as Berkeley did in the Commonplace Book. Many pages in the first three chapters of Yeats’s copy
of Studies in Hegelian Cosmology have marginal scorings, (although only page 61 from that above): these
tend to be pages where McTaggart directly quotes or refers to passages from Hegel or Lotze (see YL pp.
163–64).
Since McTaggart denies time, reincarnation is for him an experience rather than a reality of the soul’s immortal existence (or rather, that of the “self ”), and is not, as Yeats claims in his introduction to The Resurrection, “the foundation of McTaggart’s own philosophical system” (Ex 396–97; VPl 934).
Or they could be equivalent representatives from the higher states of the reincarnating soul’s discarnate
phases, from after the Shiftings, when the Spirit is purified of memory and no longer attaches itself to the
sensory.
Plotinus, Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, Vol II: Psychic and Physical Treatises, (London: P. L. Warner
for the Medici Society, 1921), 46–53 (WBGYL 1602; YL 1590). The exchange of “supersensual emotion
and imagery” in the Shiftings may be related to the condition of Victimage, when the relation between a
Spirit of the Thirteenth Cone and an incarnate Daimon is reversed, since this also happens in the Shiftings
(AVB 238).
Yeats’s marginalia to The Nature of Existence show he was partially aware of this problem. In a note to
McTaggart’s passage beginning “Perception is the awareness of what Mr Russell calls particulars,” Yeats
writes that he must confine “perception” to “sense data,” since the Spirit and Celestial Body were “universal”
but not “creative” (YL p. 163). He somewhat ambiguously declares that the Spirit and Celestial Body are a
“subtler alternative.”
Berkeley, The Commonplace Book, 87, SS. 724–726.
In his 1930 Diary, Yeats describes Berkeley’s rejection of Newton by calling “visibility, light—mind and
light [sensation] the Siamese twins that constitute the whole of reality” (Ex 324). He thus interpreted
Berkeley as giving an ontological status to the visible as well as to the “mind” it incarnates.
See Neil Mann’s essay in this volume, “The Thirteenth Cone,” 189 n68, on the discarnate Daimon, or
Ghostly Self, as the soul in its complete state at the end of the cycle of lives. This description of the Ghostly
Self as “permanent Self,” which gives each man his uniqueness, also bears a resemblance to the Plotinian
understanding of the eidos, or idea of the individual and particular soul which continually reincarnates
until it has acquired freedom (Ennead V.7).
It should be noted that while Yeats envisages the Creative Mind as moving through the signs in the order
of the equinoctial precession (Taurus, Aries, Pisces, Aquarius), and as certainly doing so when it represents
movement through the religious eras of the Great Year, in the Wheel of the Principles the Spirit moves not
from Aries to Pisces but from Pisces to Aries and then Taurus in its own solar cone (AVB 196): this latter
movement is through the tropical zodiac of the ordinary year and not through the sidereal zodiac of the
equinoctial precession.
He makes this much clearer in the first edition of A Vision, when describing the movement of the Will
of “Eternal Man” through Phase 15 of the Great Year considered as lunar months, “the civilisation that
climaxed in Athens and Rome,” in the middle of which we have Aries 30 which is also the beginning of
the new solar month: “at the foundation of Christianity [Will] entered upon the gyre of Phases 16, 17 and
18, while his Creative Mind entered upon that of Phases 14, 13 and 12” (CW13 117; AVA 144).
Helena Blavatsky, “The Esoteric Character of the Gospels: Part 1”, Lucifer 1:174 . See also William Quan
Judge, The Ocean of Theosophy (NY & London: The Path & Theosophical Publishing Society, 1893), 121.
Yeats confirms that the instructors drew the diagrams as meaning two lunar or solar months in A Vision
B when he writes: “When, however, one wants to show, as the automatic script generally does, that each
civilisation and religious dispensation is the opposite of its predecessor, a single revolution constitutes two
solar or lunar months” (AVB 204). This perhaps warrants the view of seeing the “new” Christ at 6/7 and
“Timeless and Spaceless”?
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
133
Buddha at 12 as illuminations to different months of a 4,000-year gyre, although his views on Buddha had
changed by 1937 (AVB 207).
In the automatic script the main month cycles are variously written as 2,000 years, 2,150 years and 2,200
years. Yeats himself refers to the months as being 2,000 and 2,200-year cycles (AVB 203-4) (cf. http://
www.YeatsVision.com/Numbers.html). In my own references to the cycles I have mainly stuck to round
figures, one thousand, two thousand and four thousand years for the sake of clarity, even though these are
technically imprecise.
In “NB6” George Yeats recalls how they were instructed by a control to present two sets of twelve cycles
with “East as top & west as bottom. Starting then from Phase (1) at north the first division would mark
first cycle. This series of 12 Cycles is repeated 28 times.…He said this was something like the precession
of the Equinoxes. We were not to think of this increase as implying a longer lapse of time. It merely meant
going further in the cycle psychologically” (YVP3 62; 12 Dec 1920). However, in the card file based on
this notebook entry, C39 and C39x, it is made clear that these cycles relate to 2,000-year epochs that start
regularly but can then become irregular (YVP3 262). In the card files relating to the script from November
1917, Yeats and George drew the figure labeled “Diagram Early,” which shows the signs of the zodiac on
three concentric circles of the Wheel. The second one, which has West at a position corresponding to
Phase 1 and East at a position corresponding to Phase 15, he calls “sidereal progress of individual” and
then, on the reverse, “2nd circle civilization in world” (YVP3 296; CF D47 & D47x), and then relates this
to the “Progress in Present Equinoxes” in a simplified version of this diagram on a card marked “Diagram
Equinoxes” (YVP3 297; CF D49). In a second card file marked “Equinoxes,” he mentions Masson’s discussion of the Precession of the Equinoxes in his introduction to Milton’s Paradise Lost (YVP3 297; CF E1).
The circles of the “Diagram Early” are discussed at length by Colin McDowell in his essay in this volume,
“Shifting Sands,” 198–201, with the inner circle appearing to have been employed to cast individual horoscopes: a feature left out of the eventual published editions.
Colin McDowell, “‘Heraldic Supporters’: Minor Symbolism and the Integrity of A Vision,” YA10 (1993)
207–217, at 215–216.
“Calendar, (Babylonian),” Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings, John Selbie et al., 12
vols. (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1908–21 [WBGYL 864; YL 855]), 3:73–78 .
W. M. Flinders Petrie, The Revolutions of Civilisation (London and New York: Harper and Brothers, 1911),
9–10 (cf. WBGYL 1570; YL 1559 [3rd ed., 1922]). Hereafter RC in text.
Thomas Whittaker notes that Petrie does not include Byzantium as a period of artistic achievement, concluding that: “Byzantine art would be for him a rigid archaism,” Thomas Whitaker, Swan and Shadow:
Yeats’s Dialogue with History, Critical Studies in Irish Literature 1 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press of America, 1964), 83.
A note recording a communication with “Carmichael” in “NB6,” written in Mrs. Yeats’s hand, compares
East and West by seeing eastern civilizations as more constant due to racial purity, while western civilizations have greater movement due to racial flux. In a note which perhaps relates to the growth of racial
instinct and then decline of the race culture, Mrs. Yeats opines that now only culture can create unity,
since the races are all so mixed. She seems to foresee A Vision’s description of the rise and fall of antithetical
culture when she writes: “There was migration of peoples about 500 & migration of Educated Class, of
Ideas, about 1500 & now comes consequent unrest” (YVP3 63; 15 Dec 1920).
“The cause of the constant struggle between East and West is likewise seen to be owing to the difference of
phases. If Mesopotamia and Europe were in the same phase, there would be a balance of power, as there
is around the Mediterranean, when even a political ascendancy does not involve a change of population.
But with Mesopotamia always leading, it is bound, politically, to overrun the West a few centuries before
the rise of the West in each period. The Mediterranean was almost an Arab lake at the time of El Manum;
Persia dominated all the civilized Mediterranean in the sixth century B.C. Yet, on the whole, the West
more usually controls the East, because from the time of its maximum, during the gradual decline of each
period, it is always on a higher plane than the East” (RC 108–9).
In alighting on Schneider’s description of solar mythology, Yeats may also have had his own solar months
of the Great Year in mind, which begin midway between the lunar months of civilization, and hence its
own Phase 15 (although Phase 1 on the main Wheel, since the lunar month begins at 15), and thus was
linking the further rises and falls of civilization described throughout Schneider’s gargantuan book with a
dynamism which in actual fact was not there.
O’Shea’s transcription of Yeats’s marginalia to pages 41–44 of Schneider’s book shows how Yeats saw
Schneider as developing four “race cultures” in Egypt (AVB 206), and why it is he used that term; see
134
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Hermann Schneider, The History of World Civilization, trans. M. M. Green, 2 vols. (London: Routledge,
1931 [WBGYL 1867; YL 1853]), hereafter HWC1 and HWC2 in text. Next to Schneider’s descriptions of
the different kingdoms of Egypt, beginning with Menes, Yeats writes “2800. First prime of 2nd Culture,”
then at “Then the empire was broken up,” he writes “End of first culture,” and also writes “First Prime of
Second Culture. 2100” at the first 8 lines of p. 42. At the top of p. 44 he writes, at “barbarians,” “end of
Third Culture” (YL p. 241). The reference to “primes” is clearly echoing a phrase which Schneider makes
on p. 40, when he writes: “The principal implements were still made of stone until Egypt’s first civilization
approached its prime.” Throughout the chapter Schneider uses the classic language of racial anthropology,
talking of “stock” (HWC1 37), and the importance of “fusion of races in the [Nile] Delta” (HWC1 42) for
Egyptian history to begin.
Schneider declares that Virgil’s Aeneas was meant to be “a more manly counterpart to Achilles” (HWC2
649), but that “To us this pious knight, who has no will apart from the will of the gods, is a somewhat
inhuman puppet, where he appears to be guided and controlled entirely by the gods, and somewhat effeminate where he feels as a man and takes flight.…This idea of Fate and the desire to present a model
of voluntary self-conquest necessarily conflicted, as Fate and free-will do in every philosophic system,
especially when it is the work of a poet” (HWC2 650).
Josef Strzygowski, Origin of Christian Church Art: New Facts and Principles of Research, trans. O. M. Dutton and H. J. Braunholtz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923 [WBGYL 2038; YL 2026]), 51–74. Hereafter
OCCA in the text.
Strzygowski also refers to the “purifying influence of Mazdaism upon art,” and to “my repeated opposition
throughout this work of Iranian form to Hellenic-Semitic objectivity” (OCCA 182).
Strzygowski carefully distinguishes “the Jews,” who had no representational art (OCCA 156), from the
“great Semitic empires” (OCCA 155).
Of course it could be argued that Yeats is envisaging a 4,000-year Wheel of the Principles here, like that described at the end of “The Great Year of the Ancients” (AVB 263). However, while the Principles no doubt
manifest themselves in this historical document, particularly at the cardinal points, the movement which
Yeats describes is one of gradual progression from East to West, and so is best illustrated by reference to the
Faculties, rather than the Principles, which can only “shine through” (AVB 89) at the polarities of history.
This approximation may be inspired by Strzygowski’s assertion that Islam, Buddhism and Christianity
were all “southern religions” which encroached on Mazdaism (OCCA 19).
Yeats’s confusion of Aryan East with Semitic at this point explains why Yeats groups South and East together as “human form” and North and West together as “superhuman form,” the one loosely antithetical,
the other loosely primary. Whitaker is wrong to group North and East together as primary “Symbolic
Asia,” and South and West as antithetical, since this stems from a belief that the portrayal of Strzygowski’s
East in “The Great Year of the Ancients” is entirely consistent with its use in “Dove or Swan” (Whitaker,
Swan and Shadow, 84).
As Brian Arkins rightly observes, Yeats is lighting upon the movement called “Iconoclasm,” which in fact
took place between 726–843 CE, and not 560 CE, as the gyres demand. He also notes, however, that “the
Monophysite bishop of Hierapolis in Syria, Xenaias, was a forerunner of Iconoclasm who in 488 banned
icons in his diocese, and Yeats, with his usual insight and fine disregard for chronology, translates him to
the time of the Emperor Leo III in the eighth century,” Brian Arkins, Builders of My Soul: Greek and Roman
Themes in Yeats, Irish Literary Studies 32 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1990), 182.
The concept of cycle cones being either horizontal or perpendicular is contained in “NB6” of the automatic script, where Mrs. Yeats describes how the control described “preliminaries for a diagram of the
cycles” (YVP3 62; 12 December 1920). The “right-angling” of the lunar and solar cones, so that Phase 15
in a solar wheel is East, and South in a lunar wheel, is something which Yeats explicitly uses for the relation between the Principles and the Faculties in the second edition of A Vision (AVB 188; 249), seeing the
right-angling there as involving a right-angling of actual phases as well, so that Phase 15 in the Faculties
“corresponds” to Phase 22 in the Principles (AVB 189).
“…the history of higher mankind fulfils itself in the form of great Cultures, and…one of these Cultures
awoke in West Europe about the year 1000…” (DW1 145).
Leo Frobenius, Paideuma: Umrisse einer Kultur- und Seelenlehre (München: C. Y. Beck’sche Verlagbuchhandlung, 1921 [WBGYL 726; YL 715]).
Leo Frobenius, The Voice of Africa, trans. Rudolf Blind (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1913).
Frobenius sees the Templum amongst the Yorubans of the Sudan, but himself describes the image from the observations of Heinrich Rissen, who had seen it as working in Etruscan culture, and as predicated by the roads go-
“Timeless and Spaceless”?
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
135
ing in a number of directions: “The Romans had four, but the Etruscans, from whom the Romans adopted the
basic idea of the system, had sixteen of these directions. On these lines, then, every such ground-plan expressed
the Templum, i.e., if we translate the meaning of this word freely, the ancient philosophic idea of the universe,”
(The Voice of Africa 1:260–61). Later he writes of how the “unAfrican” Yorubans have “methods of divination”
based on the idea of the Templum (The Voice of Africa, 1:320), confirming a link between both peoples and the
Phoenicians, and hence earlier invasions of the East to the West.
Leo Frobenius, Paideuma: Umrisse einer Kultur- und Seelenlehre (Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurter SocietätsDruckerei, 1928), 95–102 (Spengler was working from the 1921 edition, of which this is a reprint).
Ibid., 105.
Ibid., 106–9.
In a letter to T. Sturge Moore from Rapallo, Yeats writes of how Frobenius, to whose work Pound has
introduced him, “originated the idea that cultures, including arts and sciences, arise out of races as if they
were fruit and leaves in a preordained order” (TSMC 153–54; 17 April 1929).
Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1926 [WBGYL 1136; YL 1126]),
167–68.
In “Introduction to An Indian Monk” (1932), Yeats writes of how “The West impregnated an East full of
spiritual turbulence, and that turbulence brought forth a child Western in complexion and in feature.” However, the “‘tonal values’” of Romantic verse as opposed to the “sense of weight and bulk” found in European
art suggests that “the converse impregnation [East on West] has begun” (CW5 134; E&I 432). These tonal
values are clearly a contrary influx to the anti-figurative art of Modernism, and suggest—as I argued in Yeats,
Coleridge and the Romantic Sage (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000)—a concept of immanence similar to
that in Byzantium, where eastern supersensuality modifies figurative art to create immanence.
W. B. YEATS’S A VISION: “DOVE OR SWAN”
by Matthew DeForrest
A
long with the descriptions of the twenty-eight incarnations that make up the
largest section of “Book I: What the Caliph Partly Learned”and the poems “The
Phases of the Moon” and “All Souls’ Night,” which frame the main text, “Dove or
Swan” is one of the few sections of A Vision that did not undergo a radical revision when
Yeats rewrote his philosophical treatise. Indeed, Yeats goes out of his way in “A Packet for
Ezra Pound” to call attention to these unchanged sections:
The first version of this book, A Vision, except the section on the twenty-eight
phases, and that called “Dove or Swan” which I repeat without change, fills me
with shame. I had misinterpreted the geometry, and in my ignorance of philosophy failed to understand distinctions upon which the coherence of the whole
depended, and as my wife was unwilling that her share should be known, and
I to seem sole author, I had invented an unnatural story of an Arabian traveller
which I must amend and find a place for some day because I was fool enough to
write half a dozen poems that are unintelligible without it. (AVB 19)
If we, for the moment, take this admission at face value, Yeats is essentially stating these two
core texts form the foundation of A Vision (1937). They are the framework of Yeats’s system—
“the hard symbolic bones under the skin” (AVB 24)—upon which he structures his interpretations and understanding of the interchange between the primary and the antithetical.
This foundation, however, is more than metaphor. Because they are constantly grounded in particulars and provide illustrative examples, the description of the twenty-eight incarnations and “Dove or Swan” are the most concrete, comprehensible sections in both
editions. As such, they serve a particular function within A Vision B: they are the specific
expressions of Yeats’s system which follow after and balance against the sections that deal
in the abstractions of the more theoretical and philosophical concepts—a structural balance appropriate to his duality-based system. “The Twenty-eight Incarnations” (Part III of
“Book I: The Great Wheel”) follows the explication of the system’s geometric underpinning
in “The Principal Symbol” and “Examination of the Wheel” (Parts I and II, respectively),
and the theoretical “Book IV: The Great Year of the Ancients” is followed by the concrete
“Book V: Dove or Swan,”1 which outlines, in broad strokes, how the interplay between the
primary and the antithetical plays out in the context of great political, historical, and artistic
movements. This pairing with A Vision A’s “What the Caliph Refused to Learn”—especially
sections X, XV, XVII, and XXII (CW13 121–28, 131–32, 133–37, and 141 respectively;
AVA 149–58, 161–64, 164–69 and 174)—and A Vision B’s “The Great Year of the Ancients”
is what allows Yeats to outline the mechanics of his historical ages in a single paragraph:
One must bear in mind that the Christian Era, like the two thousand years, let
us say, that went before it, is an entire wheel, and each half of it an entire wheel,
that each half when it comes to its 28th Phase reaches the 15th Phase or the 1st
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision: “Dove or Swan”
137
Phase of the entire era. It follows therefore that the 15th Phase of each millennium, to keep the symbolic measure of time, is Phase 8 or Phase 22 of the entire
era, that Aphrodite rises from a stormy sea, that Helen could not be Helen but
for beleaguered Troy. The era itself is but half of a greater era and its Phase 15
comes also at a period of war or trouble. The greater number is always more
primary than the lesser and precisely because it contains it. A millennium is the
symbolic measure of a being that attains its flexible maturity and then sinks into
rigid age. (AVB 267–68; cf. CW13 150; AVA 180)2
These mechanics explain both the diagram of the historical cones which precedes them
(AVB 266; CW13 147; AVA unnumbered page between [178] and 179) and the nature
of Yeats’s descriptions of the eras, which are comparatively illustrated—Ionic vs. Doric
columns (AVB 270; CW13 152; AVA 182), the eyes of Greek vs. Roman statues (AVB
276–77; CW13 156–57; AVA 187), and the Basilica of Hagia Sophia vs. that of St. Peter
(AVB 281–82; CW13 160; AVA 193).
Yet before beginning an examination of the particulars of “Dove or Swan,” we must
not overlook the two other works carried over from A Vision A: “The Phases of the Moon”
and “All Souls’ Night: An Epilogue”—the two poems that bookend the explicatory sections of A Vision. These also remain for a purpose. As Yeats would write at the end of his
life, “Man can embody truth but he cannot know it” (L 922): such embodiment, within
writing, is more likely to be found in the connotation of art than the denotation of exposition. It was a contrast Yeats considered in the field of spiritual architecture, mentioned
above, during his discussion of the Christian era in “Dove or Swan”:
If I were left to myself I would make Phase 15 coincide with Justinian’s reign,
that great age of building in which one may conclude Byzantine art was perfected; but the meaning of the diagram may be that a building like St. Sophia,
where all, to judge by the contemporary description, pictured ecstasy, must unlike the declamatory St. Peter’s precede the moment of climax. (AVB 281–82;
CW13 160; AVA 193)
Even before the publication of his system in 1925, he had been asking readers to explore
his system through his art—supported with notes when he felt it important to make a
point particularly clear. Indeed, these artistic expressions—whether these two poems or
others, like “The Second Coming” or Purgatory—are more successful transmissions of
his system. Because they do not try and delineate detail, they are simultaneously dancer
and dance (“Among School Children,” VP 446, l. 64; CW1 221) and, therefore, are free
to reveal and transmit truth in a holistic sense. This is why Yeats chose to open “Dove
or Swan” with “Leda and the Swan,” a poem that was created, as will be explored more
fully below, to embody what would be explained while incorporating his poetry into his
explication. The poetry serves to embody his system and, as a result, offers readers a clearer
understanding of what they are reading.
This consistent content and form underscores the importance of these sections not
only to the writing but to the writer as well. That “Dove or Swan” is important to both
versions of A Vision is evident not only within the text but in its earliest explicit appear-
138
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
ance in the automatic script in April 1918,3 as George Mills Harper indicates in his The
Making of Yeats’s “A Vision”: A Study of the Automatic Script:
…George did not want to experiment while they were staying at Coole.
Nevertheless, Yeats was insistent. He was anxious to know if they could “apply funnel [the initial diagram of how the phases applied to history] to human
history.”
…Disregarding bad conditions and George’s lack of enthusiasm, Yeats returned to the subject of the funnel and human history. In an involved and somewhat uncertain series of questions he sought to discover or establish some of the
details which the theory of history in “Dove or Swan” projects. (MYV2 2–3)
While Yeats’s long-standing interest in the transformation of the world through annunciation, seen in The Tables of the Law [and] The Adoration of the Magi (1897),4 and the fall of
civilization, already “a persistent intuition of his” 1912,5 meant that these scripts doubtless attracted his attention, there was quickly more to it than his usual millennial fever.
Harper’s analysis demonstrates that Yeats’s insistence on and interest in the revelation of
the historical dates and the mechanism behind them directly translate into poetry—particularly “The Second Coming” (MYV2 13).
While it would be reasonable to take Yeats at his word that “Dove or Swan” is reproduced “without change,” as quoted above, there are some significant changes in the text
of A Vision B. The most significant difference is the addition of a two-page coda, strangely
left out of the Contents,6 entitled “The End of the Cycle” (AVB 301–2). As Neil Mann
points out, this section actually replaces “the final five pages dealing with the current
period, and the near future,”7 and Mann argues this is likely a hedge on Yeats’s part—a
movement away from pronouncements on his own era and prophecies of its immediate
future towards a more generalized vision of transformation he believed was “passing, or to
come” (“Sailing to Byzantium,” VP 408, l. 32; CW1 198).
This hedging is not, strange as it may seem, based in a need for Yeats to disavow
particulars. As can be seen in the following example, much of the material presented concerns art and literature and the rest is made up of abstracted and generalized comparisons
between near-future society and societies of the past:
A decadence will descend, by perpetual moral improvement, upon a community
which may seem like some woman of New York or Paris who has renounced her
rouge pot to lose her figure and grow coarse of skin and dull of brain, feeding her
calves and babies somewhere upon the edge of the wilderness. The decadence of
the Greco-Roman world with its violent soldiers and its mahogany dark young
athletes was as great, but that suggested the bubbles of life turned into marbles,
whereas what awaits us, being democratic and primary, may suggest bubbles in a
frozen pond—mathematical Babylonian starlight. (CW13 176; AVA 213)
Indeed, for most scholars of the literature of the period, these five pages are a loss, as they
include public statements by Yeats on high Modernism and the men we still most associate with it:
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision: “Dove or Swan”
139
I find at this 23rd Phase which is it is said the first where there is hatred of the abstract, where the intellect turns upon itself, Mr Ezra Pound, Mr Eliot, Mr Joyce,
Signor Pirandello, who either eliminate from metaphor the poet’s phantasy and
substitute a strangeness discovered by historical or contemporary research or
who break up the logical processes of thought by flooding them with associated ideas or words that seem to drift into the mind by chance; or who set side
by side as in Henry IV, The Waste Land, Ulysses, the physical primary—a lunatic
among his keepers, a man fishing behind a gas works, the vulgarity of a single
Dublin day prolonged through 700 pages—and the spiritual primary delirium,
the Fisher King, Ulysses’ wandering. It is as though myth and fact, united until
the exhaustion of the Renaissance, have now fallen so far apart that man understands for the first time the rigidity of fact, and calls up, by that very recognition,
myth—the Mask—which now but gropes its way out of the mind’s dark but will
shortly pursue and terrify. (CW13 174–75; cf. AVA 211–12)
From a poet who immersed himself in and drew upon myth, this must be seen as being
damning as well as descriptive. As Foster indicates and others have shown, Yeats kept loyal
to tradition and kept the modernity these younger writers embraced at arm’s length: “‘Talk
to me of originality and I will turn on you with a rage. I am a crowd, I am a lonely voice, I
am nothing. Ancient salt is the best packing.’ Thus Pound (and others) receive again their
come-uppance, and the phantasmagoria is asserted once more” (Life2 591; quoting CW5
213; E&I 522). While this may have set him at odds with writers he admired, Yeats cannot
be characterized as one who shied away from a fight—even with his friends. Avoiding such
disagreements, then, cannot have been the root cause of the change.
A desire not to be wrong because he feared he might have missed something, however,
could be a cause for removing this section. Yeats freely admitted in a paragraph cut from
“A Packet for Ezra Pound” that some of this might be a result of a generational difference:
It is almost impossible to understand the art of a generation younger than one’s
own. I was wrong about “Ulysses” when I had read but some first fragments,
and I do not want to be wrong again—above all in judging verse. Perhaps when
the sudden Italian spring has come I may have discovered what will seem all the
more, because the opposite of all I have attempted, unique and unforgettable.
(PEP 4)
Yeats liked and praised Pound, Eliot, and Joyce but he found their work strange and, despite critics’ attempts to include him among the Modernists, alien. This difference—especially as he worked on a system that dealt with mutually exclusive but equally valued opposites—may have been enough for him to reconsider his pronouncements of A Vision A.
As with the aesthetic, political concerns influenced his decision to withdraw these
pages. The five pages excised, however, do not contain dates of things that did not occur.
The only date given in this section talks of an age beginning rather than a completed action: “During the period said to commence in 1927, with the 11th gyre, must arise a form
of philosophy, which will become religious and ethical in the 12th gyre and be in all things
opposite of that vast plaster Herculean image, final primary thought” (CW13 177; AVA
140
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
214). And while this apparent reference to the future importance of his own system may
have later seemed too grandiose a claim, given what he writes in A Vision B’s “The End
of the Cycle,” discussed below, he had not made any concrete predictions that had been
proved wrong between the first and second edition.
A more likely explanation for his pulling back is found in the political landscape of
the period. As Foster points out, that which seemed a fait accompli in the 1920s had not
come to pass by the mid-1930s:
WBY had anticipated political reconstruction through totalitarian rule in Europe
since 1919; indeed, he was increasingly sceptical about the efficacy (and benefits)
of democratic government. He admired, like many, the apparent achievements
of modern Italy in the 1920s, but in terms which might not be immediately
recognizable nowadays. He had told MacGreevy ten years before that Mussolini
“represented the rise of the individual man as against what he considered the
anti-human party machine,” which seems, in retrospect, to have interpreted the
movement exactly the wrong way round. (Life2 468)
This reversal had, by the early 1930s, literally arrived on his doorstep in the person of
General Eoin O’Duffy, the leader of Ireland’s para-fascist Blueshirt Movement. As Yeats
considered the movement, and his involvement in it, his system was in the forefront of his
mind (Life2 473–74). That Yeats increasingly found himself in opposition to O’Duffy’s
principles—most notably “O’Duffy’s aggressive Catholicism” (Life2 475) and the absence
of a move toward a meritocratic aristocracy—and watched the Blueshirt Movement wither and die under pressure brought by then President Éamon de Valera. These events and
others must have given pause and made him reconsider the certainty with which he made
some of his pronouncements.
Although it is likely that, rather than any one thing, all of the above-mentioned influences
played a part in his decision to remove these pages, Yeats’s withdrawal of these five pages is a tacit
admission that the period between 1925 and 1934 had not turned out as he believed it would.
If, for whatever reason, Yeats felt the need to abandon the particulars of his claim for
the near future, he does not appear willing to abandon the images and metaphors he used
to express them. As seen here, he retains them in “The End of the Cycle”:
Shall we follow the image of Heracles that walks through the darkness bow in
hand, or mount to that other Heracles, man, not image, he that has for his bride
Hebe, “The daughter of Zeus the mighty and Hera shod with gold”? (AVB 302)
The change from declamation to introspection is a rhetorical one rather than one based on
a shift in content and follows a pattern seen elsewhere. During the period of the automatic
script, Yeats had to readjust his thinking more than once because of inaccurate prophecies
and utterances. The communicators’ most infamous mistake was their mistaking Anne Yeats
for a boy (MYV1 226).8 This was not, however, an isolated instance. They mistakenly assured Yeats that World War I would enter into violent, combative phase in 1918 rather than
wind down—the end, in a session dated 23 February 1918, they had predicted for 1919
(MYV1 211). While such inconsistencies would have naturally made Yeats leery of main-
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision: “Dove or Swan”
141
taining predictions in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, what it did not do,
however, was force him to abandon his belief in the greater truth of his system, a position
he staked out in “A Packet for Ezra Pound,” rewritten for its inclusion in the 1937 edition:
Some will ask whether I believe in the actual existence of my circuits of sun and
moon. Those that include, now all recorded time in one circuit, now what Blake
called “the pulsation of an artery,” are plainly symbolical, but what of those fixed,
like a butterfly upon a pin, to our central date, the first day of our Era, divide
actual history into periods of equal length? To such a question I can but answer
that if sometimes, overwhelmed by miracle as all men must be when in the midst
of it, I have taken such periods literally, my reason has soon recovered; and now
that the system stands out clearly in my imagination I regard them as stylistic arrangements of experience comparable to the cubes in the drawing of Wyndham
Lewis and to the ovoids in the sculpture of Brancusi. They have helped me to
hold in a single thought reality and justice. (AVB 24–25)
It is best to approach the particulars of “Dove or Swan” with this conditional acceptance
of the communicators’ message in mind—for more than one reason. Rather than see
“Dove or Swan” as a section of iron-clad analyses supported by a series of facts with historical certainty—arranged like butterflies set upon pins—it should be read as a series of
“stylistic arrangements of experience.” These arrangements allowed Yeats to hold historical
moments and artistic movements in some kind of meaningful order rather than leaving
them unsupervised and disordered within “the bundle of accident and incoherence that
sits down to breakfast” (CW5 204; E&I 509).
In doing so, the constancy of the prose sections common to A Vision A and A Vision
B becomes comprehensible. The first, the description of the twenty-eight incarnations,
provides a shorthand for understanding and classifying individuals within a larger system—much as a contemporary reader might use the shorthand of newspaper astrology to
classify people without necessarily believing in the influence of fixed stars and planets that
undergirds astrology. Thus, an individual artist can be explained via the phase he occupies.
What is left unexplained by this is how individuals are able successfully to navigate the
place and age they find themselves in or the movements they create or react against. For
that, the historical eras detailed in “Dove or Swan” become a similar kind of shorthand.
The system of A Vision was offered to Yeats as more than a theoretical guide to artistic and historical movements, though. The primary motivation for the entire exercise, as
the communicators reminded Yeats, was “to give [him] metaphors for poetry” (AVB 8).
As such, it is informative to read the above passage alongside its poetic equivalent—“A
Meditation in Time of War”:
For one throb of the artery,
While on that old grey stone I sat
Under the old wind-broken tree,
I knew that One is animate,
Mankind inanimate phantasy. (VP 406; CW1 192)
142
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Here, we see the above-quoted philosophical discussion of A Vision transformed directly
into poetry. Individual phrases and images remain constant across both—the reference to
William Blake’s moment of inspiration being tied to the heartbeat in his long prophetic
poem Milton, for example:9
Every Time less than a pulsation of the artery
Is equal in its period & value to Six Thousand Years.
For in this Period the Poets Work is Done: and all of the Great
Events of Time start forth & are conceived in such a Period
Within a Moment: a Pulsation of the Artery.10
So too does the theme that what may appear to be inconsistencies are limitations of vision
when seen from the vantage point of the whole, because it is we who are the imagined
rather than we who imagine and understand.
The most obvious associations between the explication of “Dove or Swan” and the
poetry, of course, are the poems of his own that Yeats, in part or whole, incorporated into
the text: “Leda and the Swan” (AVB 267; CW13 150; AVA 179: more strictly “Leda,” see
below), “Under the Round Tower” (AVB 270),11 “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes” (CW13 176; AVA 213), and “Conjunctions” (AVB 302). Giving pride of place to
“Leda and the Swan” clearly marks it as the most important of the four for understanding
both the section and its relationship to art, history, and politics.
Before beginning, however, it should be stressed that this is not an exercise in which
A Vision comes, like some scholarly-minded communicator, to give us footnotes for the
poetry. These poems, because Yeats has integrated them into the text of “Dove or Swan,”
are both illustrations of the ideas in the section as well as examples of how those ideas are
incorporated into poetic and, by extension, other artistic works.
An understanding of this relationship between “Dove or Swan” and “Leda and the
Swan”12 must begin with the note Yeats provided for the poem:
I wrote Leda and the Swan because the editor of a political review asked me for
a poem. I thought, “After the individualist, demagogic movement, founded by
Hobbes and popularized by the Encyclopaedists and the French Revolution, we
have a soil so exhausted that it cannot grow that crop again for centuries.” Then
I thought, “Nothing is now possible but some movement from above preceded
by some violent annunciation.” My fancy began to play with Leda and the Swan
for metaphor, and I began this poem; but as I wrote, bird and lady took such
possession of the scene that all politics went out of it, and my friend tells me that
his “conservative readers would misunderstand the poem.” (VP 828; CW1 664)
While Yeats claims the direct applicability to contemporary politics—glossed by Daniel
Albright as a movement “towards Mussolini and authoritarian government” (EP 664)—
has left the poem, he does not claim that its applicability to history has also left. Indeed,
his decision to place it at the opening of “Dove or Swan” implies that this applicability
grew as the other faded and the interplay between the personal tragedy and impersonal
history, as brought together by the moment of annunciation, took center stage.
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143
Its role as annunciation—the first that he believes can be traced in the current historic
and mythological record—allows it to serve an illustrative role similar to his use of Blake’s
“The Mental Traveller” in A Vision A. As he has implied by quoting Heraclitus’s dictum
“‘Dying each other’s life, living each other’s death’” and explained in “The Great Year of
the Ancients,” a historical age is birthed by an incarnation of its opposite Tincture:
When our historical era approaches Phase 1, or the beginning of a new era, the antithetical East will beget upon the primary West and the child or era so born will be
antithetical. The primary child or era is predominantly western, but because begotten
upon the East, eastern in body, and if I am right in thinking that my instructors imply not only the symbolical but the geographical East, Asiatic. Only when that body
begins to wither can the Western Church predominate visibly. (AVB 257)
Each annunciation, therefore, is equal in weight but, because it reverses the values of
society, simultaneously sacred and heretical: “What if every two thousand and odd years
something happens in the world to make one sacred, the other secular; one wise, the other
foolish; one fair, the other foul; one divine, the other devilish?” (AVB 29). The annunciation of the Rough Beast, therefore, is that of the Anti-Christ who will bring the Christian
era to an end. Christ, the product of the Marian annunciation, is the Anti-Helen who
brings the heroic, pagan era to an end. Helen, along with her brothers and sister, is the
product of the Ledaean annunciation that brought about the end of the era based on an
ideal found in Babylonian astrology that preceded the heroic age.
While the relationship between these annunciations is clear, the Tincture associated
with each avatar is a potential point of confusion. Because the avatars, more than most incarnations, are tied to a Tincture through the era they create, it is tempting to view them as
a pure embodiment of either the primary or antithetical—physical embodiments of Phases 1
and 15, which Yeats identified as being “a supernatural or ideal existence” (AVB 77):
Phase 1 and Phase 15 are not human incarnations because human life is impossible without strife between the tinctures. They belong to an order of existence
which we shall consider presently. (AVB 79)
As the avatars belong to a different order of existence, the question becomes whether they
are fundamentally human incarnations and, as such, cannot be physical manifestations of
the primary and antithetical extremes of the Great Wheel, or they are supernatural incarnations and, as such, are the exceptions to the rule that Phases 1 and 15 do not incarnate.
While, as we shall see, the system contains strange complexities when addressing the
avatars, A Vision is clear on one point: the avatar of the antithetical age that preceded the
Christian era was not a physical manifestation of either Phase 1 or Phase 15, as is seen
in the text detailing the nature of Phase 14: “Here are born those women who are most
touching in their beauty. Helen was of the phase…” (AVB 132; CW13 56; AVA 67).
Based on the placement of Helen, we would expect to find Christ either placed or
used as an example in either Phase 28 or 2. Instead, these draw their examples from the
Fool of the Tarot deck and William Watson’s “Epigrams II: The Play of ‘King Lear’” for
Phase 28 (AVB 182; CW13 93; AVA 115–16) and from Blake’s “Mental Traveller” and
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
144
Keats’ Endymion for Phase 2 (AVB 106; CW13 35–6; AVA 39–40). Given that the Tinctures are supposed to be opposite one another, the example of Christ comes at the place we
would least likely expect the avatar of the primary, Christian era—Phase 15:
Even for the most perfect, there is a time of pain, a passage through a vision,
where evil reveals itself in its final meaning. In this passage Christ, it is said,
mourned over the length of time and the unworthiness of man’s lot to man,
whereas his forerunner mourned and his successor will mourn over the shortness
of time and the unworthiness of man to his lot; but this cannot yet be understood. (AVB 136–37; CW13 59–60; AVA 71)
This clustering of the avatars at or near Phase 15 defies the logic of the simple primaryantithetical dynamic at the center of Yeats’s system. While complex, it appears to address a
mechanism found in the 9 February 1921 entry in Notebook 6 (YVP3 69) and, as quoted
here, Card File entry F27, detailing the Fountains found in AVA:13
“First Masters are in Sphere which is objective to those outside—2nd & 3rd
Masters in cycles 13 & 14 respectively. Phase of master not that of age he is born
in but opposite Phase of Christ 15 Second Master 16. 17. 18 (this is muddle
—see cardinal points on Wheel). (YVP3 308–9)
This placement of Christ is counterintuitive. Christ, as the avatar of the primary age, should
be born at the height of an antithetical civilization or, at best, the border between the two
religious dispensations but, as the being who opens or creates the era, erring on the side of
the antithetical. The communicators, however, had declared that Christ’s birth came after
the beginning of the primary era and that the next avatar—the Rough Beast of “The Second
Coming”—would come before its end, which obviously puzzled Yeats: “Why was C[hrist]
born so long after the start of cycle & why is new coming so long before its end” (YVP1 467)?
This was strange enough for Yeats, as is seen above, to worry that he had muddled the
explanation. Puzzling though this may have been (and may still be), the communicators
explained on 27 June 1918 that the avatars are “independent of all” (YVP1 295) and, as
Yeats summarized in Card File entry C32, “They are the types of saint reincarnated…out
side phase.” Yet this card undermines its own clarification by placing Christ and the Buddha “after 25 & before 1” (YVP3 260).
Likewise, the text of A Vision resists answering this question in these terms. Indeed,
it appears to go out of its way to reject the distinction:
From the Semitic East [Josef Strzygowski] derives all art which associates Christ
with the attributes of royalty. It substitutes Christ Pantokrator for the bearded
mild Hellenic Christ, makes the Church hierarchical and powerful. The East, in
my symbolism, whether in the circle of the Principles or the Faculties, is always
human power, whether Will or Spirit, stretched to its utmost. (AVB 257)
How can an avatar, who should stand as one of the most starkly clear figures in human
history, be so fluid? While an initial response would be to associate Christ-as-avatar with
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145
the plastic primary, such an explanation would require that the previous, multiple avatar—Helen, Clytemnestra, Castor, and Pollux14—have a fixed antithetical image. They, of
course, do not. While the explanation that Christ is functioning as a Mask or Daimon for
the Christian era feels like a way out, it has no explicit grounding in A Vision and does not
align with the placement of Helen at Phase 14.
The crux of the problem lies not with the avatars but with our viewpoint, which is
trapped within the realm of the antinomies. As indicated on Card File entry F27, quoted
above, the Sphere appears objective from the vantage point of this world (YVP3 308).
Within the eternal realm of the Thirteenth Cone, however, the antinomies are resolved
and beings can be both primary and antithetical, as Yeats described in the final section of
“Sailing to Byzantium” (VP 408, ll. 25-32; CW1 198). Yeats, albeit indirectly, places the
avatars within the Thirteenth Cone:
[It] is always called by my instructors the Thirteenth Cycle or Thirteenth Cone,
for every month is a cone. It is that cycle which may deliver us from the twelve
cycles of time and space. The cone which intersects ours is a cone in so far as
we think of it as the antithesis to our thesis, but if the time has come for our
deliverance it is the phaseless sphere, sometimes called the Thirteenth Sphere, for
every lesser cycle contains within itself a sphere that is, as it were, the reflection
or messenger of the final deliverance. Within it live all souls that have been set
free and every Daimon and Ghostly Self… (AVB 210–11)
Thus, the avatars, described above as “types of saint reincarnated…out side phase” (YVP3
260), pass through tinctured reality as a kind of bodhisattva of the Thirteenth Cone. Yet
we, like the two-dimensional denizens of Edwin Abbot’s Flatland: A Romance of Many
Dimensions (1884), cannot see the avatar’s totality, as Yeats implied when discussing the
metaphorical depiction of the movement from one Principle to the next:
The resolved antinomy appears not in a lofty source but in the whirlpool’s motionless
centre or beyond its edge.*
* The whirlpool is an antithetical symbol, the descending water a primary. (AVB 195)
The metaphor of whirlpool or descending water is based not on the thing represented but
our viewpoint when perceiving it. This shifting of image as the viewer observes primary
and antithetical annunciations has significant implications for Yeats’s creative works as well
as his depiction of the historical cones.
Yeats symbolically places the Ledaean annunciation at the start of the historical cycle
that begins in 2000 BCE. The actual “historic” date of Leda, of course, is somewhat later
(likely somewhere in the 1300 to 1200 BCE range) and it is certain Yeats was aware of
this. Were he concerned with a purely mechanical view of his system, or exact precision in
prophecy, this would be a problem. Indeed, a careful reading of both editions of A Vision
demonstrates that he does not attempt to place the rape of Leda at 2000 BCE.15 As quoted
above, Yeats was interested in “stylistic arrangements of experience” that brought order
to his understanding of things and he is careful to not make the Ledaean annunciation a
historical moment, dealing, instead, in symbolic time:
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
146
I imagine the annunciation that founded Greece as made to Leda, remembering
that they showed in a Spartan temple, strung up to the roof as a holy relic, an
unhatched egg of hers; and that from one of her eggs came Love and from the
other War. But all things are from antithesis, and when in my ignorance I try
to imagine what older civilisation that annunciation rejected I can but see bird
and woman blotting out some corner of the Babylonian mathematical starlight.
(AVB 268; cf. CW13 151; AVA 181)16
While his note in A Vision B citing Toynbee’s A Study of History raises two paths of exploration—the replacement of Minoan or Babylonian preeminence with Mycenaean dominance—understanding what he is attempting to accomplish with the placement of “Leda
and the Swan” does not require such specificity. It is the destruction of the decadent
but civilized East, as embodied in Asiatic Troy,17 by the energetic but barbaric West, as
embodied in Mycenaean Greece, and the high cost to all those involved, whether Trojan
or Greek: “The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead” (ll.
10–11). Only such a complete destruction, Yeats would argue, would be sufficient to
prevent us from getting more than a glimpse “of the Babylonian mathematical starlight”
which preceded it.18 He states as much in the paragraph preceding his description of the
era stretching from 2000 BCE to 1 CE:
A civilisation is a struggle to keep self-control, and in this it is like some great
tragic person, some Niobe who must display an almost superhuman will or the
cry will not touch our sympathy. The loss of control over thought comes towards
the end; first a sinking in upon the moral being, then the last surrender, the irrational cry, revelation—the scream of Juno’s peacock. (AVB 268; CW13 150;
AVA 180)
A peacock’s scream was, according to classical and medieval bestiaries, supposed to inspire
fear. Yeats could have limited himself to citing one of these or leaving the association open
to the reader. Instead, he specifically ties the terror-inducing scream to the story of Juno
(Hera to the Greeks) and Io—another rape myth involving Zeus. This particular section
of the myth, of course, involves Hermes, who lulls to sleep and then kills many-eyed Argus, whom Hera had set to watch over Io. It is Argus’s eyes that are set by Hera into the
peacock’s tail. Hermes is also the messenger who sends the three brothers from western
Ireland to Paris in search of “a dying woman [who] would give them secret names and
thereby so transform the world that another Leda would open her knees to the swan”
(Myth 310; M2005 202).
Present in all these stories, however, is the coupling of this terror to the possibility
of revelation at the moment when terror so overwhelms that only surrender is possible:
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? (VP 441, ll. 11–14; CW1 218)
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision: “Dove or Swan”
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This is different from the description offered by Hermes, who sees such things from the
viewpoint of a god—akin to the shift between primary and antithetical viewpoints discussed above—of the “woman who has been driven out of Time and has lain upon the
bosom of Eternity” (“The Adoration of the Magi,” Myth 312; M2005 203). The question
is whether Leda, like the woman in “The Adoration of the Magi,” learned in her terror.
It is also worth noting here that, while the references to the poem thus far denote the
canonical title, they are incorrect in the context of this analysis. Both editions of A Vision
employ a shorter title: “Leda” (AVB 267; CW13 149; AVA 179). The absence of the title
supplied to The Dial and used in The Tower creates a significant shift in the meaning of
the poem. So long as both are present in the title, Zeus and Leda are given equal billing
and, as such, a certain parity of significance within the poem. Likewise, by keeping them
connected in a way that parallels the personae of Blake’s “The Mental Traveller,” Zeus is
seen as the active force imposing himself on the passive Leda. Removing “the Swan” does
more than place Leda’s personal pain and loss on the same plane as Niobe’s, mentioned
in the section quoted above. Moving “the Swan” to the title of the book within A Vision
simultaneously gives a kind of equality to the two annunciations that will be discussed and
impersonalizes Zeus’s presence—making him less a god acting out of lust or, as is the case
in “The Adoration of the Magi,” actively choosing to “overthrow the things that are to-day
and bring the things that were yesterday” (Myth 312; M2005 203), and more a being used
by the powers inhabiting the Thirteenth Cone to engender the coming antithetical age.19
As such, he matches the description found for those primary beings inhabiting Phase 1:
Mind has become indifferent to good and evil, to truth and falsehood; body has
become undifferentiated, dough-like; the more perfect be the soul, the more
indifferent the mind, the more dough-like the body; and mind and body take
whatever shape, accept whatever image is imprinted upon them, transact whatever purpose is imposed upon them, are indeed the instruments of supernatural
manifestation, the final link between the living and more powerful beings. (AVB
183; CW13 94; AVA 116)
This plasticity of form is represented within the poem through the fragmentary description
of the swan, which is present only in its parts rather than ever being seen as a whole20—a
technique he also employs when describing the Rough Beast21 in “The Second Coming”
exclusively through its component parts:
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. (VP 402, ll. 14–17; CW1 189–90)
The multiple nature of the Ledaean annunciation—a fragmentation of love and war as
embodied in multiple individuals, as seen in the above passage from the beginning of
“Dove or Swan,” is clearly contrasted with the single revelatory birth of a perfectly proportioned man: “the tradition is founded which declares even to our own day that Christ
alone was exactly six feet high, perfect physical man” (AVB 273; CW13 154; AVA 185).
148
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Herein lies one of the complexities resulting from the shifting viewpoint from primary to antithetical, as raised above in connection with the avatars. One of the inherent
challenges with any analysis of the system is that each of the Tinctures reflects and is attracted to the other. In those moments when the reflections and attractions become critical, many of the words we use to describe elements of the system can be used to describe
both the primary and the antithetical. This cannot be done arbitrarily, however. Take, for
example, the drive towards pure individuality found at Phase 15—the extreme expression
of the antithetical. This phase produces an extreme form of individuality unity—one so
self-absorbed it cannot conceive of anything outside of itself or its own thought: “nothing
is apparent but dreaming Will and the Image that it dreams” (AVB 135; cf. CW13 58; AVA
70).22 Such a state of being is as singular as possible. This, however, initially appears to
be at odds with Yeats’s own characterization of the antithetical as “multiple” (AVB 263).23
And yet this multiplicity is one born of fragmentation at the societal level—one that
separates the individual from the societal whole. Indeed, Yeats points out in the description to Phase 15 in “The Phases of the Moon” that inhabitants of this phase fall back into
incarnation at Phase 16 because of a desire for others—they grow lonely:
Robartes. And after that the crumbling of the moon:
The soul remembering its loneliness
Shudders in many cradles; all is changed… (VP 375, ll. 87–89; CW1 167)
The reverse, of course, is true of Phase 1 and the primary. The individual falls completely
into the group—a drive towards a corporate unity but one that produces a whole that is
composed of many parts.
This tension can be seen in the contrast between the descriptions of the First and
Third Masters in Yeats’s notes:
First Master monotheistic. monotheism breaks up unity. Instead of unifying it
characterizes by the importance it gives to the individual.
Second Master philosophical.
Third Master. Polytheistic. Polytheism unifies. It adapts its self to each personality. It unifies races as well as individuals. (YVP3 65)
In each of these descriptions, Yeats focuses on the relationship of the belief system to the
believers. From this vantage point, for example, the common set of Greek myths can be
seen as providing a unity to the larger Greek world—whether it is on mainland Greece,
in Syracuse, or in Asia Minor. Nevertheless, polytheism advocates the direct opposite of
unity when considering the godhead, which is, by definition, multiple.
For the majority of Yeats’s work, outside those like A Vision and “The Phases of the
Moon” that describe the system directly, this tension is only subtly expressed. In his dealings with the heralds of the primary and antithetical ages, however, this tension becomes
more pronounced as one discusses—although, perhaps, not as one experiences—the poems, prose, and plays.
The ultimate distinction between these apparently conflicting characterizations of the
primary and the antithetical is driven by whether the focus is on the individual, as in the case
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision: “Dove or Swan”
149
of the heralds of an age or one of the incarnations described in “The Twenty-eight Incarnations,” or on one of the historical eras, which inherently deal in groups. Indeed, as Mann has
pointed out, it becomes even more complex when dealing with the historical cones:
Within the historical cones, it is complicated slightly, because the gyres of civilization and religion are syncopated, so that religion is at the maximum when
civilization is at the minimum; so the antithetical annunciation comes at the
height of primary civilization (or vice versa), and turns the tide.24
Classifying a person or a period of history as primary or antithetical, therefore, is a function of not only the metaphysical forces being applied on the Faculties and Principles but
also on the viewpoint of the observer. If, for example, some kind of external system is
being imposed upon an individual—such as the astrology of Babylon or the Christian
move towards integration into the mass of the congregation—the classification is that of
the fated primary. If, instead, individuals set themselves apart from the mass, as do the
antithetical heroes of the Trojan War, they are classified as antithetical.
That such a tension exists within the system is unsurprising, given two fundamental
and foundational elements: that the ultimate reality is the phaseless sphere that contains
both the primary and antithetical, and that the ultimate drive towards Unity of Being is an
attempt to replicate the phaseless sphere.
In the abstract, this appears to mean little. It is, however, important for the diction of
the poetry. As is discussed above in the discussion of “Leda and the Swan” and “The Second
Coming”—both composed while he was still working through the placement of the Buddha, Christ, and what he called “the Sphynx” (YVP1 468) and their Daimon-like association
with the era they will inspire, the choice of the definite or the indefinite article in the poetry
is used to create an inversion of language and images that represent the totality of the change
from one dispensation to the other. Because of the confusion growing out of Yeats’s shifting
understanding of the associations between the Tinctures and their avatars, the temporary
abandonment of the Tinctures as labels allows for greater clarity as the parallels between the
poems and the use of definite and indefinite language and images are examined.
The individual and particular in these two poems embody one side of the divide, retaining either individual unity or the definite article “the.” Such poetic choices can be seen
in the use of the definite article in “The Second Coming,” where the poem begins with the
“the falcon” and “the falconer” becoming increasingly separated as the primary age they
represent comes to its end (l. 2). It is likewise present in “the staggering girl” of “Leda and
the Swan” (l. 2), who is almost uniquely given a singular, named identity.25
In contrast to these, the fragmentary and multiple are associated with the indefinite
article “a.” In “The Second Coming,” Yeats shifts from using the definite article in the first
octave26 to the indefinite article in the rest of the poem—“A shape with lion’s body” and “A
gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun” (ll. 13-14). This shift, of course, corresponds to Yeats’s
understanding at that period (see Card File entry F27 quoted above, YVP3 308–9), when
he would have characterized the primary Rough Beast as the herald of the coming antithetical era, just as the antithetical Christ had heralded the current primary era. The shift
in imagery is clearly seen in Yeats’s depiction of Zeus in “Leda and the Swan,” where the
bird is represented through its parts (e.g., the “great wings,” “dark webs,” and “bill” of lines
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1 and 3) rather than as a coherent, visible whole. It is worth noting that this also serves to
give the swan a greater sense of immensity (as too big to take in at a single glance). It also
heightens the violence of the annunciation, which shatters the singular Leda into parts
(e.g., “her nape” in line 3 and “those terrified vague fingers” in line 5).
Yeats did not, of course, attempt to make every article match the Tincture he was representing in the poetry. Such an approach would have severely limited his artistic freedom
and would have required weakening the lines he was crafting (consider, for example, the
shift in the sound and rhythm of changing “the” to “a” in the second half of line 14 of “The
Second Coming,” where “the head” would become “a head,” producing an unwanted aural
association with “ahead”). Nevertheless, there is a preponderance of one type of article or
image associated with one Tincture and the other with its opposite in many of the poems.
By highlighting the primary force imposing itself on the antithetical (beautiful of form)
girl, Yeats heightens the contrast with the annunciation most readers will be more familiar
with: that of Mary and the Dove of the title. Here, the primary passivity is clearly seen in
Mary’s response to the news brought to her by Gabriel as found in the Gospel of Luke:
My soul doth magnify the Lord,
And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. (Luke 1:46–48)
Here, it is Mary rather than Zeus who has surrendered herself to be a servant to an active,
higher power: the Holy Spirit as embodied in the form of a Dove.27 This surrender brings
forth the singular, antithetical avatar discussed above. Likewise, Yeats explored the significance, within the context of his system, of Mary’s acceptance and the terror that he imagined accompanied it in the poem “Mother of God”(VP 499 & 832; CW1 253 & 607).28
In contrast with “Leda and the Swan,” which draws the reader’s eye to a moment
of transition brought about by the imposition of one Tincture upon the other, Yeats’s
reference to “Under the Round Tower” reminds the reader that, for most of history, the
primary and antithetical Tinctures are bound together in a mutually supportive dance:
But one must consider not the movement only from the beginning to the end
of the ascending cone, but the gyres that touch its sides, the horizontal dance.
Hands gripped in hands, toes close together,
Hair spread on the wind they made;
That lady and that golden king
Could like a brace of blackbirds sing. (AVB 270)29
As in so many other places, Yeats calls upon the image of dance metaphorically to convey
his meaning. While the particulars of these moments may shift slightly, they all bear a
single meaning: to separate one unit from the other—whether it is the king and queen of
“Under the Round Tower” or the dancer from the dance in “Among School Children”—is
impossible without destroying and/or ending the thing observed.30 Nor can either exist
without the other. Were either the king or queen in “Under the Round Tower” to let go,
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they would fall away and apart. The image, then, is what happens before the moment
of annunciation, of that most quoted of lines from “The Second Coming”: “Things fall
apart; the centre cannot hold” (“The Second Coming,” l. 3).
Yet the moment of annunciation is just that—a moment of extreme tension. The
Tinctures need one another. As quoted above, “Helen could not be Helen but for beleaguered Troy” (AVB 268; CW13 150; AVA 180). At the instant of annunciation, incarnation, or revelation,31 the interchange of the Tinctures occurs.
At Phase 15 and Phase 1 occurs what is called the interchange of the tinctures,
those thoughts, emotions, energies, which were primary before Phase 15 or Phase
1 are antithetical after, those that were antithetical are primary. I was told, for instance, that before the historical Phase 15 the antithetical tincture of the average
European was dominated by reason and desire, the primary by race and emotion,
and that after Phase 15 this was reversed, his subjective nature had been passionate and logical but was now enthusiastic and sentimental. (AVB 89)32
Yeats likely tied this discussion to the historical cones from the outset because the nature
of historical narrative is continuous while the individual’s progression through the twentyeight phases is episodic.
Yeats expresses this moment metaphorically in “The Second Coming,” where the
falcon’s gyring up and out of the falconer’s control is replaced by vultures’ spiraling down
around the Rough Beast (“The Second Coming,” ll. 1–2 and 17). Between the two, as
has been pointed out by Vendler, comes a section where there is a “slide from concreteness (‘the blood-dimmed tide’) to abstraction (‘the ceremony of innocence’).”33 Indeed, as is
indicated in Michael Robartes’s pronouncement in “Stories of Michael Robartes and His
Friends,” Yeats saw the balancing of the primary and antithetical in a mutually supportive
tension, represented in “Under the Round Tower” by the dance, as the symbol for the
“ultimate reality…a phaseless sphere” (AVB 193):
“The marriage bed is the symbol of the solved antinomy, and were more than
symbol could a man there lose and keep his identity, but he falls asleep. That
sleep is the same as the sleep of death.” (AVB 52)
Robartes’s assertion, which retains echoes of the role Blake’s “The Mental Traveller” played
in A Vision A (CW13 107–8; AVA 133–34), is based in the myth in Plato’s Symposium of
mankind once being an androgynous, eight-limbed being that was split by the gods into
male and female, and points out that a man cannot simultaneously be sexually active, and
literally unified with his passive/receiving partner, and post-coitally passive (the moment
when, stereotypically, sexual exhaustion makes sleep unavoidable). At that moment between arousal and sleep, however, husband and wife can lie in peace as one.
This particular union had a long-standing role in the system of A Vision and was, in
“To Vestigia,” one of the two areas he singled out as needing more exploration (CW13
lv; AVA xii). This makes it all the more remarkable that Yeats chose not to call on the
Biblical stories of Solomon and Sheba or his poems about the couple in “Dove or Swan.”
As Albright points out, Solomon and Sheba are idealized depictions of the husband and
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wife team who produced, recorded, and ordered the material that became A Vision (EP
559–60). These poems, as well as the stories of the liaison which inspired them, appear
tailor-made to carry some of the matter Yeats wished his readers to understand.
Yeats returns to this image of a dancer-performer and her male audience when considering the exhaustion of both the heroic and Christian eras as they begin the shift into
the next age. In the first case, he takes for his image the dance of Salome:
When I think of the moment before revelation I think of Salome—she, too,
delicately tinted or maybe mahogany dark—dancing before Herod and receiving the Prophet’s head in her indifferent hands, and wonder if what seems to us
decadence was not in reality the exaltation of the muscular flesh and of civilisation perfectly achieved. Seeking images, I see her anoint her bare limbs according to a medical prescription of that time, with lion’s fat, for lack of the sun’s
ray, that she may gain the favour of a king, and remember that the same impulse
will create the Galilean revelation and deify Roman Emperors whose sculptured
heads will be surrounded by the solar disk. Upon the throne and upon the cross
alike the myth becomes a biography. (AVB 273; cf. CW13 154; AVA 185)
Set in opposition to this moment is another performer and her audience. In this case,
however, it is a Christian bishop who now holds earthly power and is being swayed by the
beautiful girl:
A certain Byzantine Bishop had said upon seeing a singer of Antioch, “I looked
long upon her beauty, knowing that I would behold it upon the day of judgment, and I wept to remember that I had taken less care of my soul than she of
her body,” but when in the Arabian Nights Harun Al-Rashid looked at the singer
Heart’s Miracle, and on the instant loved her, he covered her head with a little
silk veil to show that her beauty “had already retreated into the mystery of our
faith.” The Bishop saw a beauty that would be sanctified, but the Caliph that
which was its own sanctity, and it was this latter sanctity, come back from the
first Crusade or up from Arabian Spain or half-Asiatic Provence and Sicily, that
created romance. (AVB 285–86; cf. CW13 163; AVA 197)
Yeats blends these two stories—intentionally or as a result of some internal synchronistic
drive—to heighten their role as exemplars of parallel historical moments. As before, he
does this through an imaginative act. “Seeking an image,” he warns the reader, he describes Salome anointing her arm with lion’s fat. What he does not point out, however, is
where he takes this detail from. Harper and Paul, in their notes to A Vision A, show that
the reference to the prescription for lion fat is mentioned in his diary of 1930 (CW13 297)
along with the story of the bishop, drawn from “The Life of St. Pelagia the Harlot,” which
Yeats called on in The Celtic Twilight (CW13 306): “Where did I pick up that story of the
Byzantine bishop and the singer of Antioch, where learn that to anoint your body with
the fat of a lion ensured the favour of a king?” (Ex 291).
Yeats’s association of this detail with both stories further demonstrates what he saw as
the contrast of how men of power, at these inverted historical moments, react to the gyres’
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syncopated fugue. Salome’s dance is simultaneously the swan song of the pre-Christian
religious era and the overture for the rise of Christianity. Yet it also comes at the height of
pagan civilization, when the second of many Caesars sits secure in Rome. Herod, his client
king, enjoys the sensuality of the dance while fearing the power of the beheaded ascetic. A
thousand years on, when the Christian religion has reached its height and Christendom,
its civilization, is coming into being, the Bishop will fear the latent threat of the singer’s
sexuality—an inherent challenge to the maxim that learning enters through the ear while
sin enters through the eye.
Even if he had not blurred his sources, their structures mirror one another. In each
case, the representative of that age’s Will looks upon its Mask and senses its own destruction—“‘Or transformation,’” to choose the preference of Owen Aherne when describing
such encounters between East and West (AVB 50). Whether destruction or transformation, however, neither can exist or be aware without the other. One of the results of the
clash between the way the Bishop reacts to his singer and the way the Caliph reacts to his
singer is the creation of a new artistic mode—that of medieval romance. In each of the historical eras described, such an interplay takes place, where the conflicting visions induced
by the expression of the primary and the antithetical are shown to express the Gestalt of the
particular moment. This is one of the fundamental beliefs Yeats maintained throughout
his life and caused, at times, some strife between himself and his more politically inclined
contemporaries, especially Maud Gonne: that while an artist might express something political in his art, it did not begin in politics. Instead, the artist expressed something about
the world around him, which, naturally, includes the political.
Although it comes from a section not quoted in A Vision A, the dancer also represents the swirl of creation in “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes,” the next poem
referenced in “Dove and Swan”—albeit from the five pages cut, for reasons addressed
above, before the publication of A Vision B. The selection used in A Vision A describes an
exhausted democratic society ready to be led by an aristocratic or fascistic government:
Then with the last gyre must come a desire to be ruled or rather, seeing that
desire is all but dead, an adoration of force spiritual or physical, and society as
mechanical force be complete at last.
Constrained, arraigned, baffled, bent and unbent
By those wire-jointed jaws and limbs of wood
Themselves obedient,
Knowing not evil or good. (CW13 176; AVA 213)
As the whole of the poem indicates, these individuals have slipped entirely into primary passivity and, as in the description above, are ready to be molded by whatever force
chooses to shape them. This aligns not only with what Yeats saw, and partially resisted,
happening in politics but also in art. One of the core tenets of the high Modernists—listed
out in the section quoted above—is that the artist and critic mediate art and explain it to
the masses, who are incapable of understanding it on their own. Yeats hints, also in a passage quoted above, that the purpose of A Vision was not only to explain life and art but to
constitute one of the guiding philosophies of the coming era.
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154
“Conjunctions,” the final poem Yeats highlights in “Dove or Swan,” comes in the
coda that replaces the five excised pages amidst Yeats’s distress over being unable to call up
a unifying vision when meditating on the symbols of A Vision:
But nothing comes—though this moment was to reward me for all my toil. Perhaps I am too old. Surely something would have come when I meditated under
the direction of the Cabalists. What discords will drive Europe to that artificial
unity—only dry or drying sticks can be tied into a bundle—which is the decadence of every civilisation? How work out upon the phases the gradual coming
and increase of the counter-movement, the antithetical multiform influx:
Should Jupiter and Saturn meet,
O what a crop of mummy wheat!
Then I understand. I have already said all that can be said. (AVB 301–2)
Yeats, of course, goes on to say a little more—but surprisingly little, given that “The End
of the Cycle” is asked to serve double duty as the conclusion of “Dove or Swan” and as a
closing of the prose section of A Vision B. (All that remains to offer clarity to readers after
“The End of the Cycle” is “All Souls’ Night: An Epilogue.”) Yet, read closely, the couplet
does offer some explanation not only to this section of A Vision but to why he chose to cut
the five pages discussed above and to some of its underlying concerns.
The most obvious of these implications comes out of a direct interpretation of the
metaphor. Mummy wheat should not be able to sprout literally, as was known at the time,
as shown in the following near-contemporary source:
Mummy Wheat. Wheat said to have been taken from some of the Egyptian
mummies, and sown in British soil. It is, however, a delusion to suppose that
seed would preserve its vitality for some hundreds of years. No seed will do so,
and what is called mummy wheat is a species of corn commonly grown on the
southern shores of the Mediterranean.34
Yet according to the theories found in Yeats’s system, these seeds of the East will metaphorically sprout, renewing and reviving the profane ideologies considered sacred two
thousand years before.
In the passage from A Vision B, Yeats admits to his inability to read the signs properly—a frustration that likely amplified any and all of the motivations discussed above that
he had to cut the section of “Dove or Swan” that “The End of the Cycle” replaced. Like all
whose millennial predictions have come to naught, Yeats took comfort in a formulation
that echoes Matthew 24:36—“But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the
angels of heaven, but my Father only”—as can be seen in the continuation of the above
quoted section:
Then I understand. I have already said all that can be said. The particulars are the
work of the Thirteenth Cone or cycle which is in every man and called by every man
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision: “Dove or Swan”
155
his freedom. Doubtless, for it can do all things and knows all things, it knows what
it will do with its own freedom but it has kept the secret. (AVB 301–2)
As is the case with the image of the husband being unable to remain awake, discussed
above, Yeats pleads an ignorance based not on error but on a kind of incapacity: “Perhaps
I am too old” and “it [note—not I] has kept its secret” (AVB 302). While age may provide
an initial excuse, it is clear that Yeats’s final analysis is that the secrets of the phaseless
sphere that is the Thirteenth Cone will be revealed at a time of its choosing and not his.
Nevertheless, there is still, in this couplet, the promise of a kind of sign. The Jupiter-Saturn conjunction mentioned, as indicated above, is a sign of the coming antithetical age—the
Rough Beast’s equivalent of the Star of Bethlehem. Although not immediately obvious, this
too is one of many references throughout A Vision to “mathematical Babylonian starlight.”
As mentioned above, the beliefs of Babylonian astronomers, in the form of “the friendships
and antipathies of the Olympic gods” (AVB 268n), echoed through the antithetical era that
followed the Ledaean annunciation. It was also used by the Magi who followed the Star of
Bethlehem to mark the date and location of the coming of the Marian annunciation of the
coming primary age as a part of the Christmas story—a trio he had considered for some
time, including his 1914 poem “The Magi” (VP 318; CW1 125) and the above-mentioned
“The Adoration of the Magi,” where the three are condemned by Hermes:
“I do not know where my soul has been, but I dreamed I was under the roof of
a manger, and I looked down and I saw an ox and an ass; and I saw a red cock
perching on the hay-rack; and a woman hugging a child; and three men in chain
armour kneeling with their heads bowed very low in front of the woman and the
child. While I was looking the cock crowed and a man with wings on his heels
swept up through the air, and as he passed me, cried out, ‘Foolish old men, you
had once all the wisdom of the stars.’” (Myth 313; M2005 204)
Given his interest and the appropriateness, marking his own system’s annunciation with
some astronomical sign falls somewhere between the natural and the necessary.
This association with “mathematical starlight” also aligns well with Yeats’s many references to the mathematical and geometric basis for A Vision. The association in the reader’s
mind of the one with the other makes a subtle but persistent claim to a certain pedigree
that lends gravitas to the assertion A Vision makes to being a herald of and guide for the
coming antithetical age. Indeed, Mars-Venus and Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions flank the
arch-antithetical state of Phase 15:
These two conjunctions which express so many things are certainly, upon occasion,
the outward-looking mind, love and its lure, contrasted with introspective knowledge of the mind’s self-begotten unity, an intellectual excitement. They stand, so
to speak, like heraldic supporters guarding the mystery of the fifteenth phase. In
certain lines written years ago in the first excitement of discovery35 I compared one
to the Sphinx and one to Buddha. I should have put Christ instead of Buddha, for
according to my instructors Buddha was a Jupiter-Saturn influence. (AVB 207–8)
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
There is also, embedded in the whole of the poem, a familial metaphor—one that encodes
a different secret. As, again, Albright details, “Conjunctions” refers to both Yeats’s son
Michael (Jupiter-Saturn) and daughter Anne (Mars-Venus) (EP 766-67), placed at Phases
14 and 16, respectively.36 As was referenced above, Anne was identified by the communicators initially as being not only a boy but one of the harbingers of the coming antithetical
age. In the conversations that followed her birth, they expanded to include a second child
(BG 207). Such a split avatar, of course, parallels the Ledaean annunciation that heralded
the previous antithetical age.
Yeats’s moving back and forth between poetry and prose should not be confused with
a mere recycling of material, or considered a result of commonality of thought driving multiple works.37 Yeats was very particular in identifying and addressing his audiences. Part of
that awareness was driven by an understanding of how his own thinking drove the forms
he worked in. It was this recognition he pithily summed up in his oft-quoted dictum, “We
make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry” (Per Amica Silentia Lunae, CW5 8; Myth 331). What complicates this, of course, is
the nature of the quarrel and its participants. While the communicators are, on one hand,
as “other” as one can get, he (and they) also recognizes them as being an inherent part of
George and himself: “again and again they have insisted that the whole system is the creation
of my wife’s Daimon and of mine, and that it is as startling to them as to us” (AVB 22).
Wherever one places oneself along the spectrum of belief about what Yeats and George
actually understood the communicators to be,38 there can be no doubt that siting the quarrel
as being either wholly self or wholly other is problematic. As such, the records of the quarrel—the automatic script itself—become a common source for both the rhetoric for the
other—including Per Amica Silentia Lunae, both editions of A Vision, and the small editions
of the framing material published by Cuala Press—and the poetry for the self.
By examining the nature of these quarrels and how Yeats sets them rhetorically within
the context of his treatise, readers can develop a deeper understanding of A Vision and its
role within his artistic creations and philosophy. Yeats’s historical consciousness, as seen
here, is not that of a historian, who is concerned with dates and places. It is that of a poet,
who has been given metaphors and has begun to arrange history metaphorically to gain
the “stylistic arrangements of experience” that allows him “to hold in a single thought reality and justice” (AVB 24–25). Through the comments on his contemporaries—artistic or
otherwise—and through the poems he chose to illustrate his points, Yeats, then, provides
his readers with a glimpse into the workings of the mind of the poet: how he understands
and orders the world around him and employs and deploys it in the creation of his work.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
A similar association exists between “Book II: The Completed Symbol,” which introduces the Principles, and
“Book III: The Soul in Judgment,” which lays out their implications within the afterlife. Given the necessarily
unearthly nature of such topics, however, this pairing lacks the absolute concreteness of the cited sections.
In general, I follow the text of AVB as the final version. With respect to “Dove or Swan,” the majority of the
text is the identical to that of AVA (and CW13) and I just give the page references for each: AVB, CW13,
AVA. There are, however, a number of minor variations, and in these cases, “cf.” is added to indicate that
they are not identical: AVB, cf. CW13, AVA. Here, for example, Yeats added the phrase “or the 1st Phase”
to make his explanation more precise and accurate.
A quick glance at the index of volume one of The Making of Yeats’s “A Vision” indicates there were earlier
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision: “Dove or Swan”
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
157
hints at a historical system. April 1918 is, however, when the Yeatses began their real explorations of the
applicability of their system to history.
The two stories The Tables of the Law | The Adoration of the Magi appeared as “privately printed” in 1897,
having been excluded at the publisher’s behest from The Secret Rose, where “they were originally intended
to follow ‘Rosa Alchemica’…” (The Tables of the Law, p. 4).
Mary Colum, Life and the Dream (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1947), 141.
The argument that “The End of the Cycle” should have its own entry is based on its having its own sections
labeled with Roman numerals rather than being continuous with a previous section.
Neil Mann, “The Cycles of History,” The System of W. B. Yeats’s A Vision. Accessed 21 May 2011. http://
www.YeatsVision.com/History.html#Dove
See Ann Saddlemyer, Becoming George 206–8, for a summary of the portions of the automatic script which
relate to the question of Anne’s gender and her association to Yeats’s system.
See Daniel Albright, notes to W. B. Yeats: The Poems (London: Everyman, 1990), 627, for a discussion of
Yeats’s use of this phrase. The Everyman edition of the Poems is referred to as EP in the text hereafter.
William Blake, Milton, plate 28[30], ll. 62–3 to plate 29[31], ll. 1–3 in ed. David V. Erdman, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), 127.
This poem was alluded to, rather than directly quoted, in A Vision A (CW13 152 and 293).
Some of what follows repeats arguments and interpretations set forth elsewhere, primarily in Matthew
DeForrest, Yeats and the Stylistic Arrangements of Experience (Bethesda, MD: International Scholars Publications, 1998), 97–101.
This material can also be found on Card M36 (YVP3 343).
The avatar for the antithetical era preceding the Christian era appears to have been multiple, as the automatic script indicated the avatar of the coming antithetical era would be (see YVP2 353).
It is possible, however, that Yeats was working from the mythology of Vico who, like Hegel, did not see the
Trojan war as real but did see the foundation of Thebes as having been instrumental for inaugurating the
Age of Heroes. This is one possible explanation for the anachrony of Leda and Oedipus (AVB 27–29) in
A Vision. It is equally true, however, that Yeats approached this difficulty from a position of practical faith
similar to the way most contemporary Christians celebrating Christmas on December 25, despite Biblical
evidence that the birth took place sometime in the spring—during lambing season.
The phrase “that annunciation rejected” (AVB 268) replaces “she refuted” (CW13 151; AVA 181).
“That most philosophical of archaeologists Josef Strzygowski haunts my imagination. To him the East, as
certainly to my instructors, is not India or China, but the East that has affected European civilisation, Asia
Minor, Mesopotamia, Egypt.” (AVB 257)
There is more than an implication that, while the more distant past is obliterated by each transformation,
echoes remain. Yeats’s discussion, of course, is filled with references to Greco-Roman myth. The basis of
these, he argues, owes something to the era that came before: “‘Mathematical Starlight,’ Babylonian astrology, is, however, present in the friendships and antipathies of the Olympic gods” (AVB 268).
The Olympians were subject to a higher power: Fate. This was mentioned throughout Homer and other Classical myths and was used by Percy Bysshe Shelley as a central element of the plot of Prometheus Unbound.
This approach, of course, also creates a sense of immensity and power as well.
The form of the sphinx-like aspect of the Rough Beast both recalls the presence of the sphinx in “The
Double Vision of Michael Robartes” (VP 382–84) and Yeats’s assertion that he “would have [Oedipus]
balance Christ” in the symbolism of his system (AVB 27).
“Image” is italicized in AVA.
See Mann, “Everywhere that antinomy,” in this volume 6ff.
Neil Mann, private communication to Matthew DeForrest, 28 May 2011.
The only other named person or place is Agamemnon, who is mentioned in the first half of a broken line (l. 11).
Even Troy is abstracted into fragmented images from its sack: “The broken wall, the burning roof and tower” (l. 10).
I use the technical terminology associated with the sonnet form because, as Vendler points out, “The Second Coming” is a sonnet and a half—an octave followed by a full sonnet (Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and
the Lyric Form [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007], 170–74). The break, unsurprisingly,
comes at the moment when the primary era ends and the antithetical begins.
Although the Dove does not appear in the annunciation, those who have painted the scene have taken the
image from the later baptism of Christ by John the Baptist, found in Luke 3:22.
See DeForrest, Yeats and the Stylistic Arrangements of Experience, 101–3, for a fuller discussion of this poem
and its associations with “Leda and the Swan.”
158
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37
38
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
In a sense, this is not an addition to the text of A Vision B, as the poem was alluded to, but not quoted, in A
Vision A: “There is that continual oscillation which I have symbolized elsewhere as a King and Queen, who
are Sun and Moon also, and whirl round and round as they mount up through a Round tower” (CW13
152; AVA 182).
Although he arrived at this concept independently, Yeats explored concepts of the New Physics, including
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (which states you can know with precision the location or velocity of
a subatomic particle but not both) that argue you cannot separate the observer from the thing observed
while conducting research for A Vision B.
As is discussed below, Yeats recognized a period of heightened tension as history passed through these
three stages.
A larger scale interchange takes place on the scale of the two-millennium cycles, at the moments of the
incarnation of the avatar: “At the birth of Christ took place, and at the coming antithetical influx will take
place, a change equivalent to the interchange of the tinctures” (AVB 262).
Helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline, 170–71. She further tracks the division between the worlds of Order
and Chaos on pages 172–73 and follows with a similar analysis of “Leda and the Swan” on pages 174–75.
Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 2 vols. (London: Cassell & Co., 1895), 2:870.
Accessed 24 May 2011. http://www.archive.org/stream/dictionaryofphra02brew#page/870/mode/2up
Yeats is referring to “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes” here (VP 383, ll. 17–28; CW1 173). See
Colin McDowell, “Heraldic Supporters: Minor Symbolism and the Integrity of A Vision,” YA10 (1993)
207–217.
For Anne’s placement at Phase 16, see, for instance, YVP2 340 (and 570 n106), and for Michael’s at Phase
14, see YVP3 31.
Examples could, of course, be applied between his prose and drama as well.
An excellent summary of this range in interpretation can be found at: Neil Mann, “Automatic Script,” The
System of W. B. Yeats’s A Vision. Accessed 21 May 2011. http://www.YeatsVision.com/AS.html
THE THIRTEENTH CONE
by Neil Mann
A
lthough A Vision addresses a whole range of human attitudes towards God, there
is little or no sense of the deity existing within or behind the system. God overshadows a significant part of the system, in particular as the specific interest of
those in the last quarter of incarnations, and Yeats pays constant attention to humanity’s
relationships with God, through the wheel’s spectrum of temperaments and over the spans
of historical time, including belief and skepticism, love and hatred, struggle against and
unity with God. Human ideas of God are present throughout, as is an emphasis on the
supernatural and spiritual worlds that lie beyond the mundane, but the only figure that
shows divine attributes is “the phaseless sphere” (AVB 193), in particular in its secondary
guise as the “Thirteenth Cycle or Thirteenth Cone” (AVB 210).1
This strange geometric abstraction hovers indistinctly at the margins of the system
and, from the ways it is referred to in A Vision B, takes on a variety of qualities. It has
some characteristics of place for “I shall have much to say of the sphere as the final place
of rest” (AVB 69) and “Within it live all souls that have been set free and every Daimon
and Ghostly Self” (AVB 210); of a state or attribute, since “the Thirteenth Cone or cycle…
is in every man and called by every man his freedom” (AVB 302); of an abstraction and a
being, as “The Thirteenth Cone is a sphere because sufficient to itself; but as seen by man it
is a cone. It becomes even conscious of itself as so seen” (AVB 240) or as “the reflection or
messenger of the final deliverance” (AVB 210); of deity, for “it can do all things and knows
all things” (AVB 302); even, possibly, of “Shelley’s Demogorgon—eternity” (AVB 211).2
These attributes are not impossible to reconcile but Yeats deliberately makes no effort to
do so and leaves his readers questioning.
As a consequence few elements of A Vision have given readers and commentators as
many problems. Some of the reasons for confusion are similar to those related to other
areas of A Vision and others are peculiar to the Sphere and the Thirteenth Cone. There is
no clear presentation of the relevant central ideas; the references and allusions to it do not
always seem to be consistent; it appears to have a singularly important place within the
structure of the cosmos presented, yet is hardly dealt with in accordance with that place.
The problem of scattered references is compounded by a variety of names or terms, which
may be completely synonymous or indicate different aspects of the concept, and also by a
significant difference in the concepts presented in A Vision A and A Vision B, so that the
lack of a clear exposition seems to be connected to Yeats’s own uncertainty. Indeed, the
Thirteenth Cone only really features in A Vision B, where Yeats sought to understand the
spiritual dimension of the system more fully. Although it is referred to fleetingly in A Vision A, which provides some clues about the Thirteenth Cone’s evolution, the two versions
present different concepts that do not really elucidate one another.3 In A Vision B itself,
Yeats implicitly attributes the concept’s marginalization to the fact that the “instructors,
keeping as far as possible to the phenomenal world, have spent little time upon the sphere,
which can be symbolised but cannot be known, though certain chance phrases show that
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
they have all the necessary symbols” (AVB 193). Yeats reassures his readers—and himself—that there is a coherent place for the Sphere within the whole system but effectively
tells them that whereof the instructors do not speak, thereof Yeats must be silent. Philosophy may talk “about a first cause or a final purpose,” but Yeats is convinced that “we would
know what we were a little before conception, what we shall be a little after burial” (AVB
223) and that is evidently where his own interest lay.
One further difficulty is rather different and probably most important: many readers
seem to have a particularly strong resistance to Yeats’s ideas in this instance, or to wish
that his ideas were other than they appear, in other words closer to their own preferences.
Yeats’s formulations appear to go against many conceptions about God, religion and spirituality, so that critics have either tried to supply a hidden form of orthodoxy, to disparage
a conception they find jejune or wanting, to assert a flat equivalence without much consideration, or else their comments evince bewilderment and just restate questions, often
rejecting more obvious meanings as impossible.
The majority of critics see the Thirteenth Cone as Yeats’s idiosyncratic perception of
the divine being,4 though some argue for a lower status,5 while others try to see it as a
version of the Christian God,6 or further religious,7 gnostic,8 or philosophical conceptions.9 Many emphasize the element of freedom,10 and to a lesser extent how it forms
the antithesis to our thesis,11 further embodying the system’s antinomies,12 or see it as “a
symbol of the human relationship to ultimate reality than a symbol of that ultimate itself ”
(YA6 195).13
The following consideration is not a radical reappraisal, but rather aims to give a
fuller and clearer sense of the central concepts and to take more account of some of the
complexities that arise. It focuses on the Sphere and Thirteenth Cone in A Vision, but also
looks at manuscript sources and drafts as well, where these illuminate Yeats’s thought;14
it does so largely in Yeats’s own terms, while also attempting to take account of the more
important contingent details, parallels and queries that Yeats’s treatment raises. I have
constantly sought to simplify, but find that the material and Yeats’s presentation make this
next to impossible without removing much of what is interesting—this partly explains the
heavy use of endnotes.
The first section therefore sets out a simple overview of the concepts involved, particularly the relationship of the Sphere and Thirteenth Cone as presented in A Vision B,
which remains the touchstone for ideas related to this concept.15 The second examines
the ideas of A Vision B more fully, teasing out the implications of key passages where the
Thirteenth Cone and Sphere are considered, looking particularly at the aspects related to
time and eternity. The third section looks at some of the earlier concepts that contributed
to the development of the Thirteenth Cone, and deals particularly with the Thirteenth Cone
as the final goal of the cycles of incarnation. The fourth section concentrates on Yeats’s
consideration of the Thirteenth Cone in his Rapallo diary of 1930, written as he was finishing drafting A Vision B, examining how Yeats sought to explore the human experience
of the Thirteenth Cone.16 The fifth considers how the different formulations of A Vision
express different aspects of the divine, positing a hierarchy of divinity and considering the
nature of the Principles “in the sphere.” Though the poetry is referred to throughout, the
final section considers further how Yeats’s conception of the divine through the Thirteenth
Cone found expression in his art.
The Thirteenth Cone
161
I
A Vision B states clearly that “The ultimate reality…is symbolised as a phaseless sphere”
(AVB 193) and this “phaseless sphere” or simply “the Sphere” (AVB 187) is therefore the
true ground of all being, though, as noted, the “instructors…have spent little time upon
the sphere” as it is unknowable (AVB 193).
The phrase “ultimate reality” may appear distinct from God to many readers but,
when Yeats draws attention to AE’s usage of “‘The Spirit,’ as he [AE] calls the ultimate
reality” (CW5 117; E&I 417; 1932), both are referring to God, although neither uses the
term.17 In private Yeats could state directly in his letter to “Leo,” “I do not doubt…the existence of God” (YA1 [1982] 22; 1915), or make God one of the three things upon which
he “would found literature” (Ex 332; 1930), but he shared with AE a reluctance to use a
name freighted with so many preconceptions for each reader. They were not alone among
writers of the period in their reservations, and earlier Matthew Arnold has his “men of
science” say “we, too would gladly say God, if only, the moment one says God, you would
not pester one with your pretensions of knowing all about him.”18 At the other end of
the spectrum, the Theosophist Franz Hartmann has a Rosicrucian adept say that “there
exists nothing in the universe but ‘God’; but if this word does not please you, because
it has for ages been subject to misconceptions…let us call it the ‘Real.’”19 George Yeats
used similarly distancing quotation marks in writing up an account of a sleep in October
1921—taking dictation from her husband, in turn giving his account of what she had said
apparently under the control of a communicator—noting that they should say a regular
prayer “addressed to ‘God’” (YVP3 102), showing that one or both of them wished to
indicate some reservation about the word. Indeed, Yeats throughout his writing favors
periphrastic epithets for the divine,20 except when he is referring specifically to the God of
conventional religion, and seems to prefer “a substitute for the old symbol God” (Ex 325).
This preference for avoiding a name that brings associations has a different kind of
support from negative theology, which rejects defining divinity at all except by negation,
and has a long mystical tradition that was important in the esoteric systems that Yeats had
studied, as well as more orthodox religion, including Judaism and Christianity.21 Even the
automatic script states that, “god has to be seen through darkness as through a cloud or veil”
(YVP1 407; YVP3 328) and the 1930 diary that the “ultimate reality must be all movement,
all thought, all perception extinguished, two freedoms unthinkably, unimaginably absorbed
in one another” (Ex 307; emphasis added). At the same time, the phrase “ultimate reality”
finds echoes in, for example, the philosophy of Spinoza, Berkeley, Hegel or Fichte, the scientific agnosticism of Herbert Spencer and the ancient texts of Vedanta or Buddhism. Each
strand embraces a complex group of influences, but their cumulative effect is that Yeats
prefers not to call his apprehension of the divine by the name of “God,” and to conceive that
true godhead is so far beyond human comprehension that any understanding we may have
is only of inferior manifestations.
Already, however, “the ultimate reality” indicates a conception of the divine that is
impersonal and philosophical rather than religious. The Sphere, as its symbol, is readily
comprehensible and recognizable as one of perfection and totality, harking back to Parmenides, Empedocles, Plato and Plotinus (to mention only sources cited by Yeats, and
only a few of those), while the concept of God as a sphere, whose center is everywhere
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
and whose circumference is nowhere, can be traced to Hermetic and medieval sources.22
Traditionally, however, this image has been used only as a metaphor to express only certain aspects of divine nature—perfection or omnipresence—rather than as the dominant
vehicle to convey the concept of the divine itself. Although for Yeats it remains no more
than a symbol, it is his preferred and almost sole image, except insofar as the Sphere is
viewed in its refracted form, the Thirteenth Cone.23
The “phaseless sphere” denotes a completeness that goes beyond all experience, change
and sequence, beyond idea and form. Outside of time, space and consciousness, it comprehends and reconciles all antinomies, in what Nicholas of Cusa called “the coincidence
of opposites.”24 However, “the phaseless sphere…becomes phasal in our thought, Nicholas
of Cusa’s undivided reality which human experience divides into opposites” (AVB 247),25
and its “phasal” form is the divided antinomies of, on the one side, humane subjective
experience, the thinking mind, and, on the other, all the rest, the spiritual objective.26 This
phasal, fallen form is no longer complete and perfect: “as all things fall into a series of antinomies in human experience [the phaseless sphere] becomes, the moment it is thought
of, what I shall presently describe as the thirteenth cone” (AVB 193).
The Thirteenth Cone is thus a form or view of Sphere, except that humanity can only
conceive of it as the Thirteenth Cone, so that effectively, even when we think that we are
contemplating the Sphere itself, the best we can attain is a view of the Thirteenth Cone,
therefore in our consideration the two concepts are essentially interchangeable, though it
sometimes helps to try to distinguish different aspects. The name encapsulates the illusion, as it is neither a cone, nor is it the thirteenth of anything. On the one hand, “The
Thirteenth Cone is a sphere because sufficient to itself; but as seen by man it is a cone”
(AVB 240), “its illusory form,”27 that is a distortion and a misperception. On the other, it
is beyond the series of “twelve cycles of time and space” (AVB 210), and may therefore appear to humanity to be the thirteenth: “So we say that the first cycle sent its first soul into
the world at the birth of Christ, and that the twelfth will send its last soul immediately
before the birth of the New Fountain. Then there will come the first of a new series, the
Thirteenth Cycle, which is a Sphere and not a cone” (CW13 138; AVA 170).28 Indeed,
the symbolism of the number twelve includes the idea of completeness, so that “thirteen”
inevitably goes beyond this completeness, or crowns it. Richard Ellmann noted a comment by George Yeats that “12 cones are 12 disciples and 13th is Christ,”29 and Christ is
of course not the thirteenth disciple but above them and includes the types of humanity
that they represent.30
II
In Yeats’s presentation of ideas related to the Sphere and the Thirteenth Cone in A Vision
B, he generally gives enough to leave readers as much perplexed as enlightened, and the
majority of mentions are little more than glancing references, serving mainly to remind
us how little we know. I shall concentrate here on some of the fuller treatments of the
Thirteenth Cone in A Vision B, particularly a paragraph from “The Completed Symbol,”
Section XIV (AVB 210–11), that in Northrop Frye’s opinion “ought to have been one of
the key passages of A Vision.”31 While focusing on the central concepts, I shall also try to
pursue some of the wider implications and connections that Yeats’s exposition indicates.
The Thirteenth Cone
163
Yeats suggests here that, if one regards “the whole of human life” collectively as a
single gyre or cone, this cone has as its antithesis a “contrasting cone as the other half of
the antinomy, the ‘spiritual objective’” (AVB 210).32 This single collective gyre of present
humanity is referred to in terms of time, so that its movements are called months, “twelve
months or twelve cycles” (AVB 209), and when we are in “the first month” of the humane
cone, “we are in the twelfth of the other, when we are in the second in the eleventh of the
other, and so on, that month of the other cone which corresponds to ours is always called
by my instructors the Thirteenth Cycle or Thirteenth Cone, for every month is a cone”
(AVB 210).33 This example of opposing months is in fact one case of the more general
pattern, sketched in Yeats’s preceding paragraph (AVB 209–10) but probably stated more
clearly in a draft, in terms of the wheel:
In reading what I have written of the Wheel of Birth & death or that of the 28
incarnations, or the wheel of history which I have yet to examine, the reader
must always assume that there is a spiritual wheel, [which is] its antithesis &
which acts upon it as man upon woman. I have dealt & shall deal only in the
most summary way with this other wheel[,] the sphere in its illusory form as the
13th cone[,] that I may keep as much as possible to the concrete & the phenomenal. The two wheels live each others death, die each others life.34
The Thirteenth Cone is thus the antithesis of whichever cone or wheel refers to humanity, whether of incarnation or of history, “the ‘spiritual objective’” (AVB 210), “spiritual
wheel” or “the sphere in its illusory form as the 13th cone,” which Yeats sees in his favorite
Heraclitean paradox of reciprocal dying and living (cf. AVB 68)35 or figures in “the lambs
of Faery bleating in November” (AVB 210). It must always be assumed as the automatic
complementary counterpart to the humane wheel, acting as man upon woman.36
A key question here is whether Yeats saw the Thirteenth Cone as truly existent—whether
it is simply an “illusory form” of the Sphere or whether it is a reality within the antinomies. In
some respects the question is meaningless and in others it is the essence of the whole system:
“as all things fall into a series of antinomies in human experience [the Sphere] becomes, the
moment it is thought of, what I shall presently describe as the thirteenth cone” (AVB 193).
It is the thinking that makes it so, and the illusion is real: “The cones of the tinctures mirror
reality but are in themselves pursuit and illusion” (AVB 73). In this sense it is very much akin
to the illusion of maya in Vedantic philosophy: it is true but is not the truth—which is “the
ultimate reality” of Brahman alone—but it is not false either. Shankara taught of a man who
in half-light sees a snake and is afraid. Light reveals that the snake is a coil of rope: but the
fact that it is not a snake does not make it unreal, and though his fear is groundless, it is an
authentic emotion.37 There are therefore aspects of things that are true, though only one real
truth. Yeats sees the illusion as ineluctable and essential to the human condition.
As the draft passage indicates, the illusory Thirteenth Cone is also a wheel, mirroring
and complementing any aspect of the humane wheel. While Yeats writes of the Thirteenth
Cone in terms of a place or condition where time runs in opposition to ours, “a being racing into the future passes a being racing into the past” (AVB 210),38 he also conceives of
it as the opposite of time. Thus intersecting with our space-time is an opposite world of
the Thirteenth Cone, anti-time and non-time co-existing and intersecting with our time.
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
When we try to conceive of non-time we tend to imagine endless time or everlastingness,
but more accurately, though still just images, “eternity is not a long time but a short time,”
or, in terms that Blake might have used, “Eternity is in the glitter on the beetle’s wing.”39
Eternity perhaps applies more accurately to the Sphere itself, and is indeed a form of synecdoche, for, as eternity is to time, so the Sphere is to universal space-time and phenomenal reality. Certainly, eternity is one of the key concepts at the heart of what humanity
can only see as the Thirteenth Cone.
In the final sentences of his explanation of the Thirteenth Cone on AVB 211, Yeats
includes a pair of illustrations, paratactic allusions without explicit connection or clear
argument. The first refers to the Hermetic tradition of eternity as expounded in the Latin
Asclepius: “‘Eternity also,’ says Hermes in the Aeslepius [sic] dialogue, ‘though motionless
itself, appears to be in motion’” (AVB 211). As is common with Yeats’s glancing references,
the omitted context is almost as significant as the quoted material, in this case the Asclepius’s complex argument of how time’s motion affects the perception of Eternity, which
by inference alludes to how the gyre’s antinomies affect the perception of the SphereThirteenth Cone. Indeed it seems likely that Yeats saw it as the pattern for the relationship
between the Sphere and the gyres:
Now time, though it is ever in movement possesses a faculty of stability peculiar
to itself, in that its return into itself is determined by necessity. And accordingly,
though eternity is stable, fixed and motionless, yet since time is mobile and its
movement ever goes back into eternity, it results from this that eternity also,
though motionless in itself, appears to be in motion, on account of its relationship to time; for eternity enters into time, and it is in time that all movement
takes place. 40
If “gyre” is substituted for “time” and “the Sphere” for “eternity,” the argument is a more
explicit version of what Yeats appears to have intended, showing how the Thirteenth Cone
is the apparently moving aspect of the Sphere, an expression of “its relationship to time” or
the gyres. For the Hermetic writer eternity and God are almost synonymous, “The being
then, of which I speak,—whether it is to be called God, or eternity, or both, and whether
God is in eternity, or eternity in God, or each in the other—this being…is infinite, incomprehensible, immeasurable; it exceeds our powers and is beyond our scrutiny.”41
After gnomically quoting the Hermetica, Yeats moves without obvious link to Shelley.
The Demogorgon of Prometheus Unbound is a notoriously indefinable figure, deliberately
formless, unsexed and protean, a dark mythic version of the uncertainties that shroud the
Thirteenth Cone’s symbolic abstraction.42 A chthonic figure, able to tell “All things thou
dar’st demand” (II:4 l. 8), it declares, in answer to Asia’s questions, that God is the creator
of all, but it will not identify who or what it means by God, asserting that “the deep truth
is imageless” (II:4 l. 116). It tells Jupiter that its own name is “Eternity—demand no direr
name” (III:1 l. 52), yet it is Jupiter’s child, as Jupiter was Saturn’s, each overturning the
father. In the last act, Demogorgon is seen “as Darkness, / …rising out o’ Earth” (IV:1
ll. 510–11), but brings with it light, freedom and omens of possibility. Yeats’s comment
focuses rather literally on the symbolism of the earth as a sphere,43 but Demogorgon is
also the influx of the new age, and most specifically the imminent “antithetical multiform
The Thirteenth Cone
165
influx” (AVB 302), overturning its progenitor, just as the primary influx overturned the
previous antithetical age. Like the Oceanid Asia, Yeats questions this coming age, but can
only reach so far: “The particulars are the work of the Thirteenth Cone or cycle which is
in every man and called by every man his freedom. Doubtless, for it can do all things and
knows all things, it knows what it will do with its own freedom but it has kept the secret”
(AVB 302). Demogorgon-like it resists giving particulars.
If Demogorgon creates an impenetrable myth of eternity, it also indicates how eternity potentially lies within reality. Indeed reality is not just space-time, but the intersection or marriage of space-time with eternity:
“The stallion Eternity
Mounted the mare of Time,
’Gat the foal of the world.” (“Tom at Cruachan,” VP 529; CW1 273)
“World” here seems to take on the sense of the Hermetists’ “kosmos,” all or universe, with
the Thirteenth Cone acting upon the humane cone as male upon female, to produce total
reality.
Yeats expresses this geometrically in the interpenetration of the two cones: “our expanding cone seems to cut through its gyre; spiritual influx is from its circumference, animate life from its centre” (AVB 211). The image figures two cones, one the cone of spacetime-human reality and the other the Thirteenth Cone, which intersect—“our expanding
cone seems to cut through its gyre”—but the exact mental picture or geometry behind “its
circumference” and “its centre” is slightly unclear, because these do not automatically apply to cones, and Yeats probably had in mind a visualization that he planned at one stage
to use as part of the introductory exposition of what became “The Principal Symbol.”44
In this earlier organization, Yeats opens Book I with “Dramatis Personae”: first comes
the Daimon, which “is unique and perfect and has for its symbol a sphere” and the next
major symbol is the double vortex, and “there is a gap which I can fill from Plotinus”:
he compares God and Man to two spheres which once coincided and now do
not. I draw these spheres and insert the double vortex.
[N.B. The diagram on left is the one that appears in the typescript with Yeats’s handwriting, but it does
not correspond with text, and the one on the right, with “Universal Self ” and “Particular Self ” transposed, is the corrected version.]
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
166
I call the shaded sphere—“God” in his metaphor—knowledge, and the unshaded—his “man”—action; that point where the circumference of the shaded
sphere passes through the centre of the unshaded, the Universal Self, and that
point where the circumference of the unshaded passes through the centre of the
shaded, the Particular Self.45 Each Self seeks to be united to its entire sphere, and
its desire is expressed by a vortex or gyre. Though its gyre always touches the
circumference of the sphere and expands with it, till it reaches the greatest width,
we represent it for convenience by a straight-sided cone. Each Self identifies itself
with the sphere at whose centre it lies and so with all that is opposite to its own
nature.46
There are several points worth commenting on,47 but the most important aspect in the
present context is the placing of cone, circumference and center within the spherical
framework (cf. AVB 199–200), as the cone’s surface in fact represents a gyre “that always
touches the circumference of the sphere” and has its apex at the center of the opposing
sphere. Though this precise version was superseded, it is clear that Yeats continued to
think in these terms when considering the intersection of the Thirteenth Cone with the
mundane cone. The center is thus the Subject or Self, and the kernel of desire or appetency that is the driving force of “animate life.” The circle at the base of each cone is
therefore the full circumference of the sphere, the “Object or limit” of the Subject,48 so
that when the expanding gyre of the divine cone reaches this point, Knowledge, there is
“spiritual influx…from its circumference” of the sphere with the contact: “Did she put on
his knowledge with his power…?” (VP 441; CW1 218).
The term “influx” is exclusively associated in A Vision with the revelation surrounding the birth of a new religious dispensation, in the next case “the antithetical multiform
influx” (AVB 302). Yeats explicitly links this coming influx with the “rough beast” of “The
Second Coming,” though using his common technique of juxtaposition without logical
connectors so that the exact relationship is obscured:
The approaching antithetical influx…will reach its complete systematisation at
that moment when…the Great Year comes to its intellectual climax. Something
of what I have said it must be, the myth declares…what else it must be no man
can say, for always at the critical moment the Thirteenth Cone, the sphere, the
unique intervenes.
Somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. (AVB 263)
The intervention of the spiritual influx is also figured as the irruption of a bird into
the human dimension, Leda and the Swan, Mary and the Dove, and, in Yeats’s own myth,
Attracta and the Great Herne, which will be examined in more detail below. Even a lesser
moment, such as the conception of “world-transforming Charlemagne,” hints at the way
that “Eternity is passion” and that, in “their sexual joy,” man and woman give voice to
The Thirteenth Cone
167
powers outside time, enacting, at least in some cases, a “sacred drama” (“Whence had they
Come?” VP 560; CW1 293).
Though eternity should be understood as the eternal instant, there is a human tendency to treat this as the persistent present, which Yeats figures as the Record.
All things are present as an eternal instant to our Daimon (or Ghostly Self as it is
called when it inhabits the sphere), but that instant is of necessity unintelligible
to all bound to the antinomies. My instructors have therefore followed tradition
by substituting for it a Record where the images of all past events remain for ever
“thinking the thought and doing the deed.” They are in popular mysticism called
“the pictures in the astral light”…and what Blake called “the bright sculptures
of Los’s Hall.” We may describe them as the Passionate Body lifted out of time.
(AVB 193)49
The Record is effectively another term for the Great Memory, which Yeats wrote about in
“Magic” (CW4 25ff; E&I 28ff; 1900), and for Anima Mundi.50 The Record is not the same
as the Thirteenth Cone, let alone the Sphere, but represents an aspect of them, preserving
what has passed into time and moved from present consciousness into the past; as Crazy
Jane comments “All things remain in God” (“Crazy Jane on God, ”VP 512; CW1 263).51 In
the afterlife too, the Spirit relives the life just lived during the Return, repeating its events
until they are exhausted, “until, at last forgotten by the Spirit, they fade into the Thirteenth
Cone” (AVB 227), preserved and absorbed.
However we choose to imagine or understand this preservation of events and
ideas, the truth may come “Out of a medium’s mouth / Out of nothing… / Out of the
forest loam / Out of the dark night where lay / The crowns of Nineveh” (VP 439; CW1
218). All these provide record of the past, whereas the fuller form of Daimonic perception
in the “eternal instant” of Sphere-Thirteenth Cone also includes time future. However, the
relation of the Record to time is hazy and it is possible that, while it is timeless, humanity
can only comprehend what relates to the past. In contrast, the Daimon’s “eternal instant”
also contains what has yet to be manifested and has not yet passed into time, and, in Rapallo Notebook C, Yeats speculates “Is not the Daimon in some sense that being which
can stretch its memory—both Record & abstract memory—through 28 incarnations &
man that being whose memory includes one only.”52 He represents this poetically through
the changeless bird in “the artifice of eternity” singing “Of what is past, or passing, or to
come” (VP 408; CW1 198).53
The sphinx-like image of “The Second Coming” arises from Spiritus Mundi, the
emanation of Anima Mundi,54 but both Anima and Spiritus Mundi are linked with the
Sphere-Thirteenth Cone.55 Both are outside time and partake of aspects of the eternal, and
in this case, the timeless or archetypal. In fact for Yeats, past, repeated usage and archetype
are closely linked in establishing the potency of a symbol or form. In Blake’s conception,
not only are “All things acted on Earth…seen in the bright Sculptures of / Los’s Halls,”
but also “every Age renews its powers from these Works,” which enshrine the archetypal
timeless emotions, myths and narratives.56 They are thus the forces that maintain continuity, linked to the moods of Yeats’s early works or the divine archetypes that “are always
making and unmaking humanity, which is indeed but the trembling of their lips” (Myth
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
275; M2005 181). John Aherne is also suggestive, though indefinite, when he notes in his
letter to “Mr. Yeats”: “I recall what Plato said of memory, and suggest that your automatic
script, or whatever it was, may well have been but a process of remembering. I think that
Plato symbolised by the word ‘memory’ a relation to the timeless” (AVB 54).
As with the quotation from Blake, the other elaborations contain submerged allusions that feed into Yeats’s thinking. He also mentions the “popular mysticism,” from
which so many of his ideas originated but which he tended to hedge about with more
respectable authorities. Some went further than seeing the astral light as the “receptacle
of forms, and having therefore ‘pictures’ therein” (LTWBY 280; 1914). The Theosophical
writer Franz Hartmann had written that “the thoughts of the Universal Mind” are “stored
up in the Astral Light,” but, although the “Astral Light is the book memory, in which
every thought is engraved and every event recorded.…Men do not create thought; the
ideas existing in the Astral Light flow into their minds,”57 and for Madame Blavatsky it
contained the future as well.58
Yeats indicates that the Passionate Body was the astral body of Theosophical and more
traditional terminology,59 and it follows that the “astral light” and its pictures may be
viewed as a universal astral/Passionate Body, no longer bound to time.60 A whole conception of metaphysical light lay behind his own lucubrations about the Principles, finally
reduced to the treatment of AVB 190–91, where the “Passionate Body is in another of its
aspects identical with physical light…the creator of all that is sensible” (AVB 190), “the
present, creation, light, the objects of sense.”61 Therefore the Passionate Body lifted out of
time is an eternal present.
Any treatment of the ramifications suggested by Yeats’s exposition leads into the
realm of receding mirrors, but at the core of this treatment, particularly the exposition in
Section XIV (AVB 209–11), lies the idea of anti-time. The Thirteenth Cone runs against
that of the phenomenal world, in simple terms the invisible living country where the seasons oppose ours, but more philosophically the motionless eternity that appears to move.
Though it always interpenetrates our world, its presence is closer or more significant as the
religious gyre moves into the “spiritual objective,” when a new dispensation is imminent.
III
If Yeats never makes good on his promise that “Presently I shall have much to say of the
sphere as the final place of rest” (AVB 69)—or as anything else—the Thirteenth Cone or
Cycle certainly originated as the end of the process of reincarnation, though one which
Yeats contemplates with little desire for escape:
Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul.… (VP 637; CW1 333)
These eternities are, however, those of seemingly endless time and will have their end, and
Yeats certainly sees release from the wheel of rebirth as not only possible but inevitable,
though only after a full series of incarnations, paradigmatically twelve rounds of twentyeight lives, a process “which can be quickened or slackened but cannot be fundamentally
The Thirteenth Cone
169
altered” (VP 823; CW1 658).62 Although Yeats never spells it out in published writing,
he did calculate that this entails some 336 incarnations (including the non-physical ones
at Phases 1 and 15), spread over many thousand years.63 Unlike almost all traditions of
reincarnation, the Yeatses’ system offers no clear line out of the round of births; salvation
is only possible for those who have completed the allotted course and permanent release
can only come in due time. The very different man, Frank Pearce Sturm, who longed for
primary release, thought that Yeats’s system offered him a way of calculating “how many
incarnations any particular person has already endured” (LTWBY2 381), and in theory it
does. Yeats himself was said to be at Phase 17 of his sixth cycle, so a little less than halfway
through the twelve cycles, while George, repeating Phase 18 of her seventh cycle, was
somewhat more advanced.
The idea of a final state, whether the blessed extinction of moksha or nirvana, or
some paradise of Elysium or heaven, is part of almost all spiritual traditions. In many
respects the Thirteenth Cone or Cycle is an equivalent for these, since it is the end of the
cycles of rebirth, and it is this aspect that dominates in much of the automatic script, A
Vision A and into the earlier drafts of A Vision B. The inevitability of the full twelve cycles
had emerged in an exchange from the automatic script in August 1918 where the import
was clear, although muddied slightly by the staccato note form: when they asked “Can
the soul by accepting the spiritual objective cease to incarnate before last cycle,” they were
told “No”; rather it “can only accept in its consciousness in each cycle” and “can only
excape when the consciousness of every cycle has [been] accepted” (YVP2 26). Though
this inevitability is never stated explicitly in A Vision itself, it is implicit in the vagueness
of the references to release and the injunction that, like a civilization, no soul “can spend
what it has not earned”:
the love that [the Saint] brings to God at his twenty-seventh phase was found in
some past life upon a woman’s breast, his loyalty and wisdom were prepared perhaps a thousand years before in serving a bad master, and that is why the Indian
minstrel sings God as woman, husband, lover and child. (AVB 206)
Once the soul has been born as the Fool of the twelfth cycle, truly “The Child of God”
(CW13 93; AVA 115; AVB 182), it may escape into the Thirteenth Cone. The automatic
script had stated that “After the 13 incarnation if in all it accepts it becomes equal with
God & is free to choose,” clarified as “Cycle 13 / final initiation yes” (YVP2 27), and as
each initiation in the Golden Dawn was both an end and a step towards the next level,
this implies that the Thirteenth Cycle is both a goal and part of a continuing process.64
This final equality with God is echoed in A Vision A in the description of the Daimon:
she remains always in the Thirteenth Cycle, [so] cannot accompany man on his
wanderings, nor can her tutelage of man be eternal, seeing that after many cycles
man also inhabits the Thirteenth Cycle and has in a certain way a greater power
than hers. (CW13 182; AVA 220–21)65
Here Yeats reflects certain Gnostic ideas in which the perfected human is superior to the
never-fallen angel.66
170
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Even in the earlier drafts for A Vision B, Yeats explicitly identifies the Thirteenth Cone
as beyond incarnation, incorporating general Buddhist beliefs about the enlightened ones
who return to incarnation out of supreme compassion: “Those who have finished all the
cycles pass into the thirteenth cone for ever at the close of the purification; or ‘refuse salvation’ and are born as embodied messengers of the cone: a Christ or a Buddha.”67 However A
Vision B itself offers a less clear perspective, stating, as cited earlier, that within the Thirteenth
Cycle/Cone/Sphere “live all souls that have been set free and every Daimon and Ghostly Self”
(AVB 210–11), raising more questions than it answers.68 Though in all these contexts the
Thirteenth Cycle or Cone appears to be very much a version of heaven, in which live souls
released from the wheel, the Daimons and the Ghostly Selves,69 as well as Teaching Spirits and
Spirits of the Thirteenth Cone,70 Yeats states that we must “avoid attributing to them the pure
benevolence our exhausted Platonism and Christianity attribute to an angelical being. Our
actions, lived in life, or remembered in death, are the food and drink of the Spirits of the
Thirteenth Cone, that which gives them separation and solidity” (AVB 230). These Spirits
therefore intervene for their own sake, vampire angels who feed vicariously on the drama
that can only originate in the complex fury and mire of human life.71
Another paradoxical and hard aspect of this interaction is mentioned at the end of
“The Soul in Judgment” where Yeats writes of how “the deliverance from birth and death”
results from the union of “the Daimon of the Living and a Spirit of the Thirteenth Cone”
(AVB 240) a kind of spiritual meeting that is not explained further, but is put in apposition with “the conscious union of the Daimons of man and woman,” which mirrors the
Yeatses’ own situation as described in the automatic script (YVP3 291) or more poetically
“the intercourse of angels” where “whole is joined to whole” that is described by “Ribh
at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn” (VP 555; CW1 290). What makes these unions hard
to accept, however, is that they in turn are the result of the “Cruelty and ignorance” that
“constitute evil” (AVB 240), for, though it is possible to find comfort or reassurance in
the idea that evil may serve a positive purpose, it is difficult to accept the ethical standing
of a system that seems to require evil in some form for the soul’s release from the cycle of
“birth and death.”72 Indeed in a draft Yeats posits a further paradox: “our final deliverance
is not Primary but Antithetical—‘the last cycle of man is evil’” implying that the final
cycle is not one of advanced enlightenment and benevolence.73 This cannot be explained
away, though evil, cruelty and ignorance do have slightly specialized applications and are
clearly linked to the complex material about Victimage in general. There is also Yeats’s
emphasis on viewing life as a drama valued according to the aesthetic of tragedy, where
the evil of heroes’ falls may lead to some form of catharsis—for others, audience, state,
community—and even redemption.74 However, Yeats does not provide enough detail or
consideration of the problem to give any clear explanation.
Though the Thirteenth Cone is an earthly view of a spiritual whole, it is also a community or congeries of beings, and this double focus is itself a product of the antinomies
which produce “two conceptions, that of reality as a congeries of beings, that of reality as
a single being” (Ex 305; 1930). When Yeats writes of the Thirteenth Cone as acting in some
way, for instance sending forms (AVB 230n), calling spirits “to the care of the newly dead”
(AVB 233), giving “assistance” and “consent” to them, or summoning them (AVB 235),
using “messengers” (AVB 237), being “conscious of itself ” (AVB 239), or when he states
that “it can do all things and knows all things” (AVB 302), it operates in this dual aspect
The Thirteenth Cone
171
of single being and collective.75 Although the Thirteenth Cone can validly be conceived as
one, Yeats’s bias is to see it as the congeries and, as elsewhere, he appears to hold firmly to
a dictum of Blake’s that “God only acts or is in existing beings or men” (CW5 22; Myth
352)76—always allowing for the fact that for Yeats the host of “existing beings” includes a
wide range of spiritual entities and that of “existing…men” includes the dead.
At the end of the original opening section of “Swedenborg, Mediums and the Desolate Places,”77 and again in drafts for A Vision A, Yeats coupled this epigram from Blake
with another: “God is an abode of spirits” (CW5 290),78 and much of Yeats’s treatment of
the Thirteenth Cone in the afterlife seems to reflect a similar perception. It is indeed the
closest that Yeats’s system offers to the idea of a personal God who intervenes in the individual life and may respond to prayer or at least wish. The dead lose all trace of former life
at or before the Beatitude and become purified spirits (see AVB 235), entering the Purification, when they may “be called by the Thirteenth Cone to care for the newly dead” (AVB
233) or interact with the minds of the living by “the command of the Thirteenth Cone”
or with its permission (AVB 234). Similarly in the final stage before birth, Foreknowledge,
they may with “the assistance of the Thirteenth Cone affect life” and the world of the living,
especially their own world to be, and, “with the consent of the Thirteenth Cone” act like
Freud’s “censor” (AVB 235). In all these functions the Thirteenth Cone figures as a form of
control over the spirits’ behavior, an active arbiter or self-executing law. It appears to have
some volition and to intervene at an individual level.
Although there is nothing to define it as a single being or congeries, its actions seem
more collective and in many ways continue the process embodied in the earlier stages of
the afterlife by the Teaching Spirits of the Thirteenth Cone (see AVB 228–30).79 Yeats does
not characterize the process further in this context or give any more than these hints.
There is a sense, therefore, in which the afterlife shows the Thirteenth Cone as a collective
consciousness or a hive mind, at most a divine council rather than a polytheistic pantheon of differentiated godheads. It is natural both that this antithetical aspect of deity
should be the closest to a personal God and most clearly related to the human, and also
that it should not necessarily even be viewed in terms of godhead, and represented rather
in the hosting Sidhe, “a timeless and spaceless community of Spirits,”80 or the multitudinous Daimons.
In many ways this reflects the view that Yeats himself proposed in the “Seven Propositions,” where reality, implicitly the ultimate reality, is defined as “a timeless & spaceless
community of Spirits which perceive each other.”81 In this sense, the Thirteenth Cone is
both one and many, depending upon how it is viewed, acting on a personal level through
Spirits of the Thirteenth Cone, Daimons and other messengers, while present as a single
unity in world history or when we conceive of the whole concept. As such it is the universal and particular goal of incarnating spirits, but once they reach it, it may lead them back
into the world of animate life.
IV
Yeats evidently felt freer to explore possibilities concerning the nature of reality and the
divine in the diary of 1930 precisely because it was allowed to be speculative rather than
seeking to be authoritative like A Vision. Certainly this diary contains some of the most
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
direct considerations of the Thirteenth Cone. It emphasizes in particular how the Thirteenth Cone is experienced by humanity, and its place in the individual life as well as in the
philosophical construct of the universe.
The role of perception, both active and passive, central to the “Seven Propositions”
recurs in the diary. Considering Berkeley’s conception of existence as perception, Yeats
translates it into his own terms:
Berkeley in the Commonplace Book thought that “we perceive” and are passive
whereas God creates in perceiving.82 He creates what we perceive. I substitute
for God the Thirteenth Cone, the Thirteenth Cone therefore creates our perceptions—all the visible world—as held in common by our wheel. (Ex 320)
Though this is far from being a simple one-for-one substitution of God by the Thirteenth
Cone, in this context at least the Thirteenth Cone plays for Yeats the same role that God did
for Bishop Berkeley, the active creator and preserver of our phenomenal reality, though
elsewhere Yeats specifies that it is not phenomenal itself: “all life but that of the unknowable thirteenth cone is phenominal [sic].”83
In the first edition of A Vision Yeats had addressed the same problem of the continuity of perception, but had seen it more in terms of the plurality of spirits, particularly the
dead:
Berkeley thought that if his study table remained when he closed his eyes it
could only be because it was the thought of a more powerful spirit which he
named God, but the mathematician Poincaré considers time and space the work
of our ancestors. With the system in my bones I must declare that those ancestors still live and that time and space would vanish if they closed their eyes.
(CW13 128; AVA 158)
The role played by the Thirteenth Cone in the 1930 diary is thus the same as that attributed
to the dead in A Vision A, and in many ways Yeats continued to explore the concept of
God or the Thirteenth Cone as the abode of spirits, which can be viewed either as a unity
or a congeries.
The Thirteenth Cone is not only the matrix of “all the visible world—as held in common by our wheel,” the creative power behind all that we perceive as external, but it is also
the extreme of objectivity, opposed to us: “The 13th cone is the only thing that is entirely
objective & therefore fated, when considered by the antithetical human race. We are who
we are because of the assertion of our subjectivity.”84 If the Thirteenth Cone is completely
opposed to the humane cone, it is completely beyond human control, intervention or
conception. Thus our experience of it, as well as its “objective correlatives,” in T. S. Eliot’s
phrase, are in the sublime and the fated:
The 13 Cone is reflected in those parts of external nature uncontrolable by us—
sea, sky, growth & so on. As an internal experience the 13th Cone is the spiritual
reality [that] transcends experience, but is touched by all at the highest moment.
Our thought & our emotions & the acts towards which we are impelled are our
The Thirteenth Cone
173
experience of the incarnations of CM, Mask, & BF respectively, but beyond
these lie those fated things, that are external perceptions of the 13th Cone. We
enter in the Beatitude an experience that can only enter our embodied experience
when symbolized by all that is most tremendous in nature.85
The vast elements and powers of the natural world are beyond any personal Body of Fate,
and are utterly objective, thus reflecting the spiritual objective.
Although Yeats’s poetry very seldom figures the natural sublime, humanity’s can approach the Thirteenth Cone in life through symbol, the “tremendous in Nature” standing
for the sublime beyond Nature, just as Yeats’s use of the natural world in his poetry tends
always to intimate the supernatural or preternatural.86 It is perhaps fitting that Wordsworth, one of the poets who best expresses the numinous presence in external nature, is
placed at Phase 14,87 where the direction is still towards Nature though the sensitivity is
subjective, whereas Blake, whose vision goes beyond the natural to the mythic, is at Phase
16, where the direction has turned towards God (AVB 104). There is also a note of pantheism or panentheism, of the spiritual or divine dimension within all reality, when Yeats
observes that since “the 13th Cone, enters in some measure into all Spirits we must then
expect some image of it in all things.”88 This persists into A Vision B on a more personal
level: “the Thirteenth Cone or cycle which is in every man and called by every man his freedom” (AVB 302), which also recalls Jesus’s teaching that “the kingdom of God is within
you” (Luke 17:21; cf. YVP4 40 & 103).
While recognizing that “we must expect some image” of the Thirteenth Cone “in all
things,” Yeats still sees it most clearly in Blake’s “portions of eternity,”89 “in those things
which Blake called in Heaven & Hell too great for the eye of man,” singling out storm, the
starlit sky, the abundance of spring, but also “war in so far as war exceeds mans purpose—
‘the destructive sword’—The Beatific Vision, the Beatitude, gods love though still in his
wrath also.”90 Yeats’s list finds eternity in vast nature, irrational violence, and private communion with God: all are beyond the scope of human sense and remain irreconcilably
other to humanity in their “terrible beauty” (VP 392; CW1 182).91
The personal experience of the Thirteenth Cone is not fixed to any determined incarnation, though it becomes far more possible in the later phases of the wheel, “the spiritual
objectivity, or spiritual primary,” where “the Faculties ‘wear thin,’” and “the Principles,
which are…a sphere, shine through” (AVB 89). It is perhaps more readily experienced
therefore by the primary saint, for whom “the total life has suddenly displayed its source”
(CW13 92; AVA 113; AVB 180), yet the experience is potentially part of every life, since
each includes multiple cycles where the Principles potentially shine through in their final
phases. For Yeats himself such moments include the blazing openness of “Vacillation”
IV or the experience at Glendalough when “Through intricate motions ran / Stream and
gliding sun / And all my heart seemed gay,” the eternal instant that flashed in “the gleam /
That pierced my body through” and “made me live like these that seem / Self-born, born
anew” (VP 506–7; CW1 259).92
Within the individual life, the experience of the Thirteenth Cone is linked particularly to the two stages mentioned: the Beatific Vision and the Beatitude. Both terms draw
on the religious language of the human perception of the transcendent but, while the afterlife Beatitude represents a form of merging with the whole, a primary form of union,
174
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
the Beatific Vision is a secular, humanist and sexual, antithetical state.93 The two strands
meet in the sacrament of marriage, used a symbol for both states. As the Beatitude in the
afterlife is also called the Marriage (AVB 232), its embodied, living counterpart is found
in the “marriage bed” which “is the symbol of the solved antinomy” (AVB 52), “the
natural union of man and woman” which “has a kind of sacredness” as “a symbol of that
eternal instant where the antinomy is resolved” (AVB 214): “That stillness… / Where
his heart my heart did seem / And both adrift on the miraculous stream / Where… /
The Zodiac is changed into a sphere” (“Chosen,” VP 535; CW1 278). This moment
where the two hearts meet and the whirling zodiac becomes the sphere is also adumbrated in the near perfect union of Solomon and Sheba, where the cock “that crowed
out eternity / Thought to have crowed it in again” (“Solomon and the Witch,” VP 388;
CW1 179).
These stages fall at the extremes of the cycle of an individual life, the points in the
wheel of human incarnation and afterlife where the gyre contacts the circumference
(cf. AVB 198–200). After death, the Beatitude is seen as a brief culmination, symbolic
Phase 1 in the circle of the Principles, the soul’s round of life in the body and out of it,
and the Beatific Vision is its balancing Phase 15, Sun in Moon as opposed to the Beatitude’s Moon in Sun.94 The Beatitude is the state of the afterlife where the soul comes
the closest to the spiritual reality, “for a short time ‘out of space and time,’ and every
other abstraction, and is said not to move a gyre but in a sphere, being as it were present
everywhere at once” (CW13 193; AVA 235), and it is the “internal experience” of the
Thirteenth Cone, “the spiritual reality” that “transcends experience, but is touched by all
at the highest moment.”95 None of this description was, however, included in A Vision
B, where this central state and stage of the cycle is given the minimum of treatment, and
characterized as when “good and evil vanish into the whole” (AVB 232).
If the Beatitude was scanted in A Vision B, the Beatific Vision was completely omitted.
Yeats had regretted in A Vision A that he had written “nothing about the Beatific Vision,
little of sexual love” (CW13 lv; AVA xii), yet he removed what little there had been when
he rewrote A Vision B.96 The treatment in A Vision A is enigmatic, melding the influx of
the next Master, with the dead, sexual love and a Blakean transformation of the Faculties from Desire, Cruelty, Service and Domination to Wisdom, Truth, Love and Beauty
(CW13 140; AVA 172). What exactly this transformation means is unclear, though the
terms do imply a form of redemptive restoration, but it seems a matter of mythic dimensions rather than human experience, and certainly not the personal terms from which it
arose in the automatic script nor fully in keeping with the general style of A Vision.97 It
does involve the only mention of the Thirteenth Cone as such in A Vision A, when Yeats
writes about the first and second Critical Moments leading up to the Beatific Vision, stating
that passionate sexual love during these “three forms of crisis” comes “under the sway of
the thirteenth cone. That is to say there is harmonisation or the substitution of the sphere
for the cone” (CW13 140; cf. AVA 172).98 “Harmonisation” is further defined in A Vision
A as “the recognition by Lunar man of the Solar spiritual opposite that is called faith, and
it inaugurates religious emotional and philosophical experience” (CW13 140; AVA 172),
which, reduced to more banal equivalents, is to say that it is the subjective human’s acceptance of the spiritual objective and is called faith—hardly a controversial experience
of the divine.
The Thirteenth Cone
175
A fragment from a draft of A Vision B gives further insight into this harmonization in
terms of balance with the Principles, considering how a Swedenborg, for instance, who is:
conscious of the Wheel of the Principles and that of the Faculties in their mutual
relations, is at the same instant awake and asleep, alive and dead. He expresses
through a system of images a harmony of related aims, and we should discover
in this system, in this Unity of Being, not the sphere’s messengers but the sphere
itself, that which only contradiction can express not “the lone tower of the absolute self ” but its shattering, “the absolute self ” set free, that unknown reality
painted or sung by the monks of Zen.99
The “harmony of related aims” that expresses the Sphere is Nicholas of Cusa’s “coincidence
of opposites,” a marriage of Principles and Faculties, unconscious and conscious, sleeping
and waking mind, the dead and the living state, a unity of primary and antithetical: “I
hail the superhuman; / I call it death-in-life and life-in-death” (VP 497; CW1 252). The
implication is that “a harmony of related aims,” whether the Faculties or Principles themselves or expressions of them, are realized in a “system of images” which achieves a form of
Unity of Being,100 which expresses not self but pure being, the unknown, ultimate reality.
Yeats indicates that Zen art has such systems of images, which express satori through unified contradiction, where all is true, and the absolute self is freed from its isolation into
the wholeness of the absolute as Sphere.101 It is possible that he even hoped to achieve
something similar in his own system, with its “arbitrary, harsh, difficult symbolism” of the
kind that “has almost always accompanied expression that unites the sleeping and waking
mind” (AVB 23).
As opposed to harmonization, Beatitude and Beatific Vision when viewed in terms
of the Principles are special moments of union. In Beatitude, Celestial Body is united in
Spirit, “pure mind, containing within itself pure truth” (AVB 188–89) and is “that reality
we discover in thought: a single spaceless and timeless being[,] all others its creation and
endowed with reflected limited life,” while its opposite, Spirit in Celestial Body, is identified with Beatific Vision and “that reality which supports and precedes phenomena; a community of timeless and spaceless autonomous beings, each being unique, or a species in
itself, a complete multiplicity.”102 The diary of 1930 notes that when the Celestial Body “is
unified in” the Spirit, the soul approaches the Thirteenth Cone internally and, when Spirit
is absorbed into Celestial Body, it gains the strongest perception of the Thirteenth Cone “as
fated Nature,” approaching it externally.103
The table below summarizes the two states under the headings solar and lunar, though
primary and antithetical or One and Many would serve as well:
solar
Phase 1
Beatitude
internal experience of Thirteenth Cone
Celestial Body in Spirit
thought
single being
“it is because it is true”
lunar
Phase 15
Beatific Vision
external experience of Thirteenth Cone
Spirit in Celestial Body
phenomena
congeries of beings
“it is true because it is”104
176
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Almost none of this dichotomy was used in A Vision B itself, probably because Yeats recognized that he was creating a form of symmetry that was not borne out in his documents,
but the processes of musing and drafting left their traces and informed his approach to the
question of spiritual experience and the Thirteenth Cone.
V
It may seem paradoxical that Yeats the poet who is if anything polytheistic in his sympathies should apparently enshrine such a monolithic and rebarbative symbolism for
divinity as the Sphere-Thirteenth Cone, but neither the absolute Sphere nor even the
Thirteenth Cone is the same as the God of monotheism, which is as much an expression
of the antinomies as the plural deities of ancient Irish or Greek religion. A Vision in fact
offers some five distinct views of the divine, at the very least. First, beyond all, comes the
Sphere. When that Sphere “falls in human consciousness…into a series of antinomies”
(AVB 187), the first of that series is the antinomy of the humane wheel and the spiritual
wheel, where duality enters, “for in 13th Cone [God] divides into two” (YVP3 102),
including good and evil.105 There may be a unified version of this stage, out of time,
dual and differentiated but united: “two worlds lying one within another—nothing
exterior, nothing interior, Sun in Moon and Moon in Sun—a single being like man and
woman in Plato’s Myth,” but as soon as this enters time there is “then a separation and
a whirling for countless ages” (CW13 121; AVA 149).106 This united, resolved antinomy
is a second, potentially creative aspect of the Sphere, dual and maybe phasal, embracing both Thirteenth Cone and humane cone, spiritual and mundane wheels. When this
divides truly, the humane and mundane is set against the spiritual wheel and the Thirteenth Cone, which is the third, illusory form of the divine and the one that we can perceive. Next, within the cone that encompasses the whole of human experience, another
element in the “series of antinomies” is an antinomy within human thought comprised
of “two conceptions, that of reality as a congeries of beings, that of reality as a single
being” (Ex 305), or, to reverse the order, a solitary primary God and an antithetical multitude of gods, the fourth and fifth aspects of divinity. Beyond these, but still related to
these earlier concepts, are various views of the Daimons and the Principles, wherein the
divine is brought even closer to the embrace of humanity, even literally:
So closely do all the bonds resemble each other that in the most ascetic schools
of India the novice tortured by his passion will pray to the God to come to him
as a woman and have with him sexual intercourse; nor is the symbol subjective, for in the morning his pillow will be saturated with temple incense, his
breast yellow with the saffron dust of some temple offering. Such experience is
said, however, to wear itself out swiftly, giving place to the supernatural union.
(AVB 239–40)
Love for the god can be expressed antithetically, that is in human terms, through sexual
desire, since “the opposite sex is nature chosen and fated” (AVB 88; cf. CW13 52; AVA
61). Philosophical Hinduism unifies its polytheism’s diversity, so the ascetic’s devotion
to one god can lead to the One God of all, and “supernatural union,” but popular Hin-
The Thirteenth Cone
177
duism celebrates the diversity of the gods’ aspects. Though the manifestations of deity
have a clear hierarchy, the similarities of the bonds also create a ladder for ascent, and
the attempted union with the divine at the lower level leads, for those so attuned, to the
higher levels. For such, “Unity with God” is the gift of the soul in primary incarnation,
while the antithetical soul must look to “Unity of Being, the unity of man not of God,
and therefore of the antithetical tincture” (AVB 258).
If the system’s true deity is a totality which comprehends all, what is referred to
as “God” throughout A Vision is a deity of religion, associated largely with the primary
Tincture, particularly the last quarter between Phase 22 and the supernatural Phase
1, where awareness of God and openness to him are possible, after “The Emotion of
Sanctity” comes at Phase 22 (AVB 181; CW13 92; AVA 114). This is especially the
God of monotheism, which is first and foremost Christianity in Yeats’s thinking, but
includes the other Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam, as well as the more abstract
conceptions of Buddhism, philosophical Hinduism and Vedanta, and the philosophical
paganism of Plato, who “thinks all things into Unity and is the ‘First Christian’” (AVB
262–63). The gods of the Hindu pantheon offer a more antithetical expression of the
divine in terms of human selfhood—“The Indian submits to a god, but that god is himself—every self ” (LMR 21; 5 October [1934])107—but their system can also embrace
the ascetic yogis and devotees of Shiva of the last primary quarter.
Ultimately, however, and despite Yeats’s personal sympathies, the primary has primacy. If “the greater circle is always primary in relation to that which turns more quickly
and within” (CW13 121; AVA 149), the greatest circles are inevitably in some respects
primary. The Sphere may transcend all antinomy as the mutual annihilation of both
Tinctures and the unimaginable union of God and man (Ex 307), but it is One, and “in
the primary we are one, & all are one before they are many.”108 From the other side, the
primary has more affinity with the absolute reality and all the cycles of incarnation must
reach conclusion in Phase 1, complete primary Tincture. Considering how those more
evolved souls “of later cycles” might experience the periods of the end of the cycle, as
the historical phases move “from the physical to the spiritual objective,” Yeats notes that
they face the prospect of “complete absorption in God,” going so far as to acknowledge
that, no longer some primary Nobodaddy (WWB3 91), in this context “God must be
understood as the Sphere, a spirit no longer separate or phasal.”109
At the end of Book III, “The Soul in Judgment,” the Sphere is endowed with a
kind of thought, when Yeats writes of how “It becomes even conscious of itself as” being seen as the Thirteenth Cone, and its duality as Sphere-Cone is compared to “some
great dancer, the perfect flower of modern culture, dancing some primitive dance and
conscious of his or her own life and of the dance” (AVB 240). If the figuring of reality
or the Absolute as the Sphere rejects all but the barest symbolism, Yeats’s images here
verge on the mythical, as the simile of the dancer embodies allusions to essential being—the dancer’s life—and process—the movements of the dance—which both meet
in the dancer’s body and the dance itself.110 The concept of the modern person dancing
a primitive dance adds a further dimension, implying a distance and that there are many
other possible dances available and ways of seeing the dance, though only one is seen for
the moment.111 Yeats continues in mythic mode: “There is a mediaeval story of a man
persecuted by his Guardian Angel because it was jealous of his sweetheart, and such
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stories seem closer to reality than our abstract theology,” though it is unclear whether
this applies specifically to the Daimon, the subject of much of the preceding material,
or the Sphere-Thirteenth Cone, the subject of all the surrounding material. The latter
seems more logical but also harder to conceive, yet Yeats continues that “All imaginable
relations may arise between a man and his God,” implying that the Sphere-Thirteenth
Cone is indeed God and that humanity can relate to it in multifarious ways.
Yeats’s conception of levels of divine manifestation is never formalized into anything approaching Neo-Platonic or cabalistic emanations, but each level of deity imperfectly reflects that above and descends further into the antinomies. However, he had
used Plotinus and his hypostases as a way of understanding his concepts of God from
the first, even if his attributions and structure do some violence to Plotinus’s actual
ideas. In A Vision A, “the Soul of the World, the Intellectual Principle and the One” had
been identified with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Cycles, as well as with the
Principles (CW13 143; AVA 176), and these cycles with the afterlife’s Beatitude, Going
Forth and Foreknowing, and then “Holy Ghost, Son and Father” in turn (CW13 194;
AVA 236). These three cycles are not only stages beyond the human wheels of incarnation but also beings. Although the identification with the Christian Trinity is perhaps
as much a reflex of Yeats’s Golden Dawn training in seeking out elaborate chains of
correspondence as a genuine identity, it does indicate their exalted status and divine
equivalence.
In A Vision B, the Plotinian correspondences are applied to “the Four Principles
in the sphere” (AVB 193) and it is clear that he conceived of the Principles, “in the
sphere” at least, as microcosmic forms of Plotinus’s divine hypostases.112 Celestial Body
and Spirit are identified with the “First Authentic Existant,” the One, and the “Second
Authentic Existant,” the Intellectual Principle, respectively. However, the place of the
“Third Authentic Existant or soul of the world (the Holy Ghost in Christianity)” is
occupied by “the discarnate Daimons, or Ghostly Selves,” while the other two Principles
(Passionate Body and Husk) are only included indirectly as reflections of this condition.
In part this is an attempt to square traditional threefold divisions with his own fourfold one, and in part it points to the fact that Passionate Body and Husk are evanescent
Principles, which are important for incarnate life but should then be shed during the
afterlife (AVB 188), and so have no real place “in the sphere” except as reflections of
Daimonic hunger (AVB 189).113 By retaining the identification with “the Holy Ghost
of Christianity,” Yeats intimates the way in which the microcosm and macrocosm are
intimately connected: the Trinity is no enskied or distant deity, but an integral aspect
of man’s constitution.
The identification of individual Principles superseded an earlier attempt to view the
Principles in Plotinian terms that in many ways clarifies Yeats’s thinking more.
If I would arrange Principles & Faculties into such a diagram as comes naturally
to the students of Plotinus I arrange them thus
The Thirteenth Cone
179
114
Here the One is identified with the unified or resolved antinomy, specifically the second
stage identified above.115 The Thirteenth Cone is seen here in its unified from, whereas the
second and third hypostases show the dualism of single being and congeries (Ex 305). As we
have seen already, Celestial Body in Spirit expresses the solar, primary or unified reality that
approaches the Thirteenth Cone from within, whereas Spirit in Celestial Body expresses the lunar, antithetical or multitudinous reality that approaches the Thirteenth Cone from without.
Both “the Many and the One are equally autonomous”116 below “The Resolved Antinomy,”
though the unified view is inevitably placed first. The stages here therefore mirror the stages
of the divine outlined above, with the first three forms condensed into the Supreme Monad,
Reality, Resolved Antinomy or eternity—the Sphere as Thirteenth Cone—and humanity’s
two views of Reality as a unified and as multitude making up the three hypostases.
Yeats later corrected himself, stating that: “The resolved antinomy appears not in a
lofty source but in the whirlpool’s motionless centre, or beyond its edge” (AVB 195). Just
as the Cabalists’ Tree of Life is conventionally and most conveniently shown as a vertically arranged hierarchy, it is also perhaps more truly shown by concentric rings, with the
highest point either at the center creating outwards or beyond the edge embracing all.
Similarly, the resolved antinomy lies at motionless center, eternity, and at the circumference of spiritual influx.
VI
Yeats had early absorbed the idea that any attempts to figure the divine in mortal thoughts
and language involve inevitable distortion, writing in “The Indian upon God” of how
the moorfowl revere “an undying moorfowl,” the lotus conceives of God as hanging “on a
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
stalk,” while to the roebuck “He is a gentle roebuck,” and to the peafowl “He is a monstrous
peacock” (VP 76–77; CW1 11–12).117 Human anthropomorphism is as understandable
and as risible as any of these, and Yeats responds most readily to the anthropomorphism
of the antithetical aspect of the numinous, feeling that he can achieve his intention in
“The Hosting of the Sidhe , ‘O sweet everlasting voices,’ and those lines about ‘The lonely,
majestical multitude’” (Ex 305). In contrast, “Again and again with remorse, a sense of
defeat, I have failed when I would write of God, written coldly and conventionally” (Ex
305). It is not surprising therefore that Yeats did not seek to repeat failure when expressing
his ideas about the Thirteenth Cone and Sphere, and as with most of the ideas of A Vision
they are usually clothed in metaphor and conventional language. Even here, however,
he also confronts the problem of treating ultimate reality in image: “I knew a man once
who, seeking for an image of the Absolute, saw one persistent image, a slug, as though
it were suggested to him that Being which is beyond human comprehension is mirrored
in the least organised forms of life” (AVB 284; cf. CW13 162; AVA 195).118 One of the
ways around this problem is to figure the Absolute in a state, expressed through images of
ecstasy and completion, such as the perfect sexual union of Solomon and Sheba or “Chosen,” referred to already, the conflagration of souls mentioned in “Supernatural Songs” or
the unified extinction of “There.”
Full anthropomorphism may in some ways be preferable to the insidious version
that affects all human thought about the divine. True deity lies beyond whatever (mis-)
conceptions are imposed by the limitations of consciousness or partiality, and writing of
the conception as a sphere and the misconception as a cone at least underlines the main
point that we have no idea and no language for the divine. Godhead can only be talked of
negatively and approached by the negative way of the mystic, expressed early on by Paul
Ruttledge, the Tolstoyan mystic of Where There is Nothing, who finds that “Where there
is nothing, there is God” (VPl 1140) and more violently by Martin in The Unicorn from
the Stars (VPl 709). Similarly the mystic saint “Aengus the Lover of God” has “found the
nothing that is God” (M2005 125; Myth 190; VSR 54).
Ribh, the main voice of “Supernatural Songs,” a Christian in some Irish-Coptic
tradition of Yeats’s fancy (VP 837–38 & 857; CW1 679 & 680), expresses both metaphorical anthropomorphism and negative theology. He denounces Patrick for his “masculine Trinity” that goes against nature, seeing that “Natural and supernatural with the
self-same ring are wed” (VP 556; CW1 290), implying that we understand godhead
by analogy with creation. He also, however, seeks to use hatred to “turn / From every
thought of God mankind has had” (VP 558; CW1 292) stripping away the trivial human notions to “the desolation of reality” (VP 563; CW1 295), for “Thought is a garment and the soul’s a bride / That cannot in that trash and tinsel hide” (VP 558; CW1
292). By destroying false thoughts, therefore, “Hatred of God may bring the soul to
God” (VP 558; CW1 292), for it is only by hating “all ideas concerning God that we
possess” that “absorption in God” is possible, as the communicator had originally said
(IY 283; cited NC 355).119
“There” (VP 557; CW1 291) expresses succinctly the end of all movement and desire,
bringing the barrel-hoops of all the separate gyres into the Sphere, with the apocalyptic fall
of the planets “in the Sun” recalling the description of “the soul’s journey” in “All Souls’
Night,”
The Thirteenth Cone
181
How it is whirled about,
Wherever the orbit of the moon can reach,
Until it plunge into the sun;
And there, free and yet fast,
Being both Chance and Choice,
Forget its broken toys
And sink into its own delight at last. (VP 472–73; CW1 233)
These states are both the end of all cycles, the first in cosmic terms and the second in more
personal. Though the sun is treated here as the center of the solar system, it is also symbolically the objective aspect of reality, the primary, spiritual unity, opposed to the whirling,
subjective, lunar gyres of antithetical multiplicity.
Chance and Choice express the fundamental antinomy: “one can think about the
world and about man, or anything else until all has vanished but these two things, for
they are the first cause of the animate and inanimate world,” as Yeats has Aherne’s record
of what Robartes heard from the Arab devotee of Kusta ben Luki [sic] in the notes to
Calvary, and “In God alone, indeed, can they be united, yet each be perfect and without
limit or hindrance” (VPl 790; CW2 697). The union of Chance and Choice is therefore
the resolution of the antinomies that can only occur in the Sphere, as noted in the preternatural sympathy of “Solomon and the Witch” (VP 387–89; CW1 179–80).
The God of Christ in Calvary is not however the God of Judas or the dice-throwers, nor has he appeared to the birds, all representatives of the antithetical order, and is
therefore only a partial, primary expression of godhead. Yet, at the same time, Christ is
an expression of the Thirteenth Cone, the Sphere, and the miraculous irruption of the
spiritual dimension into the world. This is what the beating heart of the risen Christ
forces the Syrian of The Resurrection to recognize as the irrational: “What if there is always something that lies outside knowledge, outside order? What if the moment when
knowledge and order seem complete that something appears?” (VPl 925; CW2 490). The
Greek acknowledges it through another reconciliation of opposites, a version of Yeats’s
favorite apophthegm: “God and man die each other’s life, live each other’s death” (VPl
931; CW2 492).
In the play’s notes, Yeats describes the phantom’s beating heart as “the terror of the supernatural” and “the sense of spiritual reality” that comes with “some violent shock” (VPl
935; CW2 726). This strange combination is also at the heart of The Herne’s Egg, where
the Great Herne is possibly the closest that Yeats comes to a symbol for the Thirteenth
Cone. The Great Herne never appears, and the words of his priestess Attracta sound like
mad delusion to Congal and his men, yet for her “There is no reality but the Great Herne”
(VPl 1016; CW2 513). In the eyes of Congal, he and his men rape Attracta; in her eyes,
the Great Herne came to her and made her his bride. Similarly, if the priestess is doing
“his will,” then even her servant Corney can be “his instrument or himself,” acting, as in
Blake’s dictum, in existing beings or men:
I lay with the Great Herne, and he,
Being all a spirit, but begot
His image in the mirror of my spirit,
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Being all sufficient to himself
Begot himself.… (VPl 1039–40; CW2 534)
The Great Herne is a fabulous bird like the Persian simurg, an expression of the soul or
godhead like the hamsa of Hinduism, and Attracta’s relationship to him is comparable to
both Leda’s with the swan and Mary’s with the dove, both of which represent the irruption
of the divine into the world of history.120
The “artifice of eternity” of Yeats’s “holy city of Byzantium” (VP 408; CW1 197) represents the “harmonization” of the wheels of the Faculties and Principles, “a harmony of related aims” in a form of Unity of Being that expresses the Sphere.121 Its union of living and
death states in “death-in-life and life-in-death” (VP 497; CW1 252) was not for Yeats the
nightmare of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” but a superhuman marriage of
spirit life and earthly life. In general, however, Yeats seeks a more personal form of Unity
of Being and recognizes himself as a man “who has thought more of the love of woman
than of the love of God,” as he has Owen Aherne describe him (CW13 lxii; AVA xxi):
Mr Yeats has intellectual belief but he is entirely without moral faith, without
that sense, which should come to a man with terror and joy, of a Divine Presence, and though he may seek, and may have always sought it, I am certain that
he will not find it in this life. (CW13 lxiii; AVA xxi–xxii)
The last three words are key: after further incarnations the soul that was Yeats will arrive at
Phase 22 and “the ‘Emotion of Sanctity,’” becoming “aware of something which the intellect cannot grasp, and this something is a supersensual environment of the soul” (CW13
92; AVA 114; AVB 181). He recognizes that even now “heart might find relief / Did I
become a Christian man” (VP 503; CW1 256) but realizes that he also plays “a predestined
part,” and that, for those who fall on the antithetical half of the wheel, trying to find experience of the divine as taught by religion goes against their nature and is largely doomed
to failure. He may intellectually grasp the idea of sanctity and respond to a mystic such as
Von Hügel, but ultimately they are not kin: “Homer is my example and his unchristened
heart” (VP 503; CW1 257), singing the loves, wars and wanderings of man.
Yeats’s God of ultimate reality therefore exists as the ineffable Sphere. Although its active aspect, the inscrutable Thirteenth Cone, intersects with and impinges upon our world,
Yeats himself feels unqualified to comprehend it. If the Sphere is the Eternity of Hermes
Trismegistus, the motionless, timeless, spaceless all, which, as the Thirteenth Cone, yet appears to be in motion, he rather apprehends eternity in the very human terms of the soul
coming “into possession of itself for ever in one single moment” (AVB 139; CW13 61;
AVA 73).122 Though it is the goal of all the cycles, for him it is not yet an end that he looks
forward to with any enthusiasm, though he can appreciate the presence of sublimity that
intimates it. He recognizes that others may achieve a clearer and purer understanding but
that he will only be able to experience the Thirteenth Cone subjectively and in drama. His
concern is not the great causes at the beginning and end of creation but humanity and
“what we were a little before conception, what we shall be a little after burial” (AVB 223).
The Thirteenth Cone
183
Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Yeats’s nomenclature varies, as does his use of capitals and italics. Thirteenth Cycle (the main term in AVA
and without italics) is the most logical, since it denotes the cycle beyond the “twelve cycles of time and
space” (AVB 210), but possibly limits the term to this context. Since a cycle can be seen as a gyre or cone,
the Thirteenth Cone (the most common term in AVB and usually italicized) follows and broadens the application slightly. The Thirteenth Cycle of AVA is a far less developed concept than its counterpart in AVB
(as discussed later in the text). To this pair Yeats then adds a single reference to a Thirteenth Sphere, conflating “the phaseless sphere” with these cyclical, gyring forms, and in doing so probably clouds rather than
clarifies the issue. “Sphere” also appears both with an initial capital and without. I use capitalized forms
throughout when referring to Yeats’s special terms and follow Yeats’s usual practice in italicizing Thirteenth
Cone, but not Thirteenth Cycle.
Graham Hough summarizes, not entirely accurately, that “we are at a loss to know whether it is a locality,
a historical period, an undifferentiated slice of time, a state of affairs or a supernatural force,” The Mystery
Religion of W. B. Yeats (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984), 113; hereafter MRWBY.
In A Vision A the term “thirteenth cone” occurs only once (CW13 140; AVA 172), “Thirteenth Cycle” in
six places (CW13 138, 143, 182, 189, 191, 194; AVA 170, 176, 220, 229, 231, 236; in some cases together
with Fourteenth and Fifteenth Cycles and in one place twice) and by allusion to “a spiritual cycle” in one
other (CW13 195; AVA 236). The “sphere” is referred to some eight times, though the usage is not always
clear, since there is no capitalization and it is not distinguished from other references (CW13 107, 109,
113, 138, 140, 142, 143, 193; AVA 133, 135, 139, 170, 172, 176; 235). By comparison the Thirteenth
Cone is mentioned some nine times in A Vision B (AVB 193, 199–200, 210–11, 227, 233–34, 235 in two
separate sections, 263, 302) and in the phrase “messengers” or “Spirits of the Thirteenth Cone” in a further
four places (AVB 228, 229–30, 237, 239–40), while “the Sphere” (with and without capital letter) occurs
in eight places (AVB 69, 73, 89, 187, 193, 193–94, 247, 263).
Ellmann notes that “the embodiment of divinity in so unprepossessing a term as Thirteenth Cycle stood in
ironic and urbane contrast to Yeats’s claims for the cycle’s unlimited powers” (The Identity of Yeats [1954;
2nd ed. London: Faber & Faber, 1964],159; IY hereafter), and he also claims that it is the “system’s antiself. All the determinism or quasi-determinism of A Vision is abruptly confronted with the Thirteenth
Cycle which is able to alter everything, and suddenly free will, liberty and deity pour back into the universe” (Yeats: The Man and the Masks [2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979], 286). Though there
is much in Ellmann’s characterizations, some subsequent critics have taken his summaries as sufficiently
authoritative that they repeat Ellmann rather than looking at Yeats.
Graham Hough demurs: “Ellmann is persuaded that the Thirteenth Sphere or Cycle is Yeats’s equivalent
for God; but though the language used of it at the end of A Vision is exalted I do not think it reaches as far
as that; Fate or Fortune perhaps, but not God” (MRWBY 117). To Northrop Frye, “it is…impossible that
the ‘One’ could be anything but Man, or something identical or identifiable with man,” so that “The Thirteenth Cone…represents the dialectical element in symbolism, where man is directly confronted by the
greater form of himself which challenges him to identify himself with it,” see “The Rising of the Moon,”
Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society (Bloomington, IN, & London: Indiana University
Press, 1976), 273. Frye is also clear that “Yeats’s instructors were obviously devils. That is, all they knew
was the vision of life as hell,” (ibid., xii). Harold Bloom finds the Thirteenth Cone “a happily Urizenic name
for God,” but focuses on its “immediate meaning” for consideration of the individual, which is “man’s
freedom, or all of freedom that Yeats desires, anyway,” Yeats (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press,
1970), 274.
Virginia Moore notes that “In a 1930 diary Yeats had written: ‘I substitute for God the Thirteenth Cone.’
Can this God possibly be called Christian?” and answers “Yes” because Yeats identifies it with Plotinian
hypostases in A Vision A; see The Unicorn: William Butler Yeats’ Search for Reality (New York: Macmillan,
1954), 367.
Morton Irving Seiden casts the net wide, finding that “Yeats’ Thirteenth Sphere, if less attractive or personal than either Jehovah or Christ, has not a few traits in common with each,” while noting it may appear
closer “to Blake’s God, to Madame Blavatsky’s God, to the Hindu’s One or Nirvana, and to the Kabbalist’s
Ain Soph Aour,” though only superficially; see William Butler Yeats: The Poet as Mythmaker 1865–1939
(Ann Arbor: Michigan State University Press, 1962), 121.
Ron Heisler’s essay “Yeats and the Thirteenth Æon” (YA13 [1999] 241–252), which incidentally provides a
useful survey of criticism, ultimately concentrates on a single Gnostic parallel and possible source, without
184
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
really illuminating Yeats’s construct or meaning.
James Olney examines Yeats in terms of ancient Greek philosophy, and at one point sketches a genealogy
of the antinomies similar to one I outline in Section V, see The Rhizome and the Flower: The Perennial
Philosophy—Yeats and Jung (Berkeley & L.A.: University of California Press, 1980), 224. However, he
complicates and ultimately confuses his consideration by bringing in too many external parallels, without
really presenting the implications as regards Yeats. Drawing parallels between Yeats and other systems
can certainly be illuminating, but must be done with the greatest of care so as not to distort Yeats’s ideas
to those of his forebears, not to distract too far from Yeats’s ideas themselves, and not to minimize their
often marked change over time. Olney perceptively picks up on Per Amica Silentia Lunae’s treatment of
the “passionate dead” who “live again those passionate moments, not knowing that they are dead” (ibid.,
223) equating these with classical “daimones,” but muddying the differences between Per Amica and A
Vision, and seeming to ignore the Daimon’s evolution in Yeats’s thought. Elsewhere he seems to conflate
disparate elements, writing of “Yeats’s Thirteenth Cone or Sphere, the realm of the daimones and the great,
exemplary dead” in A. D. Moody (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 5.
Terence Brown judges that the “concept seems incorporated into the system as a means of subverting at
last its overall determinism, rather than as the desirable goal of all human striving,” The Life of W. B. Yeats:
A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 309, while Barbara L. Croft thinks that it is “perhaps too
little and too late to give the system a genuine balance of freedom and determined necessity,” see “Stylistic
Arrangements”: A Study of William Butler Yeats’s “A Vision” (Lewisburg, PA: Associated University Presses,
1987), 160. Croft’s approach is largely Ellmann’s, and for her the Thirteenth Cone “both defeats and extends the system, and in its lack of resolution, injects the artistic and human tension into the work. Yeats
specifically identifies this cycle as man’s “freedom,” but he also insists that it is “secret” (AVB 302), so the
Thirteenth Cycle…remains essentially a mystery,” ibid., 38.
Helen Vendler focuses on the concept of the “spiritual objective” (AVB 210), though with an idiosyncratic
aesthetic emphasis, considering it “the locus of all Masks, if we like, ‘the antithesis to our thesis’” that “can
as well be described as the ideal, in the best sense a figment of our imagination,” but one lying “somewhere in the mental realm…a goal, not a product,” Yeats’s “Vision” and the Later Plays (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1963), 68. Jefferson Holdridge similarly sees “the Thirteenth Cone, God-like
mystical locus of the ‘Mass’ [sic],” in Those Mingled Seas: The Poetry of W. B. Yeats, the Beautiful and the
Sublime (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2000), 109, though it is not clear if this is a misprint
for Vendler’s Masks or an unexplained reference to Michael Robartes’s “general mass, call it Nature, God,
the Matrix, the Unconscious, what you will” (YO 221).
For Hazard Adams, antithesis is key: “There is an antinomy in the Thirteenth Cone’s relation to life or in
our capacity to think of it,” The Book of Yeats’s Vision (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995),
116, but he does little to clarify any details of this antinomy and its aspects. Adams’s treatment is diffuse,
partly because he follows the structure of Yeats’s presentation in AVB. He avoids mention of the divine and
worries at the concept of the Thirteenth Cone and Sphere rather than really addressing it (see 117–20). He
continues (from the comment cited) rather vaguely, that: “the Thirteenth Cone seems to have powers of
intervention in and command over both life and death. It is either both primary and antithetical simultaneously or entirely transcendent of this opposition. There is certainly a give and take not just between the
two worlds of life and death, one primary and the other antithetical, but also between the Thirteenth Cone
and both of these worlds, seen as one,” (ibid., 116).
Colin McDowell’s “‘The Completed Symbol’: Daimonic Existence and the Great Wheel in A Vision
(1937)” (YA6 [1988] 193–208) engages with the concept at an active and imaginative level and his Yeatsian “thought experiment” is entirely appropriate to “a symbol” that Yeats had turned over in his “mind,
exploring all its details, defining and again defining its elements,” much as he had when he “meditated
under the direction of the Cabalists” (AVB 301), though it is probably not the basis of Yeats’s own thinking.
I would like to thank Gráinne Yeats for giving permission through A. P. Watt Ltd. to quote from unpublished manuscripts in the National Library of Ireland.
I am entirely in agreement with Colin McDowell that whatever other materials may be available or used,
“A Vision B must still be judged on profundity and internal consistency,” “Yeats’s ‘Vision’ Papers: First
Impressions,” YA11 (1995) 157.
Part of this diary was published as Pages from a Diary Written in 1930 (Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1944) included in Explorations 287–340, but much remained unpublished and the original diary is in the National
The Thirteenth Cone
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
185
Library of Ireland (MS 30,354).
Always lower case, it is a late usage and this is the phrase’s first appearance in print, though Yeats had probably come across it while reading for the revision of A Vision (largely finished in 1931; see AVB 187 & 193)
and certainly used it earlier, see Pages from a Diary Written in 1930, Ex 295, 307, 310. See also “Prometheus
Unbound” (CW5 118; E&I 419) and “Introduction to Aphorisms of Yoga” (CW5 179), On the Boiler (CW5
432 n63; Ex 430n).
St Paul and Protestantism (1870), in The Works of Matthew Arnold, 15 vols., (London: Macmillan, 1904),
9:9. Arnold’s periphrasis for God is even vaguer than Yeats’s: “That stream of tendency by which all things
strive to fulfill the law of their being,” which science might also “call God.”
Franz Hartmann, An Adventure Among the Rosicrucians (Boston: Occult Publishing Co., 1887), 146.
Commenting on the early poetry, Ellmann notes that “God is referred to as the ‘Eternal Darkness,’ ‘the
Supreme Enchanter’…the ‘Ineffable Name,’ ‘the Light of Lights,’ the ‘Master of the still stars and the flaming door’” (IY 53), to which could be added a litany of other titles from later writings.
This thread is present in Theosophy, Boehmist theosophy, Cabala, Vedanta, as well as the works of philosophers and mystics that Yeats found congenial, such as the Neo-Platonists, including Plotinus on the One.
Negative or “apophatic” theology has sometimes been regarded with distrust in orthodox Christianity, but
is found, for example, in the writings of pseudo-Dionysius Areopagus, John Scotus Eriugena, Nicholas of
Cusa and St John of the Cross. Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides) also famously expounds a Jewish form
of negative theology in The Guide for the Perplexed.
Yeats had used the formulation in “In the Serpent’s Mouth” (1906), see CW4 443 headnote and n1. The
formulation varies between “circle” and “sphere,” although its oldest form appears to be as a sphere in a
Hermetic text: “Deus est sphaera infinita, cuius centrum ubique, circumferentia nusquam,” “God is an infinite
sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere” (Liber XXIV philosophorum; see Françoise
Hudry ed., Le livre des XXIV philosophes, [Grenoble: Millon, 1989] in Latin and French). It is unlikely that
Yeats knew this source but, given the formulation’s many occurrences, it is very hard to know where he
might first have come across it: see, for instance, Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine 2 vols. (London: Theosophical Publishing Co., 1888), 1:65. D. Mahnke’s survey of the figure, Unendliche Sphäre und Allmittelpunkt,
Beiträge zur Genealogie der mathematischen Mystik (Halle: Niemeyer, 1937), locates the chief source in
Plotinus (215ff.) with roots in pre-Socratic thought.
Occasionally the two geometrical tropes are described through secondary images, as in the series of comparisons at the end of Book III, “The Soul in Judgment,” examined below 176–78.
Yeats apparently only discovered Nicholas of Cusa (also Nicholas Cusanus; ca.1400–1464) in 1931, writing to Mario Rossi in October 1931 to thank him for his “long and valuable quotations from Nicolas of
Cusa” and referring to W. H. Johnston’s translation of Ludwig Fischer’s Die natürliche Ordnung unseres
Denkens (L 783–84); see The Structure of Thought: A Survey of Natural Philosophy (German 1927; London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1931), especially 202–6.
This passage appears in draft in almost identical form without the reference to Cusanus (NLI 30,840 and
30,841), implying that he inserted it later. The typescript entitled “Genealogical Tree of Revolution” (NLI
30,280; see Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: Man and Poet [1949; 3rd edition, Dublin: Gill & Mamillan, 1996], Appendix, 325) also posits Cusanus as the originator of the antinomies.
Rosemary Puglia Ritvo writes of a phasal sphere, which she attributes to the Principles (“A Vision B: The
Plotinian Metaphysical Basis,” Review of English Studies 26, no. 101 [1975]: 34–46 at 37 n2), but the appeal to Cusa indicates that the duality implies the gyres more broadly.
See NLI 30,757, quoted more fully below.
Yeats’s full meaning here is hard to fathom and not immediately relevant to the point being made. The
concept of souls from a Thirteenth Cycle initiating the new dispensation is bound up with ideas that were
rejected by the time of AVB, or at least omitted, along with most of this section entitled “The Three Fountains and the Cycles of Embodiment” (CW13 137–38; AVA 169–70).
As with the hour hand of the clock passing twelve, the thirteenth in this series is the start of a new
era. However, it is not a whole new circle, as in A Vision A Yeats appears to have envisaged only three cycles
beyond the twelfth, “The 13th, 14th and 15th cycles,” all of which “are described as Spheres” and said
to correspond with Plotinus’s hypostases (AVA 176) and the persons of the Christian Trinity (AVA 236).
These later cycles, as well as the whole construct outlined here, were all rejected in AVB and in certain
respects seem to have been subsumed into the Principles in AVB, see Neil Mann, “A Vision: Ideas of God
and Man,” YA8 (1990) 157–175, at 162–66.
“‘Gasping on the Strand’: Richard Ellmann’s W. B. Yeats Notebook,” ed. W. Gould, YA16 (2005) 279–
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
186
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
361; notes on interview with George Yeats, 17 January 1947, 318. Cf. IY 159, where Ellmann verges on
Christianizing the Thirteenth Cone. GY’s comment does not indicate that the Thirteenth Cone is Christ in
any more substantial way, or that its “deliverance” has anything to do with Christian salvation.
The twelve disciples themselves share the symbolic number with the months of the year, the signs of the
zodiac or the tribes of Israel, and the thirteenth is that which subsumes them all, the year itself, the sphere
of the heavens or the patriarch Jacob, named Israel, father of the tribes. Since the twelve cycles are linked
to the months of the Great Year of the Ancients, and the twelve months of the actual year derive from the
twelve complete lunations in a solar year, the twelvefold symbolism is an appropriately soli-lunar artifact.
“The Rising of the Moon,” Spiritus Mundi, 271.
The term “spiritual objective” is perhaps deliberately ambiguous, containing the meaning of “objective” as
“goal,” but its main significance stands in contrast to the “humane subjective.”
The footnote indicates that Yeats is aware that being too precise about the opposition causes problems.
Following the numbering of the months the opposition becomes less striking midway, as the sixth month
of the humane cone is the seventh of the spiritual objective, the humane seventh is the spiritual sixth, and
so on. This is not therefore an “antithesis of the seasons” since the crossing points 12–1 and 1–12, and 6–7,
7–6 are logically the same seasons, though if Irish lambs are normally born in February and Faery lambs in
November, this shows the 11–2 correspondence Yeats indicates. The fact that the sum of the two complementary months is always 13 may be a further rationale for the spiritual cone’s name, although it is not its
origin. The automatic script shows Daimons representing paired cycles summing 13 to be responsible for
the Masters or avatars: see YVP1 459, 467; YVP3 65, 262, 336–37.
NLI 30,757, unnumbered loose pages, drafts for AVB, “The Completed Symbol”; cf. AVB 209–10. A
slightly more condensed version opens the section numbered 17 in the typescripts NLI 36,272/12, and
36,272/22 (p. 34), substantially the same until: “the reader must assume that there is always another wheel,
that of the thirteenth cone, its antithesis, which acts upon it as man upon woman.”
«ἀθάνατοι θνητοί, θνητοὶ ἀθάνατοι. ζῶντες τὸν ἐκείνων θάνατον, τὸν δὲ ἐκείνων βίον τεθνεῶτες»,
Herakleitos 22 B 62, in Hermann Diels, ed. Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 3 vols. (1903;
11th ed., Zürich & Berlin: Wiedmannsche Verlag, 1964), 1:164. John Burnet translates this as, “Mortals
are immortals and immortals are mortals, the one living the other’s death and dying the other’s life,” in
Early Greek Philosophy (London & Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1892 [WBGYL 316; YL 308]),
138.
This sexual metaphor is also seen in the Daimon’s relationship to the human (see CW13 24ff.; AVA 26ff.)—
although Yeats underplayed this aspect of the system in AVB—and indicates the Daimonic dimension
of the Thirteenth Cone (see below; and see Haswell, “The Sexual Dynamic of W. B. Yeats’s A Vision”
YAACTS12 [1996] 102–18). When Yeats writes “All these symbols can be thought of as the symbols of
the relations of men and women and of the birth of children” (AVB 211) in the following section, it is
unclear whether “these” refers to the symbols related to the Thirteenth Cone and eternity, or to those outlined throughout the preceding fourteen sections of “The Completed Symbol.” The subsequent material
certainly deals with the Great Year and with ideas of influx and impregnation (see Gibson “Timeless and
Spaceless,” at 118–19). However, whether there are any precise implications in the Thirteenth Cone’s acting
as man upon humanity’s woman is unclear.
Shankara (788 CE–820 CE), the founder of advaita or non-dualism, reused the parable frequently, but
it appears in The Crest-Jewel of Wisdom, translated by Charles Johnston (1925; Covina, CA: Theosophical
University Press, 1946) vs. 110, 387 and 569 (pp. 22, 63, 88). See also the translation by Mohini M. Chatterji [sic] in The Theosophist, 1885–87, whose verse numbering differs. Adhyasa, usually translated as error,
etymologically indicates casting over or superimposing: the rope is seen but attributes are superimposed so
that it is falsely interpreted, giving it an illusory appearance in the mind. Cf. also three views of reality in
TSMC 67–69.
This image was also, and probably earlier, applied to the Daimon in a rejected poem; see Neil Mann, “‘Images’: Unpublished Tableaux of Opposition,” YA9 (1992) 313–20.
Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats, 1865–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1942), 327; cit. NC 249.
“Asclepius III,” 31, tr. Walter Scott, Hermetica: The ancient Greek and Latin writings which contain religious or philosophic teachings ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924–36 [WBGYL 889; [YL 881]) 1: 351–53. The Asclepius also makes a distinction between cyclical time, which “is
infinite, and is thought to be eternal,” and true eternity, which is fixed: “God and eternity then are the
first principles of all things which exist,” whereas the Kosmos, or Universe, partakes of “a secondary sort
of eternity” of movement: Hermetica, 1:353. The concept of Time as the “moving likeness of Eternity”
The Thirteenth Cone
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42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
187
goes back to Plato’s Timaeus (37c–38c).
Hermetica, 1:353. The full text of the Asclepius exists only in a Latin translation, unlike the majority of
the Corpus, which is in Greek, and the Latin word “aeternitas” translates the Hermetic term “aiōn” or
“aeon.”
See Yeats’s own essay “Prometheus Unbound”: “What does Shelley mean by Demogorgon?” and “Demogorgon made his plot incoherent, its interpretation impossible” (CW5 118 & 119; E&I 419 & 420).
The essay “Prometheus Unbound” was written in 1932 after he had finished drafting most of A Vision B
(though before “The End of the Cycle,” dated “1934–1936” [AVB 302]) and there he notes: “It lives in the
centre of the earth, the sphere of Parmenides perhaps” (CW5 118; E&I 419).
See NLI 36,272/18/1(a), (c1) and (c2) (“Dramatis Personae”), and the later version 36,272/13 (“Principal
Symbols”). “Dramatis Personae” in turn follows important elements from NLI 13,579 (Rapallo Notebook
B).
This is the opposite from what the MS diagram actually shows, and the subsequent development of the
discussion shows that the text is correct and the sketch misplaces the two Selves.
NLI 36,272/18/1/a, p. 3.
These include the way in which Yeats treats the spheres of Daimon, God and knowledge as so readily
interchangeable (recalling the way Aries and Taurus become Mars and Venus and then become Buddha
or Christ [AVB 207–8], see McDowell, “‘Heraldic Supporters’: Minor Symbolism and the Integrity of
A Vision,” YA10 [1993] 207–217). Another is that at this stage Yeats planned to introduce the Principles
first, Husk and Passionate Body represented in the cone of Action and Particular Self, Spirit and Celestial
Body represented in the cone of Knowledge and Universal Self.
NLI 36,272/18/1/a, p. 9.
Barbara L. Croft notes that: “in order to get at this nebulous definition of the Record, one must, in
one short paragraph, wade through three equally precise terms (Daimon, Ghostly Self, Passionate Body),
three more general terms of the system (sphere, antinomies, Thirteenth Cone), four major philosophical
considerations (reality, the one and the many, eternal instant, time), and three quotations,” “Stylistic Arrangements,” 91.
The Record hardly figures in A Vision B (its only other mention is AVB 229), unlike A Vision A (CW13
183; 184; 185; 188; 189; 191; 201–02; 205–06; cf. AVA 221; 222; 224; 227; 229; 231; 245; 250–51),
where it is never defined, probably indicating that Yeats expected this volume’s more esoterically minded
readership to recognize it as the Theosophists’ “akashic record” or “records”: “The Akashic Records are the
original photographs, so to speak, of everything that has happened since the world began, reflections of
which are projected upon the astral light, where they can be seen by clairvoyants and pyschometrists,” “The
Past, Present, and Future of Theosophy” III, in Borderland: A Quarterly Review and Index, ed. W. T. Stead,
(London: 1897) 4:403. Paul and Harper note that: “Discovered as a term late in the psychical research
for AVA, ‘Record’ virtually replaces ‘Anima Mundi,’ the focal point of the first recorded questions in the
A[utomatic] S[cript]” (CW13 336 n92; and see also CVA notes 81–82). The two terms may not always
mean exactly the same (see CW13 201–2; AVA 245) but both are related to the “memory of nature” (cf.
C. W. Leadbeater, “Devachan,” Lucifer 17 [February 1896]: 469).
In drafts Yeats makes a distinction from any literal memory, “for what comes into memory does so
voluntarily or by association and in a context not its own and is always abstract” and the “image” called up
“however like the old is a new creation. The Record on the other hand contains the actual event in its own
context” (NLI 36,272/18/1/a, p. 14).
See also the opening of “The Soul in Judgment” where Yeats sets “metropolitan poet” against “singing girl”:
Paul Valéry’s rejoicing that “human life must pass” against a memory of Iseult Gonne dancing on the beach
in Normandy, saying “O Lord, let something remain” (AVB 220).
NLI 30,580, penultimate page.
Benjamin Jowett notes that in Plato’s Timaeus, “Time is conceived…to be only the shadow or image of
eternity which ever is and never has been or will be, but is described in a figure only as past or future” The
Dialogues (5 vols. [3rd ed.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892; cf. WBGYL 1598; YL 1586]) 3: 396.
Spiritus Mundi and Anima Mundi are closely linked but not identical; Ann Saddlemyer recalls George Yeats
quizzing her “on the distinction between ‘Spiritus Mundi’ and ‘Anima Mundi’; my stumbling explanation
must have been satisfactory, for she offered me the ‘magic’ books” (BG 628). Although in esoteric usage
“spirit” is normally regarded as higher in the hierarchy than “soul” (see Mann, “Everywhere that antinomy,” 19 n17 in this volume), Yeats was probably thinking of the Neo-Platonic scheme outlined by Ficino
or Agrippa, where nous or intellectus is the higher principle. In Marsilio Ficino’s De vita coelitus comparanda
188
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56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
(De triplici vita, 1489), elaborated from Plotinus, anima or soul (both individual and universal) is seen as
intermediate between intellect and body, and spiritus, spirit or breath, is seen as the linking force between
soul and body (see ch. 26). Further, “just as our soul is brought to bear on our members through the spirit,
so the force of the World-soul is spread under the World-soul through all things through the quintessence,
which is active everywhere, as the spirit inside the World’s Body…”; in ch. 1 of Carol V. Kaske and John
R. Clark, Three Books on Life: A Critical Edition and Translation with Introduction and Notes (Binghamton,
NY: 1989; Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies in conjunction with the Renaissance
Society of America, 1998), 247. Henry Cornelius Agrippa follows this in De occulta philosophia libri tres
(1509–10, published 1531–33), see “Of the Spirit of the World, what it is, and how by way of medium it
unites occult Vertues to their subjects,” (bk 1, ch. 14), trans. J. F., Three Books of Occult Philosophy, (Moule:
London, 1651), 32.
Yeats had originally titled the second section of Per Amica Silentia Lunae “Spiritus Mundi” and
changed it to “Anima Mundi” following Henry More’s usage, but he distinguishes between the soul and
its vehicle: “The vehicle of the human soul is what used to be called the animal spirits” which are in turn
but “a condensation of the vehicle of Anima Mundi,” presumably its spiritus (CW5 20–21; Myth 350).
However, the vehicle may be the more active form, just as “Los…is the Vehicular Form of strong Urthona”
(Jerusalem, plate 53; WWB3 [311]).
In the Card File C14: “Purple = for the living Anima Mundi & for Spirits 13 Cycle which is their anima
mundi. One anima mundi seems to include all that not fate” (YVP3 254).
Jerusalem, Plate 16, ll. 61–62 (WWB3 [274]). The phrase “thinking the thought and doing the deed” is
also juxtaposed with this quotation from Blake in “Magic” VI (CW4 37; E&I 46–47) and attributed to “I
think an Indian writer” (NLI 36,272/11a, p. 30).
Magic White and Black or The Science of Finite and Infinite Life containing Practical Hints for Students of
Occultism (London: George Redway, 1886), 150–51.
Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, 2 vols. (New York:
Bouton; London: Quaritch, 1877), 1:178.
Letter to Iseult Gonne: “Our last teaching has been on the relation between the passionate body (astral
body) and the celestial body after death” (9 February 1918, NLI 30,563, cited BG 151).
A. E. Waite had informed him in 1914 that “So far as my studies can tell you, the theory of the Astral
Light as a receptacle of form, and having ‘pictures’ therein, was first originated by Éliphas Lévi, after the
year 1860” (LTWBY1 280). Yeats uses this information and traces earlier versions of the idea in Agrippa
and More in a note to Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (CW5 270–72). See also the diary of 1930,
Ex 329–332.
Visible light is identified with Husk and physical light is the light of the body, even astral light, definitely
not the light of physicists. See Gibson, “Timeless and Spaceless,” 107–115, in this volume.
There may be possibilities of skipping an incarnation (YVP2 26–28 and YVP4 107 give different groups
of phases that cannot be missed) and there are certainly instances when “the being may return up to four
times” to the same phase “before it can pass on” (AVB 86).
In the following draft he failed to hit on the exact number but found the right area on his third attempt:
“In a typal man, unfallen man if you will the incarnations in a single cycle were exactly twenty eight, &
one symbolical month of the moon & as the sun moves during that time through one sign & the whole
of the present phase of human life is considered to make up a single year typal man would be reborn 1000
1536 326 times” (YVP4 127).
Rather surprisingly, at this point in the automatic script the next questions go off on a completely different
and minor detail, apparently indicating that Yeats felt satisfied with the extent of the answer received. The
idea is incorporated more recognizably in AVA, though Yeats seems to have been unsure whether there
were actually one or three stages of initiation, which would be possible once the soul had reached ripeness:
“Were the Spirit strong enough, or were its human cycles finished, it would remain, as in the Beatitude,
permanently united to its Ghostly Self, or would, after two more states, be reborn into a spiritual cycle
where the movement of the gyre is opposite to that in our cycles, and incomprehensible to us” (CW13
195; AVA 236). The first alternative hints at a possible straight line out of the wheel, the Spirit having the
strength not to move towards human rebirth. The second alternative, coming at the natural completion of
the twelve cycles, sees the soul united to its “permanent self ” (CW13 183; AVA 221; see n68 for consideration of the Ghostly Self). And the third alternative (which could also be simply further description of the
second) sees the soul reborn into a spiritual cycle—the two more states seem to allude to the triad of the
Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Cycles, referred to elsewhere in AVA (CW13 143; AVA 176), since
The Thirteenth Cone
65
66
67
68
189
“the Beatitude and the two states that follow [termed the Going Forth and the Foreknowing, equivalent to
AVB’s Purification and Foreknowledge] correspond to the 13th, 14th and 15th Cycles which correspond in
their turn to Holy Ghost, Son and Father” (CW13 194; AVA 236); see n28. The situation in AVB removes
all sense of the Thirteenth Cycle/Cone as a stage, viewing it more as a state and, as the distorted view of the
Sphere, there are no subsequent cycles to consider.
Since Daimon and human are of opposite sexes, in AVA Yeats posits the human as male and the Daimon as
female, whereas in AVB he adopts a sexless “it” for the Daimon and implies that his readers are both men
and women. Paradoxically, the less sexist language removes an important element of the symbiosis between
human and Daimon.
The draft of Book I, “Principal Symbols,” develops this further: the Daimon “is a unique unity but not
self-sufficient for I judge from a saying of my teachers that it is ‘less powerful than man because it knows
only one, and man many’ that it is the unity of man’s multitude” (NLI 36,272/13, p. 1).
“Notes upon the Life after Death,” NLI 36,272/12, corrected TS, p. 29; cf. NLI 36,272/22, p. 29.
Not the least of these questions is the distinction between Ghostly Self and Daimon, and there is no simple
answer. In the automatic script of 23 March 1919, Thomas answered Yeats’s question “Is daimon the
ghostly self,” “Yes,” and told him that his Daimon was part of him, beyond the “13th cycle” (YVP2
210–11). A script from 15 April 1919 implies that the Ghostly Self corresponds to the Daimon’s Principle
of Spirit: “Daimon consists of c[elestial] b[ody] & p[assionate] b[ody] only not of spirit” and “As Daimon
has no spirit in what lies his power of choice?”—“The ghostly self or soul has complete free will” (YVP2
251–52), summarized as “Daimon is CB and PB alone & in these is no intellect (Ghostly Self has intellect)” (YVP3 291). Five months later, Yeats was told “You must get to understand Fixed idea & Ghostly
Self ” (YVP2 423; 13 September 1919) and, whether or not he did, he was again asking “what was distinction between Daimon & Ghostly Self ” in August 1920, to be told that the Daimon was born with the new
soul at the beginning of all cycles (Phase 2 of the first cycle) “but not Ghostly Self ” (YVP3 39), presumably
already existent. A few days earlier, they had been told that “The Daimon cannot exist apart from the 4
Faculties, whereas the Ghostly self is in a sphere” (YVP3 34), implying that the Daimon is an incarnate
counterpart of the Ghostly Self.
In AVA, therefore, Yeats distinguishes the Ghostly Self from the Daimon: “the Ghostly Self, by which
the creators of this system mean the permanent self, that which in the individual may correspond to the
fixed circle of the figure, neither Man nor Daimon, before the whirling of the Solar and Lunar cones. It is
the source of that which is unique in every man, understanding by unique that which is one and so cannot be analysed into anything else” (CW13 183; AVA 221). During the Beatitude comes “the momentary
union of the Spirit and the Celestial Body with the Ghostly Self ” (CW13 194; AVA 235), at which stage
the Spirit passes all memories into the Ghostly Self (CW13 195; AVA 236; cf. YVP3 39). The Spirit will be
“permanently united to its Ghostly Self ” (CW13 195; AVA 236) once the cycles of incarnation are finished,
while in contrast human and Daimon “are united for twelve cycles, and are then set free from one another”
(CW13 182; AVA 221).
Yeats’s thinking developed during revision, and he generally came to see the Ghostly Self in terms of
the “discarnate Daimon.” An early typescript shows an adaptation of AVA’s three supernatural cycles (see
n28 and n64): “The 13th cone or sphere is divided into three concentric spheres of which the innermost
is, I conclude, the One, the second that which sees the One – the Platinus’ intellectual principle, and the
third that of the multitudinous archetypal being, Platinus’ Soul.…Because they inhabit this third sphere,
that in the ‘daimon’ which does not incarnate and remains always apart from the four faculties, is sometimes called the Ghostly Self to distinguish it from that in the Daimon which is merged in the faculties.
This Ghostly Self appears to us to be in perpetual conflict or union…with man, whether individual man
or mankind symbolised by the entire cone of 12 cycles.…Yet it is only so in seeming, for it is not phasal
or moveable in any way…” (NLI 36,272/24, pp. 8–9). Here the key is the phrase “that in the Daimon,”
distinguishing two aspects of the same entity, one of which has much in common with the Thirteenth
Cone itself. As his understanding of the Principles developed, Yeats related Daimon and Ghostly Self more
often to the Principles (cf. AVB 193–94). A series of drafts for AVB 194 shows Yeats moving from “Spirit
in Celestial Body is sometimes called the Ghostly Self, ” then substituting the first term with “Spirit in the
Sphere,” before settling on “The Discarnate Daimon is sometimes called the Ghostly Self because being individual and particular it belongs to the Third Authetic Existant, the third person of the Christian Trinity”
(NLI 36,272/16). The final version is less clear: “I identify…the discarnate Daimons, or Ghostly Selves, with
[Plotinus’s] Third Authentic Existant” (AVB 194). It is unclear if he regarded these changes as corrections
or shifts of emphasis between equivalents, though they seem more the latter.
190
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70
71
72
73
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75
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
In the drafts of AVB 194, Yeats writes of “a fourth condition which is the Third Authentic Existant
reflected into sensation & discursive reason, & this condition I compare to the ghostly self reflected into
Husk & Passionate body or the daimon” (NLI 36,272/16), and elsewhere that the “ghostly selves are the
Passionate Body as a part of the sphere,” existing as the soul’s “goal, concrete, personal unique” and the
archetype from which “the ‘new’ Passionate Body must be formed” before each new life (NLI 30,757).
The Diary of 1930 implicitly compares and contrasts incarnate Daimon and discarnate: “Incarnate
Daimon or true daimon presents those states & persons necessary to the man. Ghostly Self those spiritual
states necessary to the man” (NLI 30,354 p. 15) and “A Packet for Ezra Pound” comments that “reality
itself is found by the Daimon in…the Ghostly Self ” (AVB 22).
The same draft of AVB 194 contains the comment that “Daimon & ghostly self are however one &
only seem to be different” (NLI 36,272/16) which is perhaps the key or the cop-out: they are reflections
of each other. In the end, Yeats was struggling with terms and formulations that were not entirely his own
and try as he might to pin them down to a conception that he understood, the instructors did not give
enough information or confirmation for him to feel fully confident about these essential concepts.
This pairing is tautologous if the Daimon is called the Ghostly Self “when it inhabits the sphere” (AVB
193), but if the Daimon is always in the Sphere then there is no real reason for a distinction. However, the
distinction underlines Yeats’s continued uncertainty about the Ghostly Self.
“Teaching Spirits are Spirits of the Thirteenth Cone, or their representatives who may be chosen from any
state” (AVB 228), thus some Teaching Spirits are not within the Sphere/Thirteenth Cone.
This distinction had emerged in Per Amica Silentia Lunae, where Yeats had noted, “There are two realities, the terrestrial and the condition of fire. All power is from the terrestrial condition, for there all
opposites meet and there only is the extreme of choice possible, full freedom. And there the heterogeneous is, and evil, for evil is the strain one upon another of opposites, but in the condition of fire is all
music and all rest” (CW5 25; Myth 356–57). The Daimon relies upon the human to bring disparate and
heterogeneous material, since “it does not perceive, as does the human mind of man, object following
object in a narrow stream, but all at once[,] &…it does not perceive objects as separated in time &
space, but arranged alone as it were in the order of their kinship with itself, those most akin the nearest,” so that it finds access to difference through its human counterpart (NLI 30,359, leather notebook
ca.1927).
As Harold Bloom comments: “It is not without considerable revulsion, or at least skepticism, that most
readers (I trust, perhaps naïvely) could entertain such a doctrine, for Yeats is not persuasively redefining
cruelty and ignorance” (Yeats, 178). In AVA “it is said that while still living we receive joy from those we
have served—choosing tragedy they abandon to us this cast-off joy?—whereas we receive from those we
have wronged, ecstasy, described as the only perfected love and as emotion born when we love that which
we hate knowing that it is fated” (CW13 193–94; AVA 235).
NLI 36,272/22, p. 11; probably drafts for “Michael Robartes Foretells” (YO 219–24) or similar teachings.
In considering the nature of the Frustrators and Teaching Spirits in the Thirteenth Cone, Yeats raises another definition of evil: “both sort are from God for in 13th Cone He divides into two. Human souls on
reaching 13th Cone are first absolute good & then absolute evil. I asked if I might interpret absolute Evil to
be Absolute Power & he said ‘yes’—The Frustrators were once human. All were once human” (YVP3 102).
In some ways the closest parallel would be the conventional conception of Heaven, where in Catholic
theology saints and angels mediate contact with God and intercede; only “the good, unlearned books say
that He who keeps the distant stars within his fold comes without intermediary” (CW5 11; Myth 335).
Blake’s original actually reads “and” for the first “or”: “God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men,” The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), Plate 16 (WWB3 [126]).
Dated October 1914, this essay represents ideas prior to Per Amica Silentia Lunae, let alone A Vision.
This introductory section may have been dropped because Lady Gregory disagreed with Yeats’s opinion
concerning the Sidhe—“for the most part they are the dead” (CW5 289)—as her copy of the typescript
underlines this comment and has “No” in the margin (Berg Collection, New York Public Library).
The draft is a typescript entitled “Historical Cone | The Equinoctial Points” (NLI 36,266/7, p. 23), which
identifies the quotation as “said” by Villiers de l’Isle Adam. I have not been able to find a direct source,
but Villiers uses a quotation from Nicholas Malebranche as an epigraph in L’Eve future (Paris: Brunhoff,
1886): “Dieu est le lieu des esprits, comme l’espace est celui des corps” (p. 158). This is given in one translation
as: “God is the abode of spirits, as space is the abode of bodies. He is to the soul what light is to the eye,”
Alfred Weber, tr. Frank Thilly, The History of Philosophy (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1896).
In this draft, the sentence that follows gives a vision of this abode, a rougher version of that quoted
The Thirteenth Cone
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
191
by Ellmann (IY 166), as the expression shows signs of dictation or a typist’s problems with Yeats’s handwriting: “As all whirling as an end and unity of being perfectly tamed they are all happiness, all beauty,
all thought, things, images come to their entire fullness to such a multiplicity of form that they are in our
eyes without form, they do what they please all whirling at an end, daimons and men reconciled and no
longer figures opposing one another in daimonic dance and it is they who create genius in its most radical
form and change the direction of history. Besides these orders of spirits which all act without intermediaries there are beings[,] arcons, who act upon events, so that we may accept the domination of our own
daimons” (pp. 23–24; see note 100 below).
These Spirits supply the soul reliving its life’s experience with a substitute for emotion, since emotion
comes from the Passionate Body and Husk which have “disappeared”; acting as Passionate Body therefore,
they supply the soul with “supersensual emotion and imagery” (AVB 228), supplying Daimonic sensation
in place of earthly. Indeed, when Yeats imagines “the Four Principles in the sphere” (AVB 193), the place of
the “Third Authentic Existant” corresponds in the text with “the discarnate Daimons, or Ghostly Selves” and
in the diagram with the Passionate Body (see above n68). If the dead supply the imagery of the dreams of
the living, it may be that the imagery for the dead comes from the Teaching Spirits or discarnate Daimons,
the more primary level supplying the more antithetical.
See “Seven Propositions” (IY 236), cited in “Everywhere that antinomy,” 8–9.
NLI 13,581, a notebook Yeats used for drafting and known as “Rapallo Notebook D,” contains two drafts,
probably from the late summer of 1929; see my essay in this volume “Everywhere that antinomy,” 8–9, 19
n21 and n24. See also www.YeatsVision.com/7Propositions.html (consulted Apr 2010). Cancelled material uses the traditional image of God as a circle, and indicates the spirits’ closeness to a multiform divinity:
“Reality is a timeless and spaceless community of spirits Each of whom is different from the others is the
center of a circles whose circumferences passes through all other spirit spirits, it is subject & they its object
which perceive each other.”
One of the earliest formulations in The Commonplace Book is “Existence is percipi or percipere” (“Existence
is to be perceived or to perceive”), see ed. A. C. Fraser, The Works of George Berkeley, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), 1:10; a marginal comment adds “or velle, i.e. agere” (to wish to i.e. to do). Cf. Berkeley’s
Commonplace Book, ed. G. A. Johnston (London: Faber and Faber, 1930 [WBGYL 160; YL 159]).
NLI 36,272/22, p. 36.
NLI 30,354 [p. 19].
NLI 30,354 [pp. 17–18].
Abraham Heschel in Man is not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1951)
places man’s primal recognition of God in “awareness of grandeur” and “sense of the ineffable” (3–4).
Talking to Jacob Needleman, while he was translating “a particular Hasidic text,” he “quoted something
he had just translated: ‘God is not nice. He is not an uncle. God is an earthquake,’” Needleman, The New
Religions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1970), 6.
Wordsworth is not included in the heading, but is mentioned as one of “the poets…who are of this
phase”(AVB 134; CW13 57–58; AVA 68).
NLI 30,354, [p. 19].
“The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are
portions of eternity too great for the eye of man,” The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), Plate 8 (WWB3
[118]).
NLI 30,354 [pp. 19–20]. A journal entry from January 1929, cited by Ellmann, notes how “Blake denounced both nature and God considered external like Nature as mystery” and that “the passage from
potential to actual man can only come in terror. ‘I have been always an insect in the roots of the grass’—my
form of it perhaps” (IY 239).
This might be a cultural artifact rather than an absolute expression. In 1906, Yeats had felt that the ordered
vision of Spenser had given way to a Romantic sensibility, “to the religion of the wilderness—the only
religion possible to poetry to-day.…This new beauty, in losing so much, has indeed found a new loftiness,
a something of religious exaltation that the old had not” (CW4 272; E&I 378). And in the 1932 introduction to An Indian Monk, he notes that the Indian “approaches God through a vision, speaks continually of
the beauty and terror of the great mountains,” but also finds it in delicate birdsong and birds, “the whiteness of a sheet, the softness of a pillow, the gold embroidery upon a shoe. These things are indeed part of
the ‘splendour of that [Divine] Being’” (CW5 133; E&I 431).
See Matthew Gibson, “Satori in Yeats’s ‘Stream and Sun at Glendalough,’” Irish University Review 28.1
(1998): 28–36.
192
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
The automatic script concentrates on the moments of crisis, including the Beatific Vision, for the subjective or antithetical incarnations of such people as the Yeatses. The equivalents for primary incarnations are
often very sketchy and this imbalance is likely one of the reasons why Yeats felt uncertain about including
such material in the public expositions of A Vision.
A footnote explains that the six states between death and birth “correspond roughly to Phase 22, Phases
23, 24, 25, Phases 26, 27, 28, etc., upon the wheel of the Faculties which is at right angles to that of
the Principles,” which is marked by the zodiac. By the phasal measure, Phase 22 corresponds to The
Vision of the Blood Kindred (for the Principles, solar Aries, AVB 223), Phases 23, 24, 25 to the Return
(Taurus, AVB 225), Phases 26, 27, 28 to the Shiftings (Gemini, AVB 231), Phase 1 to the Beatitude or
Marriage (Cancer, AVB 232), Phases 2, 3, 4 to the Purification (Leo, AVB 233), and Phases 5, 6, 7 to the
Foreknowledge (Virgo, mislabeled Scorpio, AVB 234). The drafts give the correspondences as “symbolical March” to August (NLI 36,272/22, p.9), but Yeats evidently decided that the solar months of the
zodiac were more correct, which indicates that the mapping of lunar to solar divisions will be only ever
“correspond roughly.” See Colin McDowell, “The Six Discarnate States of A Vision (1937),” YAACTS4
(1986) 87–98.
NLI 30,354, [p. 17].
Consideration of the lightning flash and Critical Moments reached relatively advanced typescripts in
the drafting of AVB (see NLI 36,272/10) but was eventually abandoned. See also in this volume Colin
McDowell, “Shifting Sands,” 205ff. and also Janis Haswell, “Yeats’s A Vision and the Feminine,” 293 and
304 n6.
See Colin McDowell’s treatment in his review of Hazard Adams’s The Book of Yeats’s Vision, YA13 (1998),
357–66, at 364.
The preceding part of the sentence—that “Such love has a relation with the dead similar to that of the
Fountains,” which are the points of spiritual influx in history—hints at a connection between the dead
and the Thirteenth Cone that is not explored further. There are further echoes in AVB, however, when Yeats
writes of a fourth state of consciousness, Turīya, which “is that state wherein the soul…is united to the
blessed dead” (AVB 222–23). Cf. also his comment in “A Packet for Ezra Pound”: “The blessed spirits must
be sought within the self which is common to all” (AVB 22).
A cancelled paragraph from “Notes on the Life after Death,” NLI 36,272/12, p. 29, corrected typescript;
though the previous page is missing, it probably deals with the Beatitude. The phrase “the sphere’s messengers” substitutes “the mere intervention of the thirteenth cone,” possibly pointing to the sense in which
the Thirteenth Cone is a messenger or substitute for the Sphere.
Unity of Being is applied in A Vision B to a particular state attainable in the phases following the full moon,
but elsewhere, as here, Yeats uses it more broadly and always with the sense of a harmonious tension that
transcends itself; cf. an early draft on the Thirteenth Cycle cited by Ellmann, “all whirling at an end, and
unity of being perfectly attained” (IY 166 and see note 78 above).
The phrase “the lone tower of the absolute self ” recalls how “sometimes the Celestial Body is a prisoner
in a tower rescued by the Spirit” (AVB 189), and indicates that the “absolute self ” is Celestial Body or the
union of Spirit and Celestial Body. The image of the blasted tower also recalls the bookplate that the Yeatses
commissioned for George from T. Sturge Moore, showing a unicorn bursting from a lightning-shattered
tower (TSMC 35), itself drawing on the Tarot image of “The Tower” or “La Maison de Dieu.”
NLI 36,272/17, p. 3; also 36,272/16, p. 9, where they are depicted on the cycle of a total cycle of life and
afterlife. Cf. Mem 277–78, where the terms should read: “‘Spirit in Celestial Body’.…‘Celestial Body in
Spirit’” (emphasis added).
NLI 30,354 [p. 19]. The passage is slightly problematic since Yeats contrasts “Beatific Vision” with an
“embodied” state, but in drafts elsewhere “Beatific Vision” is applied to the afterlife state as well.
This last is taken from Mem 278, a stray note about A Vision inserted at the back of a journal started in
1908.
Conversely, “in the system Good and Evil are eliminated before the soul can be united to Reality, being
that stream of phenomena that drowns us” (CW13 143; AVA 176).
This whirling of solar and lunar is also seen in the relations of man and woman, mirrored throughout the
system.
“Self ” here is not that of “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” but the “absolute self,” the highest principle of
human spirit, “Atman,” identified in some schools with Brahman, the ultimate reality.
NLI 30,319 (5), p. 3c.
NLI 36,272/22, p. 11.
The Thirteenth Cone
193
110 These in turn recall specifically the Hindu traditions of dancing Shiva, as well as the final question of
“Among School Children:” “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the
dancer from the dance?” (VP 446; CW1 221).
111 It is the sense of distance that Yeats seeks to emphasize, though he risks implying an unwarranted degree
of perfection to modern culture and condescension towards primitive dance.
112 See R. P. Ritvo, “A Vision B: The Plotinian Metaphysical Basis”; she seeks to rescue Yeats from misrepresenting MacKenna’s term “the Authentic Existent…Essence…Being” (“On the Impassivity of the Unembodied,” Third Ennead, Sixth Tractate, Section 6, Plotinus, 2:75; see also 4:5ff. and 4:93ff.) by taking Yeats’s fabrication of “First Authentic Existant” and “Second Authentic Existant” as twin aspects of
the Second Hypostasis, Nous, “Intellectual-Principle” (38–40) but Yeats’s list of correspondences in AVA
make it clear that by “First Authentic Existant” he meant MacKenna’s “First Hypostasis,” see n115 below.
See also Charles Armstrong, “Ancient Frames,” in this volume, 96 and Matthew Gibson, “‘Timeless and
Spaceless,’” 105–6 and Graham Dampier, “‘The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work,’” 57–59.
113 Passionate Body and Husk are essential to sensual and emotional experience and, once they have been exhausted in the afterlife, usually by the stage of the Shiftings, the soul assumes what Plotinus had called the
impassivity of the unembodied, yet there is a form of “correspondence” so that the Spirits of the Thirteenth
Cone (and Daimons) derive substance and sustenance from human action, for “separation and solidity”
(AVB 230).
114 NLI 36,272/16, p. 8.
115 There is no precise equivalence. Good and evil differentiate at the stage of the Thirteenth Cone, while in
AVA Yeats comments that “the One is the Good, whereas in the system Good and Evil are eliminated
before the Soul can be united to Reality, being that stream of phenomena that drowns us” (CW13 143;
AVA 176). This goes against MacKenna’s explanation of what “goodness” means with reference to the
One: “Morally seen, it is the good,” but “if we call it the good, we do not intend any formal affirmation
of a quality within itself; we mean only that it is the Goal or Term to which all aspires. When we affirm
existence of it, we mean no more than that it does not fall within the realm of non-existents; it transcends
even the quality of Being,” Plotinus 1:118.
116 NLI 30,354, [p. 18].
117 This poem was published in the Dublin University Review in 1886. A letter to Kathleen Tynan, 20 April
1888, raises a similar point: Yeats writes of how, “When I was a child and used to watch the ants running
about in Burnham Beeches I used often to say ‘what religion do the ants have?’ They must have one you
know” (CL1 63).
118 Yeats’s images associated with Phase 1 have similar characteristics, and the dominant image is the plasticity
of dough (CW13 94; AVA 116; AVB 183).
119 Yeats also includes another layer of meaning, for the saint earns his love of God through living to the
full the other lives of the wheel, including those where God is rejected (AVB 206). Similarly, whereas the
communicator seems to point to realization of negative existence, rejecting human ideas about God, Yeats
himself comments that “The soul has to enter some significant relationship with God even if this be one
of hatred,” which implies a more personal rejection of God (IY 283; cit. NC 355).
120 The herne or heron is also a bird closely identified with Yeats himself, from Michael Hearne, the hero of the
semi-autobiographical The Speckled Bird, to Owen Aherne, the seeker for the law of his own being in “The
Tables of the Law” and, of course, Robartes’s interlocutor and collaborator in “The Phases of the Moon”
and the prefatory fictions of A Vision.
121 NLI 36,272/12, p. 29.
122 Yeats also liked to quote the aphorism of Thomas Aquinas that he had culled from Axël: “Eternity is the
possession of one’s self, as in a single moment” (CW5 52; cf. CW5 19, 26, 247; “Leo,” YA1 37). Tellingly,
here it is used to describe the asymptotic goal of the soul’s development from Phase 8 to Phase 15, identifying it as an antithetical vision of eternity.
SHIFTING SANDS: DANCING THE HOROSCOPE IN THE VISION PAPERS
by Colin McDowell
Felkin told me that he had seen a Dervish dance a horoscope. He went round and
round on the sand and then circle to centre. He whirled round at the planets making
round whorls in the sand by doing so. He then danced the connecting lines between
planets and fell in trance. This is what I saw in dream or vision years ago.
W. B. Yeats, June 19091
I
I
t was one of W. B. Yeats’s idler fantasies that A Vision might found a new Irish heresy, as
disciples studied it and applied its doctrines (L 712). In fact, even as he wrote this, he
knew how few readers his work could realistically expect. In A Vision A, he had confined
his audience, somewhat pessimistically, to his “old fellow students” in the Golden Dawn,
and suggested that “if they will master what is most abstract there and make it the foundation of their visions, a curtain may ring up on a new drama” (CW13 lv; AVA xii). Later,
when he came to write A Vision B, he had resigned himself to finding a solitary satisfaction;
the symbols, he said, helped him “to hold in a single thought reality and justice” (AVB 25).
Generally speaking, readers have been content to allow Yeats his petty triumph. Literary
critics continue to read the book as Yeats gave them license to do, as “metaphors for poetry”
(AVB 8). So far, the only people who have taken up the challenge of applying the doctrines
of A Vision have been astrologers seeking to enlarge their art. I shall briefly examine some of
these later, but in order properly to assess the use to which these epigones have put A Vision,
one first needs to see some of the ways in which the Yeatses tried to integrate astrology into
the system with a possible view towards extending astrology’s capabilities.
There are few traces of traditional astrology in the finished work, especially as concerns
the individual.2 Several passages extant in A Vision B mention how the natal horoscope
can twist, or rather enrich and complicate, the natural character of a person’s phase (AVB
153, 176). However, it is difficult to tell whether these passages were left in deliberately to
complicate matters, or are simply vestiges of earlier thought that Yeats omitted to root out
because of his impatience with proofreading. Certainly, he managed to retain the unfulfilled
promise to consider “cycle and horoscope” (AVB 117).3 It was only with the publication of
“Appendix by Michael Robartes” in Yeats and the Occult (1975) that details began to emerge
of more specific investigations that the Yeatses had undertaken: “In the Great Diagram,
which is the frontispiece of the Speculum there are three circles one without the other, and
all three represent the circle of the Heavens. The inmost however is merely the Horoscope of
Giraldus himself placed as we are taught to place a horoscope for its better understanding”
(YO 210). Presumably, the diagram would have explained precisely how the horoscope was
to be placed, but lacking the diagram one must seek elsewhere. Since the publication of Yeats
and the Occult, of course, the four volumes of Yeats’s Vision Papers have appeared, and the
automatic script itself has been available for perusal by interested scholars.
Shifting Sands
195
In the Yeats’s Vision Papers, there are several attempts to allocate horoscopic planets
of individuals to one or other of the two Tinctures, antithetical and primary.4 As these
Tinctures are opposites, one must work out a way to place planets so that they are opposite to each other, given that one has embarked on the allocation. But as anyone with
even a rudimentary knowledge of astronomy or astrology knows, planets in charts do not
neatly line up with every planet having an opposition to another planet: in fact, Mercury
and Venus never stray far enough from the Sun to form an opposition to it. One must
therefore determine another method. There are of course traditional associations of planets with active/passive, male/female, etc., but these do not seem to have figured largely in
the allocations we shall discuss, as the allocations differ from person to person, although
they are occasionally used in the script as a convenient shorthand when the system is not
involved.
The first attempt occurs on November 10, 1917, after several days during which
the communicator tells Yeats to construct talismans or conduct evocations to strengthen
or weaken planetary influences in the birth charts of himself, George Yeats and Iseult
Gonne. During these instructions, the traditional astrological association of Saturn with
melancholy appears to play a large part, perhaps understandably given the circumstances
of the wedding. However, the complexities of taking into account three horoscopes for
these procedures makes it likely that the phrase “the Saturnian opposite overpowering it
[Iseult’s ‘childhood phantasy of the primary’] at times” (YVP1 71) is not a generic characterization of the antithetical, meaning that the antithetical is not being equated with
the Saturnian, but rather that a comment is being made about the opposition in Iseult’s
chart between Mars and Saturn.5 This supposition is confirmed when we find George
writing later that
In one the anti is Saturnian
In one venusian
In one lunar
No you are the venusian
medium
No except that [Moon] is part ruler you cant go by rules [sic: must be ruler] for anti
in each case the opposite of the primary self—Iseult [Venus]
primary—you [Saturn]—medium [Jupiter] [Mars]
(YVP1 73–74)
My assumption is that Yeats understood the Saturnian to relate to Iseult Gonne and, after
the first three lines, asked if this meant that he was Lunar, only to be told that this was
incorrect and that he was the Venusian while the medium was Lunar. He then queried this
because he had presumed he was Lunar, only to be told that he probably only thought this
because the part-ruler of his horoscope, or lord of the Nativity, is the Moon, but that one
cannot use this type of ruler for determining antithetical or primary.6 Yet these allocations
immediately introduce complications, even as they make clear that the same planets may be
antithetical or primary for one person and the reverse for another. First of all, Iseult’s primary
is here identified with Venus, which is in opposition to no other planet, but is trine to Uranus and square to both Moon and Saturn. Then Yeats’s antithetical is identified with Venus,
196
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
which is square to Mars and Moon in his natal chart, but has no relationship with the planet
identified as his primary planet, Saturn. Finally, George’s primary planets are identified as
Jupiter and Mars. These two are sextile to each other while Jupiter is opposed to Sun, and
Mars is trine to Sun and square to the Ascendant. This would seem to imply that George’s
Sun is antithetical, as it is in opposition to the primary Jupiter.7 What this goes to show is
that whatever method is being used, it is by no means simple.
The script continues to say that “your venusian acts more independently of [Saturn]
but her [George’s] [Moon] anti close to [Uranus] but opposition primary [Mars] [Uranus]
both anti & primary | yes | yes opposed by [Uranus]—thwarts it by its violence—not
passive enough—your anti will work on primary—does not do so yet” (YVP1 74). George’s
Moon is sextile Uranus, a beneficial influence of 60 degrees, but I would not think this
would be called “close to.” But then Iseult’s Uranus is not in aspect to her Moon, Saturn
or Mars, although it is trine Sun and Neptune. George’s Mars is not in aspect with Saturn, Moon or Uranus. None of these facts is of assistance in determining the Venusian or
the Lunar. However, a script from the following day may offer assistance: “medium weak
[Mars]—primary very strong [Uranus] [Moon] anti—much too strong | yes yes” (YVP1
77). It is difficult to know how to punctuate these fragments, but I interpret this to mean
that George’s Moon is antithetical, that her Mars is primary, and that Uranus, while it can
be (like all planets) either antithetical or primary, is antithetical in GY’s case. I thus put a
pause or comma after the word “primary.”
Fortunately, between these scraps of inconclusive script, the medium states:
Madam Gonne. GY—primary [Mars] anti [Moon] [Venus]
Lady Gregory. GY—primary [Mercury] anti [Jupiter]
Harold [Tucker: GY’s stepfather]. GY—primary [Moon] anti [Mars] [?or]
(YVP1 76)
When this statement was codified, the three persons just discussed were also added:
Primarys— M.G. Primary [Mars] anti [Moon] [Venus]
Lady G. Primary [Mercury] anti [Jupiter]
Harold Primary [Moon] anti [Mars]
Iseult P = [Venus] anti ?[Moon]
WBY [P] = [Saturn] anti [Venus]
Medium [P] = [Jupiter] [Mars] anti [Mars] [Uranus]
(YVP3 417; CF T13x)
This states that Iseult’s antithetical is Lunar, although with a lingering doubt, whereas previously she had been Saturnian, and leaves George as either Martian or Uranian, whereas
previously the other options had been Saturnian or Lunar. In addition, Mars is given on
both sides of the equation for George. One would think that Mars must be either antithetical or primary, if there is any method in the madness.8
But what of planetary rulers, as distinct from the ruler of the horoscope? Traditionally, each planet is said to rule over one or more signs. The following diagram shows the
signs with their ruling planets:
Shifting Sands
197
Sun and Moon do not split their rulerships, and the other planets take the signs on either
side of this “central” pair in order of apparent speed of motion. Also, when the Yeatses
were writing, the traditional rulers had not yet been entirely supplanted by the modern
versions, whereby Uranus rules Aquarius and Neptune rules Pisces. Pluto, of course, had
not yet been discovered. The Yeatses seem to have followed the traditional allocations and
did not consider Uranus or Neptune as rulers.9 It thus seems that the rulers cannot have
been used by the Yeatses to determine antithetical and primary, because Uranus has been
named in the script more than once, and they would not have been able to allocate it
using their list of the traditional rulers. However, it is apparent that when George writes
“[Cancer] [Leo] really cancer and Leo [Sun] & [Moon] | no | Taking them as representing
the primary self [Sun] & anti [Moon] more or less | rather less than more” (YVP1 73), she
is identifying the rulers of Cancer and Leo with antithetical and primary.
Interestingly, if we then plot the position of the planets in the natal charts of the subjects according to which side of the horoscope they appear in when a line has been drawn
from between Cancer and Leo to between Capricorn and Aquarius, the following table
may be derived. I omit the allocations that the script deems to be dubious:
Sign/ruling
planet
WBY
GY
IG
MG
AG
HT
Between
Leo and
Capricorn/
Sun
Venusantithetical
Jupiter/
Marsprimary
Venusprimary
Marsprimary
Mercuryprimary
Marsantithetical
Between
Aquarius
and Cancer
/ Moon
Saturnprimary
Uranusantithetical
Moonantithetical
Venusantithetical
Jupiterantithetical
Moonprimary
198
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
What one immediately notices is that males have their antithetical planets on the side of
Aquarius to Cancer, whereas females have their antithetical planets on the side of Leo to
Capricorn.10 While the sample size is too small for certainty, such an alternation for males
and females is not something that would have been beyond George Yeats to conceive of.
Certainly, it is consonant with Yeats’s suggestion “I suppose the splitting between philosophic & artistic in me joyous ([Venus]) and sad ([Saturn]) in Iseult are different expressions of a
universal masculine and feminine in the soul,” to which the answer was “yes” (YVP1 109).11
In any case, these allocations were soon overtaken by the advent of the twenty-eight
phases on 28 November. While the attributions already arrived at appear in the Card File
without any retraction, they certainly play no further part in discussion, and any contradiction with what was later taught is silently passed over. The twenty-eight phases developed out of discussion of the cardinal points and the midpoints between them, which are
named Head, Heart, Loins and Fall.12 Amusingly, the cardinal points are first called 1, 7,
14 and 28 rather than 1, 8, 15 and 22 (YVP1 100). Unfortunately, because the editors of
the Yeats’s Vision Papers were in the habit of considering the diagrams to be largely meaningless, it is difficult to be entirely sure of the course of the discussion, but the following is
my best reconstruction. The task is made more difficult by uncertainty on the part of both
Yeats and his wife, and consequent revision which may or may not introduce retrospective interpretations to the discussion. One is not entirely heartened by George’s admission
“no I must get it right—I will do it again” in relation to the diagrams (YVP1 116), nor by
Marcus telling Yeats that “You are to ignore all script which Thomas has given you which
is [Lunar] symbolism and the symbolism of outer circle” (YVP1 124).
In fact, Head, Heart, Loins and Fall appear to introduce a digression into the discussion and are a complication which has been introduced too early: a headlong dive rather
than dipping one’s toes, it might be said. It is only later in the script that the concepts are
fully thought out. Card File D32x relates the birth charts of WBY and GY to the “world
diagram,” and codifies a discussion of 23 November 1917:
How does the new East arise?
In the cycles man is born from North in the world Diagram. In the Human [diagram?] [he is born] under the sign which in each case rotates during the cycle so
that if he is born under the eastern sign (?) [the editors decipher the word in the
corresponding passage in the automatic script as Aries, which is the same thing]
it will be in the position of his stage in the world Diagram”
Diagram for man “in [Scorpio] anti”
[Editorial note: two diagrams: one for “birth” with arrow pointing to N [Taurus];
the other for “Man” pointing to [Taurus]]
(YVP3 289, referring to discussion in YVP1 111)
Although it is difficult to know precisely what is intended without the described diagrams
to guide us, this seems to imply that everyone is born at Aries or internal East, at least on
the human wheel, which is also the position of Head and the spring equinox, taking the
cues from D31 (YVP3 289). The bit about Taurus must then relate to YVP1 112: “Why
[Taurus] at ¾ stage of anti. GY | [Capricorn] [Scorpio] or [Libra] or [Cancer]—the sign
does not matter—if you are born under [Pisces] that sign comes to the part of the world
Shifting Sands
199
diagram which represents your development at that stage.”13 Yeats then demands to be given
his diagram and it is here I presume that the circles from the codification in D32x appear:
See YVP3 289. In the diagram on the left, the editors wrongly give the symbol for the
Moon’s North Node instead of Leo, the opposite sign to Yeats’s rising sign Aquarius (corrected here). I also suspect that the sign for Capricorn is a mistake for Virgo, the opposite
sign to Pisces. The rising sign of George, the medium, is Scorpio, the opposite sign to
Taurus, so I suggest that in the diagram on the right, Scorpio should appear at the ¾ mark
of the antithetical where the word “Medium” is situated.
With regard to these diagrams, Yeats makes the interesting observation: “so my ascendant would compare to head Zodiac sign at phasal number. I have [Aquarius] at 17”
(YVP3 290).14 Note in these diagrams, assuming that they have been drawn accurately
from the manuscript, that W. B. Yeats’s Aquarius is depicted as being contiguous to, or
just after, what would be Phase 15: what Yeats calls “new S[outh] in outer” (YVP1 117,
if we superimpose the diagram in D31 on the left-hand diagram from D32x). Certainly,
it is not at the ¾ mark of the antithetical, where Head would be on the wheel. (Remember that the collaborators already knew that the middle of the antithetical phases was
Phase 15, and the end of the antithetical phases was Phase 22. Aries or Head would then
have to be at the end of George Yeats’s Phase 18, and in fact would be between Phases 18
and 19. In the diagram from D32, it is tacitly assumed that George’s Scorpio overlaps
the position of Head precisely. This cannot be the case.) Whether or not it was intended
in this particular script, the phrase about the birth sign going to “the part of the world
diagram which represents your development at that stage” is beginning to look like an
instruction to put birth signs against phase of the individual rather than at the ¾ mark
or Aries, or perhaps it might be best to say rather that the instructions in the script are
such that they may later be interpreted in this manner. When all of this information is
codified in D47, Diagram Early and its accompanying text, not only has the subtle shift
from ¾ antithetical to the Phase of the individual taken place, but Aries or Head in the
outer wheel seems to belong to a different sphere of action, where it is contiguous to
Loins on the second, interior wheel. Given that the editors of Yeats’s Vision Papers attribute this Card File note to “AS 25 Nov 1917” (YVP3 296), that is, the day following the
D32x diagram, they are either in error or else Yeats has imported later information into
an earlier diagram. The other possibility, of course, is that a large part of the discussion
200
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
went unrecorded, but this does not seem likely. The editors of YVP reproduce Diagram
Early from D47, and the reader who wishes to see it is referred to YVP3 296, but the
following typesetting is clearer:
The outer circle here is the wheel of the twenty-eight lunar phases, with its NWSE in
the correct positions but no phase numbers. The circle next to it is variously described
as “second circle sidreal progress of individual” and “2nd circle civilization in world”
(YVP3 296).15 This circle, I take it, will become the twelve cycles, each of which contains
an average of 28 incarnations, although at the stage of the script from which it comes it
is identified with the primary. The internal circle, which is the one I wish to concentrate
on, is “individual horoscope ‘WBY’ being placed to show ascendant at 17” (YVP3 296).
Harper et al. attribute “Diagram Early” to 25 November 1917, and the editorial
description at the head of the transcription reads “diagram: circles, crossed with dissecting
lines marking Cardinal Points, Chief Signs of the Zodiac, and Head, Heart, Loins and
Fall at diagonal corners” (YVP1 116). The Card File diagram reproduced here appears to
be based on the corrected one drawn after GY says “no I must get it right—I will do it
again” (YVP1 116). Thus, WBY’s primary is described as being “just past East going to
aries” (YVP1 117), meaning E on the second or middle wheel at 3 o’clock going to Aries
at 4:30, while the antithetical is “just past South,” meaning S at 3 o’clock going to Aries
at Head at 1:30.16 Obviously, the phrase “just past” is not especially accurate. These permutations of E and Aries are meant to explain Yeats’s supposedly violent nature, although
Yeats himself wants to relate the positions of Aries and East here to his horoscope with the
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201
more traditional opposition between Mars and his Moon in his Ascendant sign. Of more
interest is Yeats’s questioning of the placement of the Ascendant itself. George explains
that one must “also remember individual horoscope—That is way to find primary anti
and so on” (YVP1 118). Yeats asks how this is done, and is told “You must know stage of
develop[ment] [i.e., person’s phase number]—put then horoscope into this figure.” Yeats,
still at a loss, asks how one is to know the stage or phase, and is told, “By clairvoyance if
you know the person represented by the horoscope.” To the question “Must I judge each
house & contents [viz. planets] in relation to outside circles,” the answer is given that
one must “Judge by aspects of Planets & houses they are in—then refer major aspects to
both outer figures—you must have method—work from without to within—first outer
circle for generality then inner for individuality then centre for detail.” It is then that Yeats
asks for an explanation of the attributions he had been given earlier in the script, of his
antithetical Venus and primary Saturn. Unfortunately, the answers have been lost, but they
must have included a fair bit of obfuscation, because George Yeats had moved on in a different direction since those equations had been adumbrated. Where she eventually ended
up meant that they no longer applied.
It is perhaps not entirely unexpected that several weeks passed before a concerted
effort was made to examine natal planets against phases: the rotation by ninety degrees
of directions and signs for Head, Heart, Loins and Fall between the two outer wheels introduced too many complications, as did the use of outer wheel for antithetical and inner
wheel for primary. Yeats’s chart was looked at first, although the editors of Yeats’s Vision Papers chose not to include most of the relevant Script, despite Harper’s separate tabulation
of it in A Vision A as “Undated: ‘Examination of my horoscope…’” (CVA xx). Regardless
of Harper’s inability to date this script, its importance surely demanded separate publication, possibly as an appendix to Yeats’s Vision Papers. In point of fact, parts of this script
were published in these volumes, but were not identified as such. Now, however, there
appears to be sufficient information available to place these 10 pages of 40 questions in
the correct chronological order within the body of the work.
In the Vision Notebooks, VNB1, there is a note by George which reads “Astrology
(see script of Jan 16) | page 74. | 84–86” (YVP3 179). The footnote identifies “some notes
Yeats made on a blank page (74) after his Qs on 16 Jan 18,” and quotes the following:
[Moon] [opposition] [Mars]
[Sun] & [Uranus]
[Jupiter]
[Venus]
Ego & Mask
PF
CG EG
22
(YVP3 216 n116)
In Peter Kenny’s catalog of the Occult Papers of W. B. Yeats,17 there is an entry for NLI MS
36,256/25 which reads: “Sheets. Questions and Answers, numbered 1–40. Also, on reverse
of GBY natal chart GBY’s script mentioning March horary.18 At head of Questions: ‘Examination of my horoscope with the 28 phases!’ At head of Answers: ‘Horoscopes.’ [3]; [3];
[1] sheets; Questions paginated 74–76,” (OPWBY 19; also 11). Since NLI MS 36,253/11
has questions which end at page 73, and NLI MS 36,253/12 has questions that begin at
page 77, it is reasonable to assume that the questions for the “Examination” can be dated
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
to January 16 or 17, 1918 (OPWBY 5–6). Such a dating is consistent with the very similar
examination of George’s horoscope occurring on January 18, which I examine below.
Neil Mann, whose unpublished transcription of the “Examination of my horoscope
with the | 28 phases!” I have used, reads Yeats as asking first of all if one always places
the Ascendant at the “begging” [i.e., beginning] of the phase.19 This is answered in the
affirmative, although when Yeats writes the “Discoveries” manuscript, he specifies the
center of the phase: “according to the astrological system the Ascendant of a horoscope is
always placed directly under the middle point of the native’s phase and all the aspects and
planets are studied in relation the phases at which they are placed” (YVP4 24; cf. YVP4
79). In what follows, I have used the center placing, as it positions the planets so they
correlate more closely with the questions. I have also used a chart where the houses are
of equal magnitude, which means that the signs vary, as using the chart more commonly
used nowadays, where signs are of equal magnitude, does not produce the correct results.
It should be noted that when the Yeatses used the standard blank charts purchased as templates, they used the twelve equal divisions for the houses, and so depicted what are called
intercepted signs, where two signs can be wholly squeezed within one house, thereby radically altering how the planets are positioned on a chart:
Here, it can be seen that the Moon is at Phase 17, Mars is opposite it at Phase 3, which for
a person of Phase 17 is the position of Mask, while Sun and Uranus are at Phase 27, the
position of Body of Fate for a person of Phase 17, with Jupiter at Phase 13, where Creative
Mind would be. Venus is also at Phase 22. These are the planets and phases the medium
gives when she is asked to choose the principle ones and comment on the placing. Others
Shifting Sands
203
mentioned in the “Examination” manuscript are Saturn at Phase 6, Mercury at Phase 24
and Neptune at Phase 20.20
The analysis, which is hardly inspirational or incisive, states that having Sun and
Uranus at Body of Fate gives unexpected twists of fate in matters of love but that Jupiter at
Creative Mind will bring good luck through other people or in creative work. Moon opposite to Mars gives dispersal by acting against intensity in the Mask. Yeats asks what is the
effect of having Venus at Phase 22, and is told in no uncertain terms that he did not need
to ask the question. Mercury at Phase 24 allowed him to work with Lady Gregory, whose
Phase that is, whereas his Mars going to Phase 4 is correlated with the fact that Phase 4
is the Mask of Phase 18, which is George’s phase. Other planets mentioned seem to be
subject to interpretation irrespective of phase. Although we know from the published
versions of A Vision that Will and Mask are antithetical in Tincture, while Creative Mind
and Body of Fate are primary, with Will and Creative Mind being subject against Mask and
Body of Fate as object, any Faculty can appear in any phase, as it traverses them in order.
The script defines Moon as being antithetical here, whereas Mars is said to be in a primary
phase. Thus, one should divide the wheel into primary and antithetical halves, splitting
phases 8 and 22, and the planets will take their Tincture from their positions. This is a
development from 25 November and its “Diagram Early,” where antithetical and primary
were each given their own separate wheels.
When it comes to the turn for George’s horoscope to be examined in connection
with phases, George first selects “Primary planets [Mars] [Jupiter] | Anti [Uranus] [Sun]
[Moon] [Venus]” (YVP1 272; cf. YVP3 352, P12: “Whose Horoscope? Georges”).21 Her
diagram is as follows:
204
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
It can be seen that the allocation is correct, if we split the wheel into primary and antithetical halves in the normal manner at Phases 8 and 22, and that Neptune is also primary.
Here, Moon and Venus are roughly at the position of Phase 18’s Body of Fate, viz. Phase
12, but because there are no planets at the positions of Will, Creative Mind and Mask,
the analysis takes a different tack from that used for W. B. Yeats. Yeats asks what effect
having Jupiter at Phase 1 has, and George includes Sun at Phase 15 in the discussion as
well. As both of these are phases of spirits, George’s mediumship and clairvoyance can be
explained. Her Mercury is in Yeats’s phase, Phase 17, and is loosely conjunct her Sun.22
Uranus at Phase 18 causes a few problems for the interpreter, because it is described as
“The only primary strength in horoscope” (YVP1 273). On Yeats’s protestation that Uranus has been put amongst the antithetical planets, George responded that “Yes but it is the
only planet which can act primarily because [Mars] is at 24—If [=Jupiter?] at [Phase] one
[Sun] at [Phase] 15 [Moon] [Venus] 13 & 12 between” (YVP1 273). I do not understand
this, and also think that the last two phases should be 11 and 12. But perhaps one is not
meant to understand it: George is thinking very quickly in order not to get caught out
in a contradiction. There are then a few attempts to correlate George’s phases and planets
with the phases and planets of her husband, who apparently comes into her horoscope
at her “Creative & Evil G[enius],” or Phase 12, where her Moon is placed. Yeats’s Moon
is in Aquarius, and is conjunct George’s natal Mars. Her Mars at Phase 24 causes selfsuppression, although it is not entirely clear to me how this happens.
Although Yeats asked the medium whether she could “go on with Maurice here” (YVP1
274), meaning Iseult Gonne, the response was not encouraging, and the topic of applying
planets to phases appears not to have been returned to, at least not in the published script.
However, Peter Kenny lists as NLI MS 36,274/26, “Template of 22 phases for analysing
charts into different cycles. 1 card with centre excised” (OPWBY 50), and there is another
note in NLI MS 36/273/12/2 which says “Iseult Gonne, (1) chart with planetary circle cut
out” (OPWBY 47). Lest one think that “22” in the first is simply a misprint for 28, it is
worth turning to the Vision Papers, as mention is made there of a blank page with “a circular
diagram with twenty-two numbers on the outside and the following on the inside: ‘12 =
mind, 10 = Soul, 22 = Ascent.’ He [WBY] had difficulty accommodating these numbers
to the 28 Phases (see CVA 34n [note to p. 140, lines 4–5])” (YVP1 531). As reference to
the CVA Note shows, the template Harper is talking about also includes the 28 phases:
“Besides the 28 Phases, this circle incorporates three sets of numbers representing divisions
of the single cycle: ‘10 soul, 12 mind, 22 ascent’” (CVA 34 n140).23 Given that its center
was excised, I imagine that it was placed over horoscopes such that the subject’s Ascendant
was situated on the phase. The position of the planets could then be roughly determined.24
We thus have at least two methods of divining Tinctures for planets. The first, if I have
discerned it correctly, split the wheel from the point between Leo and Cancer to the point
between Capricorn and Aquarius, while the second used the eventual split of the wheel
into antithetical and primary and placed the Ascendant at phase. Depending on how the
planets were positioned in the chart, they could be either antithetical or primary. For
example, Yeats’s Jupiter is primary according to the former method, and antithetical according to the latter, while his Uranus, Mercury and Sun are antithetical according to the
former and primary according to the latter. Both methods agree on the placement of five
planets: Moon, Neptune and Venus are antithetical, while Saturn and Mars are primary.
Shifting Sands
205
II
I mentioned earlier that several astrologers had sought to incorporate the Yeatses’ ideas
into their art in order to enlarge it. In doing so, they have had to jettison one of the main
tenets of phase allocation. For the Yeatses, phases of people were to be divined by knowledge of the particular person, and could not be derived astrologically. Once one has the
phase, one could then apply it astrologically. By way of contrast, Busteed, Tiffany and
Wergin use the distance between Sun and Moon in the natal chart, counting counterclockwise, to determine phase, and thus allocate Yeats to Phase 19 rather than to the phase
with which he identified himself. This is basically the same as putting the subject’s Sun
at the moment of birth on the Ascendant or Phase 1 and then seeing where the Moon
is positioned in a wheel divided into twenty-eight. It is also, as Neil Mann explains, the
position of the Part of Fortune in the horoscope, using the day formula for both night
and day charts, as some astrologers do.25 By the same principles, George would be Phase
25 rather than Phase 18, and Iseult Gonne Phase 5 instead of Phase 14.26 An unintended
consequence of this method is that it makes a mockery of another of Yeats’s oft-expressed
tenets, according to which Phases 1 and 15 are purely supernatural incarnations. For
Busteed et al., Leo Tolstoy belongs to Phase 1 and Edward Kennedy to Phase 15: both
examples worldly, both flawed, although one worked on it more than the other. The script
itself originally placed Tolstoy in Phase 6, but Yeats found this surprising (YVP1 194–96).
He is not named in the appropriate place in A Vision.
III
The concept of the Initiatory and Critical Moments deserves more space than I can give
it here. A full exposition would include such things as the Lightning Flash, Third and
Fourth Daimons, Teaching Spirits and Victimage for the Ghostly Self, Chance and Choice,
and the Beatific Vision. It is possible that the concept also explains the Opening of the
Tinctures.27 In short, the full exposition would have to encompass a large part of the entire
system and much of what Yeats left out of the published work. As he writes in the dedication to A Vision A: “I have not even dealt with the whole of my subject, perhaps not even
with what is most important, writing nothing about the Beatific Vision, nothing about
sexual love” (AVA xii, CW13 lv). Here, I wish merely to note the attempt made by the
Yeatses to correlate the Initiatory and Critical Moments with astrological factors. In this
I simplify greatly, because the astrological factors involved in each Moment are also correlated with the Four Faculties and can apparently be plotted on the gyres.
Neil Mann helpfully defines the Initiatory and Critical Moments as follows:
[The Moments of Crisis are a]n important element of the Automatic Script,
which received brief treatment in AVA (172–73) and none in AVB, linked particularly with sexual love. They are associated with the Daimon, the least predictable element of the System, and are symbolised by the lightning flash. The
Initiatory Moment represents a shift in the nature of the Mask and Body of Fate,
the “sensuous image,” effectively in our aims, values and goals, which set in motion a series of events which reach a climax at the Critical Moment. The Critical
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
206
Moment represents a moment of the greatest freedom within an individual life,
where the intellect is able to analyse the aims and actions initiated, probably with
the help of the Daimonic mind, and the individual is able to act with as much
free will as he or she is capable of. The Critical Moment is not always reached,
and even if it is, this process may be repeated without the individual reaching the
third stage of Beatific Vision, where the individual moves into a form of greater
wholeness, and possibly Unity of Being.28
This is much clearer than the discussion in A Vision A (CW13 140; AVA 172–73), but as a
summary it necessarily omits complications. For example, there are two series of IMs and
CMs. Yeats explains: “All such subjectives [i.e., extreme examples of their phase] however
have experience, if process is completed, of two kinds of IM, called two series & of two
kinds of CMs called the First CM & the second CM” (YVP3 112, 123). Although there are
generally only two CMs in each person’s life, there are at least three named CMs for WBY
(see VNB2, “My Im & CMs,” YVP3 193). As the purpose of the first CM is to free the
C[reative] G[enius] [=Creative Mind] from the Ego [=Will], and the purpose of the second
is to free the Mask from the P[ersona of ] F[ate] [=Body of Fate] (YVP3 123), perhaps this
means that one of Yeats’s CMs was not successful. Also, although it is said that “IMs and
CMs are the expression of the Wheel in the life of sexual passion” (YVP3 111), it had earlier
been stated that “The CM of an objective person is not sexual nor is the IM” (YVP3 110).
The following discussion is concentrated on the CMs and IMs of two subjective people, W.
B. and George Yeats, as is much of the script, so this complication has also been ignored.
In studying the Moments one must bear in mind that it is a developing concept.
There is Yeats’s specific note withdrawing legitimacy from several pages of script relating
to the Moments: “Much of the information in these scripts about IMs and Cms confused
and apparently wrong,” he wrote, and although he suggests this may be to do with confusion of terms and “some uncertainty about
‘victim’ etc.,” Harper is probably correct
to caution that the note may extend to much more than the single date where the note
appears (YVP2 559, relating to YVP2 225). We shall see examples shortly of uncertainty
about whether a particular event is an IM or a CM or even an OM.
In determining planetary attributions in the script, it was often a matter of guessing
the meaning from incomplete fragments. With the CMs and IMs, this problem remains,
but a complication has been added. The Yeatses are much further on in the script, and
a shorthand known to both of them is in place. The reader must become familiar with
references such as “the March horary,” and know that “1913” refers to Mabel Dickinson,
making sense of such snippets via external sources and cross-referencing of similar passages. Needless to say, the margin for error is large. The cross-referencing is not always
straightforward. To take a simple example of immediate relevance to the Critical Moments, one need only look at the list of CMs and IMs in VNB2. George Yeats’s Second
Series list begins as follows:
End of April & Nov 1909 [ First Sept
<
[ Nov finish. [Venus] [Neptune]
(YVP3 193; cf. YVP3 192, where the relevant script is reproduced as an illustration.)
Shifting Sands
207
Here, the reading “Sept” appears to be corroborated by the accompanying illustration, but
it is almost certainly incorrect, as the script for 22 July 1919 gives “sight” (YVP2 331), as
does Card File C51 (YVP3 267), but whether this is an editorial error or the Yeatses who
have been unable to decipher their own previous handwriting is not something the reader
can know without examining the original.29 Nor is it currently possible to determine
whether “first sight” is shorthand for “love at first sight,” although this is probable. On
6 September 1919 Yeats suggested that “at first sight in love it is always [Mars] [Venus]
Signs ascending,” and was told that he was correct (YVP2 406). Mars and Venus signs are
Aries, Taurus, Libra and Scorpio, and each sign ascends once a day, so there are plenty of
opportunities on any day of the year for “love at first sight.” Whether the sex of the loved
one changes according to the traditional Mars and Venus is not stated.30
The IMs and CMs make their first appearance in the automatic script during a discussion of the “March horaries.”31 These horaries doubtless attracted the attention of the
Yeatses because of their unusual grouping of planets (technically called a “stellium,” although the Yeatses used the term “sterium,” YVP2 344, 360).32 As Saddlemyer explains,
the March horaries were drawn up for 18 and 20 March 1917, when the Yeatses cast horoscopes “concerning the possibility of marriage.” He obviously cast his horary first to see if
conditions were favorable, asking her two days later, despite having reservations (BG 207;
cf. 87, 97, 207–8). Strangely, both horaries can be read to foretell the astrological nature
of the two children the Yeatses would have.33 And both horaries would eventually join the
lists that were drawn up of the respective IMs and CMs for W. B. and George Yeats as
memorializing either an IM or a CM. George’s IM horary of “20th March 1917. [Mars]
[Venus] 9.15 am.” appears in two lists, the second of which informs us that a conjunction
of the two planets is involved, while W. B. Yeats’s horary of 18 March 1917 is identified
as a CM connected with a Phase 18 person, obviously George (YVP3 192–93, 240–41,
267). Mars and Venus are conjunct in both horaries.
Of especial interest is the first appearance of a dedicated CM/IM list in the script.
Ameritus tells Yeats to wait, and then says that he wants “to show you the curious Astrological concurrence with initiatory moments.” A list of months and years then follows,
with [Mars] [conjunct] [Venus] after each one. This list is repeated with its conjunctions
in CF C51, where Yeats writes, wrongly, that it is “copied from Script with corrections” (it
is word for word) (YVP3 267). Unfortunately, reality was not quite so neat or accommodating. When this list was transcribed to VNB2 with specific days and times, one or other
of the Yeatses had realized that Mars and Venus were not conjunct at any time in 1913,
and revised Mars and Venus to Venus and Saturn, which were conjunct in July of that year
(YVP3 192). Interestingly, one of George’s IMs was literally an initiation: at 3.15 p.m. on
24 July 1914, she was formally admitted to the Golden Dawn (BG 65). Needless to say,
Mars and Venus were conjunct, with a six-degree separation. Given the astrological background of both Yeatses, one might have thought that the astrological correspondences
were not simply of the moment, but would involve transits to natal horoscopes, but this
does not appear to be the case. Thus, it would seem that anyone could experience an IM
on any date when one of these conjunctions occurred, regardless of his or her birth chart.34
Yeats writes, in NB8, “The first CM in man has as its horoscope [Venus] [Saturn] as a
rule and the second [Venus] [Mars], or [Venus] [Mars] [Jupiter]—the converse in woman.
In woman second CM we get as a rule [Venus] [Saturn] & then [Jupiter].…It is possible
208
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
that the IMs do not correspond as exactly to this always as the CMs for my first series IM
are I am told [Moon] [Venus] not [Venus] [Saturn] & my second [Sun] [Moon] [Mars]
instead of [Venus] [Mars]. (I have not verified this & it may be a mistake)” (YVP3 116;
cf. YVP3 195). This correction seems to have been made on 24 July 1919, where these
planets are listed followed by the circled numerals 1 and 2, obviously relating to the two
series of IMs and CMs (YVP2 336).35
Deirdre Toomey is almost certainly correct when she writes that George was still
feeling her way, in both the script and the marriage itself, as she was not yet fully aware of
the details of her husband’s history: “George gets her dates wrong (and hence the Critical
Moments and Initiatory Moments) and Yeats becomes a hostile cross-examiner” (YA10
[1993] 270). Thus George has to guess dates for his affairs with Olivia Shakespear, Maud
Gonne and Mabel Dickinson.36 She was on firmer ground in discussing her own relationship with him. In fact, the overriding concern of the IMs and CMs was to convince Yeats
that he and George were destined for each other, and that their fates were inextricable.
Thus it is that Yeats writes, “My 2 CM Nativity of First Child | Georges 1 CM [Nativity
of ] Second Child” (YVP3 193) and “all her [Mars] [conjunct] [Venus] IMs connected
with W.B.Y.” (YVP3 267). However, convincing him was not an easy task, as he was often
skeptical, and George also overstepped the mark several times, as when she suggested that
Maud Gonne’s marriage in February 1903 was merely an initiatory prelude to a CM, possibly that of March 1917. The date of Gonne’s marriage appears as an IM in the CF A34,
but in June 1919 the interpreter corrected WBY by stating that 1903 was “Not an IM”
(YVP2 311). Doubtless she had gathered, after her initial suggestion, that Yeats would
not countenance such a downgrading, so 21 February 1903 duly became an OM when
Yeats writes, as a correction for CF A34, “I was said to have OM ‘direct effect of past life’
when MG married” (YVP3 241; cf. “OM. | mine MG marriage,” YVP3 349). The OM, of
course, is the “moment of greatest disquiet” in any life, and it appears to be the “reversal”
of the Beatific Vision (YVP3 349).37 Yeats also writes that “Interpreter had OM in July
1916—‘[Saturn] [Uranus] the same’” (YVP3 341), which seems to imply that his own
OM also featured these two planets. However, this is not the case for the date of Maud
Gonne’s marriage, and in fact Saturn and Uranus form no aspects in July 1916 either.
Oddly, however, they are in opposition for the revised date of George’s OM, 24 October
1917, which is the presumed date of Iseult Gonne’s unsettling letter or rather the date
at which Yeats showed it to his new wife (YVP2 520 and note; YVP3 349).38 This event
had earlier been identified as one of George’s CMs (YVP2 224) and CF C3 identifies it
as “a crisis…from which philosophy has come.” Yeats further states that such a crisis only
comes to couples where one is in the “First CM series and the other in Second,” these
CMs being equated to Venus and Saturn and Mars and Venus respectively. Venus and Saturn are identified with George’s CM: “the one who gets true Genius ([Venus] [Saturn]) is
expressive (interpreter)” (YVP3 249). Neither of these planetary attributions makes sense
with George’s OM or her husband’s version of it (BG 101). Even stranger is the fact that
the reverse side of CF A34, which had originally identified George’s OM as “Nov 21” but
later changed it to the October 24 date, continues: “after date of George OM I find ‘Now
that you have seen Ephemeris what are the important stars?’ | ‘[Saturn] [Uranus] [Saturn]
because of [Venus] | [Uranus] [because of ] [Mercury][’]” (YVP3 241). Perhaps this too
was added later, as it also relates to 24 October 1917, where Saturn is in trine to Venus
Shifting Sands
209
and Uranus in trine to Mercury. For Yeats’s OM, Saturn and Venus do not have the same
aspects, although Saturn is conjunct Mercury and Uranus square Venus. This may mean
nothing or it may mean some sort of sexual reversal.
I earlier mentioned that Yeats had three CMs rather than the regulation two. One of
these was his consummation of his relationship with Maud Gonne. The date itself shifts in
the script and its codification variously from 1910 to 1907 to 1908. One would think that
he would have remembered the year if not anything more precise, and the blame for the
imprecision cannot be laid at George’s door alone. The 1910 date is first given by George
as “Ego CG crisis” and this is identified as one of what are “generally two critical moments
in a life.” The other CM for Yeats is identified as the “horary of March” (YVP2 208). He
wants to know which of two women his “Ego CG” CM refers to, Olivia Shakespear or
Maud Gonne, and is told “The Lioness,” meaning Gonne, whose Ascendant was in Leo,
and this is confirmed by his later asking, “Taking my I.M. of 1896 [his sexual initiation
by Shakespear, the IM which led up to the later CM] & my C.M. of 1910 did ‘the pity’
of victim in I.M. act on me or MG in 1910” (YVP2 229; cf. YVP3 118–18). Nevertheless, Warwick Gould thinks that Yeats may have resumed his affair with Shakespear on
31 March 1910 (YA9 [1992] 301, 307), and the 1910 date for Maud Gonne is corrected
several months later, after some rather fruitless talk of previous incarnations: “You spoke
of victim in my ’96 I.M. & of that victim making possible CM of 1910 (–1907?–).” That
this is not an insertion at a later date is shown three questions later, when a definite 1907
is given (YVP2 375). When the lists of CMs and IMs are drawn up, the 1910 date has
disappeared. VNB2 gives “CM 1907 or [190]8 (16),” where “16” is Gonne’s phase (YVP3
193, while the Card File gives “1907 CM | Event. 1 event | Paris” (CF A43, YVP3 240).
Yeats does not seem to have been in Paris in 1907, although the two met in Dublin in
November 1907, but he was in Paris in December 1908, which is when Foster thinks the
long courtship was consummated (Life1 386, 393, 603 n172). Given the equivocation of
the automatic script, the date seems reasonable enough. Foster has relied on the advice of
Elizabeth Heine regarding a horary, probably the one mentioned in Kenny as NLI MS
36,273/4, “1908 (while visiting Gonne in Paris)” (OPWBY 46). One might also remember that WBY had written that “the CMs for my first series IM are I am told [Moon]
[Venus] not [Venus] [Saturn]” (YVP3 116). The first two planets are conjunct on 20 and
21 December 1908, whereas the second two are not conjunct at all during that month.
IV
One conclusion to be drawn from this paper, unsurprisingly, is that things that are proposed in the automatic script get tacitly dropped as the system develops and becomes both
more complicated and simpler and that one should beware of reading later developments
into earlier. In other words, not all of the revisions are noted as such and attributable to
the Frustrators; the sands do indeed shift. Rather than adopting a derisory attitude to
these changes, one can and perhaps should regard them as belonging to the scientific approach whereby one proposes hypotheses and then discards them for others when they are
found not to work. But there are more important lessons to be drawn from the book than
any apparent conformity with scientific principles. The system, Yeats says, was the joint
creation of his Daimon and the Daimon of his wife (AVB 22). It could be said that this is
210
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
offered as an excuse for the failings of the system, particularly with respect to the parts that
did not make it to the final published work. The analogies to the natal charts, allocating
planets to either primary or antithetical Tincture, and then planets to the Four Faculties,
may have worked (roughly speaking) for the two principal authors, but I think they wisely
stopped while they were ahead. Thus it was that only the very general suggestion remained
that horoscope and cycle needed to be considered as well as phase. Certainly many of
those parts of A Vision’s more private arcana did not make it to the published editions.
Yet I do not think that the thesis that Daimons created the system is offered as an
excuse for its failings. It does not absolve either Yeats or his wife from responsibility. It is
simply a statement of fact. The Daimons told the Yeatses what they needed to hear. The
crisis that was their marriage forced both of them to confront ultimate shipwreck and to
salvage what they could. George Yeats may have thought she was distracting her husband
from his own thoughts but in the end she brought him back to where the two of them
began, so that they knew the place for the first time, once again, and knew their place in
it. After all, a Daimon is only one’s own ultimate self.
But what of the general principles of A Vision? Can anyone other than the two Yeatses, or perhaps it was only ever one of them, draw succor or solace from the book’s ideas?
The theories of Initiatory and Critical Moments quite obviously have a general validity,
offering as they do novel ways of understanding peak experiences and how they do or do
not fit in with our normal lives. They are also the parts of A Vision which can be most
seamlessly extracted from the whole; in fact, similar theories have been adumbrated by
others. In her book Astrology: A Place in Chaos, the astrologer Bernadette Brady has delineated a “chaotic astrology,” which sees a person’s life “as containing two types of periods:
that of when the person was living within their comfort zone and that of when they were
moving through a tipping point.”39 According to her thesis, the planetary patterns in a
horoscope can be seen to function rather as strange attractors in chaos theory, while the
sensitive points in the horoscope as indicated by such things as transiting planets aspecting the natal planets may be compared to chaos theory’s saddle points, where bifurcations
seem to open up in what had previously appeared to be a stable system. While Brady does
not mention Yeats, the Yeatsian alternatives of Choice and Chance are very much at the
forefront of her thinking. The analogies with the astrology of Initiatory and Critical Moments should not need to be spelt out. As for such things as types of people, historical
cycles and the stages of life after death leading to rebirth, I myself do not believe in some
of these things, or at least not in precisely the same way, but they do seem to me to be as
adequate as any other metaphor that people have come up with to explain life and give
meaning to it. “Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of truth,” wrote Blake.40 At
the time of his assassination, the Romanian scholar Ioan Couliano was working towards a
theory that combined structuralist principles with D’Arcy Thompson’s morphodynamics
to come up with something that looks to me rather like the Process Philosophy of Alfred
North Whitehead, whereby Eternal Objects ingress into Actual Entities. According to
Couliano’s thesis, systems of great complexity can be built up from quite simple premises,
rather as nature can be seen as being generated in a fractal-like manner, or as A Vision
grows out of the two Tinctures, antithetical and primary, and eventually encompasses all of
life.41 One may compare the two halves of the human brain, with their branching neural
connections, which seem often to follow predetermined pathways but which sometimes
Shifting Sands
211
spark and create something completely new and surprising. In his own way, Yeats has
tapped into a universal principle, and the system he and his wife created perhaps allowed
him a glimpse into how things work.
In the end, A Vision serves to remind us that we can never truly know anything. We
think we are examining the nature of the external world and find that we have simply returned to the mind’s own imaginings: “As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound” is
how Yeats put it (AVB 305: the book’s final words, apart from the flourish “Oxford, Autumn
1920”). In short, the book is an invitation to wake up. The truth, like rising in the spirit
or the glorified or celestial body, is beyond all cycles. A Vision shows us how difficult it is
to escape determinism. The explanations that we come up with are only so many stories,
some more convincing than others, some of which will trip us up if we continue to believe
them, some of which cocoon us safely so that we never need to question them. It is the
very strangeness of the Yeatses’ system, its distance from what most of their contemporaries
were writing about, that is unsettling and ultimately most fulfilling. Yeats was never as silly
as Auden and the audience he presumed to speak for. There are mirrors and mirrors, to use
another of Yeats’s metaphors, and mind is the trickiest of them all.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
PIAL Notebook, NLI MS 36,276, entry dated 4 June 1909, quoted by Elizabeth Heine, “Yeats and Maud
Gonne: Marriage and the Astrological Record, 1908–09,” YA13 (1999) 26.
Of course, the twelve cycles are related to the astrological ages but these are not my concern here. See Matthew Gibson’s essay in this volume “Timeless and Spaceless,” 15ff.
The later equation of “the seventh house of the horoscope where one finds friend and enemy” with Mask
and Body of Fate (AVB 213) is not so much a description of the actual mechanics as it is a picturesque analogy, alluding to the previous meditation published in Autobiographies and, after Yeats’s death, in Memoirs
165–66. See also Memoirs 217: “Does it [meaning Yeats’s difficulties with friendship] come from [Mars]
in VII (house of partners, etc.), [opposition] [Moon] in I?” This refers to WBY’s natal horoscope, where
Moon in the first house is in opposition to Mars in the seventh.
Deirdre Toomey wisely cautions that Per Amica Silentia Lunae had not been published when the script began
(YA10 [1998] 268), but it is almost certain that the term “antithetical,” first used in the script in November
8, came from there. It appears as though WBY used the term in an unrecorded question (YVP1 64), and GY
must have been quickly brought up to speed. In a way, the automatic script is an extended drawing out of
the implications of Per Amica: the concept of the Critical Moments, which I discuss later, is obviously heavily
dependent on Per Amica’s idea that the function of the Daimon is to bring the soul to crisis.
In generating charts, I have used Walter D. Pullen’s free astrological program Astrolog, version 5.14G,
obtainable from http://www.magitech.com/~cruiser1/astrolog.htm, along with several other packages I
have picked up over the years. For example, to determine what phase a person would be if the distance
between Sun and Moon in the natal horoscope was the determining factor, I have used Clairvision’s Canopus, which I downloaded when it was freeware. For determining times when aspects can occur, I have used
Configuration Hunter, available from http://www.configurationhunter.com. There are of course numerous
software packages available, some more expensive than others, just as there are websites that will generate
a chart for you.
The reader should take care, however, that the chart generated by whatever package for WBY does
not have its Ascendant in Capricorn. Thus, the chart in the compendium of Aleister Crowley’s astrological
writings, The General Principles of Astrology, is taken from Lois Rodden’s Astro-Databank but is not the one
that will make sense to a reader of Yeats, for whom his Ascendant was in Aquarius. Crowley himself used
the Aquarius Ascendant for Yeats, thus necessitating an amendment on the part of Crowley’s editor; see
Aleister Crowley with Evangeline Adams, The General Principles of Astrology, ed. Hymenaeus Beta (York
Beach, ME: Weiser, 1992), 576 n190. There are a couple of considerations here: First, his birth time of
10:40 p.m. was local time, not Greenwich Mean Time; so if a program does not allow for Local Mean
212
6.
7.
8.
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Time, the birth time should be amended to 11:05 p.m. Second, Yeats was born in Sandymount in Dublin
(53N20 6W14), not Sandymount in Louth (53N58 6W22). The chart he himself prepared is reproduced
in Elizabeth Heine, “‘W. B. Yeats’ map in his own hand,’” Biography 1:3 (1978) 37–50, and the data is:
ASC 0Aqu41, MC 4Sag15, Sun 22Gem51, Moon 19Aqu45, Mercury 3Gem57, Venus 13Tau21, Mars
12Leo2, Jupiter 24Sag19Rx, Saturn 23Lib46Rx, Uranus 29Gem16, and Neptune 10Ari21. The latitude
and longitude used is N53.23 and W6.20, GMT 23:05:20, Sidereal time 16:09:03. Alan Leo used “information supplied from Private Sources” for entry no. 960 in A Thousand and One Notable Nativities
(1911 [WBGYL 1113; YL 1103]; 4th ed., Mokelumne Hill, CA: Health Research, 1978), 49, 98–99. Leo
rounded the data to degrees only, though rounding the Ascendant down to 0° Aquarius rather than up. A
Thousand and One Notable Nativities was used by Crowley for his horoscopes, and one may presume that
Doctor Sturm did likewise, thus making it somewhat easier for him to have worked over three hundred
horoscopes to check the phases of the Moon (LTWBY2 381).
As Saddlemyer explains, George Yeats’s birth date was 17 Oct 1892, but she always used the day
before, probably as a result of rectification (BG 15, 661 n18, 662 n19). In YVP3 359, there is a chart
for the progression of GY’s chart from her supposed birth date of 16 Oct 1892, 8:25 a.m. As a check of
Robert Anthony Martinich’s 1982 dissertation “W. B. Yeats’s ‘Sleep and Dream Notebooks’” p. 25 shows,
what is concealed in the published YVP as “diagram: unlabelled horary signed GHL” (YVP3 21) is in fact
GY’s natal horoscope. Despite the publication of YVP, Martinich’s dissertation (Florida State University,
PhD, 1982; UMI 8416718) remains necessary to the scholar, as it prints diagrams omitted from YVP and
occasionally has the correct astrological signs where the published version does not. It should be noted
that GY puts her own ASC on 13Sco20 and Moon at 4Vir2. For the Moon to be at 4Vir2, the ASC
would have to be at 5Sco36. This just goes to show the limitations of chart construction done in the days
before computers. The rest of GY’s data as she saw it is as follows: MC 30Leo, Sun 23Lib35, Moon 4Vir2,
Mercury 29Lib17, Venus 9Vir12, Mars 17Aqu40, Saturn 5Lib57, Jupiter 19Ari23, Neptune 11Gem1,
Uranus 5Sco47 (Martinich, p. 25). I do not think the differences between this data and that generated by
my software are at all material, but give the data in case anyone thinks differently.
Lady Gregory writes in Seventy Years: Being the Autobiography of Lady Gregory, edited and with a
foreword by Colin Smythe (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1974), 1: “At the midnight hour between the
fourteenth and fifteenth of March 1852, the planet Jupiter, so astrologers say, being in mid heaven, a little
girl was born at Roxborough that is in Connacht.” Jupiter is actually conjunct the Ascendant.
Maud Gonne’s birth data has been taken from Elizabeth Heine’s article “Yeats and Maud Gonne:
Marriage and the Astrological Record, 1908–09,” 6–8 (21 December 1866, in Aldershot, in the afternoon
or evening, time “rectified” to 6.40 p.m. for WBY). Iseult Gonne gives her birth data to WBY in Letters to
W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound from Iseult Gonne: A girl that knew all Dante once, ed. A. Norman Jeffares, Anna
MacBride White and Christina Bridgewater (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 63 (6 August 1894,
in Paris, at 3 a.m.), whilst the date of Harry Tucker’s birth, but not the time, is given in John Harwood,
Olivia Shakespear and W. B. Yeats: After Long Silence (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 5 (“on 7 March
1866 at Wharton Grange, Framfield, a small village in the north-east of Sussex”). The precise time of birth
is needed to determine the position of the Ascendant, but the use to which Tucker’s data is put does not
necessitate knowing what his Ascendant was.
For a succinct explanation of why the Moon is part-ruler of Yeats’s chart, see Neil Mann’s web page on Alan
Leo and the Yeatses’ charts, http://www.YeatsVision.com/Leo.html.
Any astrological textbook will define these relationships, which are derived from divisions of the circle. As
a methodological preference, I generally eschew textbooks that the Yeatses could not have used, and would
recommend others to do the same, but these definitions are standard. Rory Ryan helpfully notes that the
astrological “opposition” is used by Yeats in A Vision with the same meaning, while “square” equates to a
discord (“The Opening and Closing of the Tictures,” YA17 [2007] 216). Generally speaking, Ryan uses all
sorts of modern astrology textbooks, thereby weakening his arguments. I cannot forbear to mention that,
when earlier in his piece Ryan says I have a different interpretation of the phrase “its Phase 8” than the one
he holds, I disagree with his disagreement. “Its Phase 8” means “a quarter of the way round the Wheel.” Any
other interpretation would necessitate the use of the phrase “its half of Phase 8,” and Yeats does not say this.
Of course, a planet may straddle signs in a horoscope, but my inclination is to believe that the Yeatses allocated more definitely than this. There is a problem with Maud Gonne’s allotment as well. In her chart,
there is no way of constructing hemispheres such that Mars and Venus can be in separate halves while the
Moon is grouped with Venus. One may perhaps interpret this impossibility as having something to do
with GY’s reluctance to examine anything to do with MG at all closely.
Shifting Sands
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
213
Their position was consistent with that of Alan Leo, as stated in the Glossary appended to Horary Astrology
(London: Modern Astrology, 1907), 126: “[Uranus] and [Neptune] have had no houses accorded them,
but are considered strong in [Aquarius] and [Pisces] respectively.” This book appears in the “1920s Catalogue of W. B. Yeats’s Library,” YA4 (1986) 285.
The need to find another male exemplar perhaps explains why Harold Tucker here makes one of his few
appearances in the automatic script. It seems, however, that WBY did not take GY’s hints as to how to
determine the nature of the planets. Later, in connection with a different schema, he will ask “How do you
get [Saturn] primary [Venus] anti from this figure in my case?” (YVP1 119). The short answer is that one
cannot, as I later show.
With the horoscopes in front of one, the other planets can easily be added, on the assumption that this is
the correct method. I list the allocations for WBY later.
Ryan, YA17 (2007) 343 suggests that “Fall” is named for the season. His citation from the Vision Papers seems
apt. However, Yeats states that Mathers used to talk of the “Fall of the Daimon” (YVP3 96), and I would hesitate to rule this out as a source, along with its theological associations. Moreover, in astrology, a planet when
it is in the sign opposite to that in which it has exaltation is said to be in its “fall.” Given that the opposite of
“Fall” in A Vision is “Head,” which one may equate to exaltation, this may be even more apposite.
Here, “stage” may be equated to the later “phase.” It should be noted that when the Yeatses wrote the
term “birth sign” did not mean what it now means in the age of newspaper horoscopes tailored to a mass
audience, viz. the Sun sign, but referred rather to the sign rising in the Ascendant. In order to know what
the Ascendant is, one must know the precise time of birth. Such a complication is obviously of no use if
a horoscope is to be general enough to interest someone who does not know what his or her Ascendant
is. Note that Saddlemyer writes, of Anne Yeats, that she was a “Gemini with her sun in Pisces” (BG 205),
although later she characterizes Michael Yeats as “a Leo with Virgo rising” (BG 278). The latter usage is
more consistent with current practice.
As a comment on the diagram it accompanies, this comment is mystifying: what does “compare” mean
here? It is a reasonable assumption that the Yeatses knew their phase numbers on November 24, which is
the date of this script. It is inconceivable that GY would say that Phase 17 is that phase where “The Ego
is in greatest capacity for artistic creation” (YVP1 116) without having first decided that this was WBY’s
phase. It is interesting that Yeats also notes how his Ascendant is in Aquarius, which is the next World Age.
This topic ties in with that of the Third and Fourth Daimons, which I find rather tiresome because of its
insistence on seeing the Yeats children as the new avatars, but I imagine that I or someone else will have to
bite the bullet on this in order to understand the meaning of much of the script.
The positions of these two wheels reverse what will later become the principle that “the greater circle is
always primary in relation to that which turns more quickly and within” (CW13 121; AVA 149). As the
phrase has it, “Lunar South in [sic: is] Solar East” (AVB 188).
Note that the central circle of the illustrated horoscope is not being referred to here, where Aries is at 12 o’clock.
In the original diagram reproduced in YVP the sign that looks like an upside-down Aries at roughly 8 o’clock
must in fact be a badly drawn Leo.
Editors’ note: The automatic script’s diagram of 25 November 1917 actually appears as part of the National Library of Ireland’s virtual Yeats exhibition (www/nli.ie/yeats/, under “Interactives,” “An Occult Marriage”; consulted March 2011).
Peter Kenny, Collection List No. 60: Occult Papers of W. B. Yeats held in the National Library of Ireland, see
www.nli.ie/pdfs/mm%20lists/yeatsoccult.pdf. Hereafter OPWBY in text.
For this, see YVP1 522. Brenda Maddox has used this particular script to “prove” that GY had used the
stars to catch WBY. See George’s Ghosts: A New Life of W. B. Yeats (London: Harper Collins, 1999), 95.
However, I read “Your March horary” as referring to WBY, so it was WBY who was looking to be married.
For more on the March horaries, see later.
I would like to thank Neil for his generosity in sharing his transcriptions with me, and for his encouragement in general. Needless to say, I wholeheartedly recommend his website, http://www.YeatsVision.com/,
to anyone who wants an introduction to A Vision. He touches on several of the topics discussed here. I
have had many private discussions with him about these and other matters, and we have had numerous
points of agreement and disagreement, but I think that what I have written here is my own. I should like
to thank him for preventing me from making several serious errors. Needless to say, any errors that remain
are entirely my responsibility.
The arbitrariness of the type of wheel that one needs to draw to get these attributions is surely indicative of
a problem with the general application of the idea. It is also probably indicative of the fact that the Yeatses,
214
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
while being competent astrologers, did not really think about what it all meant in terms of astronomy, in
other words, whether it was the ecliptic being divided into twelve, the earth’s equator or a celestial point’s
semi-arc: they most probably only ever learnt one method and stuck with it, without ever realizing that
there were other ways of drawing charts.
The same planets and allocation are given on a blank page in the script for 27 January 1918, following a
question about historical cycles. See YVP1 296 and 533 n252. It is apparent that the editors think these
allocations relate to historical cycles rather than to an individual’s horoscope.
Mercury is in fact in Phase 16 rather than in Phase 17, but is close enough to be imagined to be in Phase
17. Had the Ascendant been placed at the start of Phase 18, instead of at the center, then Mercury would
quite clearly have been in Phase 16.
Once again, I thank Neil Mann for assistance with NLI documents. The corresponding note in CW13 refers to a completely different diagram, NLI MS 36,253/12, which accompanies the script of January 1918
(YVP1 275), but the note at YVP1 531 n214 appears to refer to NLI MS 36,274/26, although Harper says
that diagram has “twenty-two numbers on the outside.” In fact, the NLI diagram includes three concentric
circles with the 22 numbering on the inside one, and the numbers I to X and the numbers 1 to 28 both on
the outside. The diagram also includes the cardinal points, the signs of the zodiac and the signs for Head,
Heart, Loins and Fall.
An entry of 4 June 1918 mentions using a similar method for horary astrology, which seeks to answer questions about current events: “in horaries on phases the person asking the question places the quesited [subject
of the question] at phases unless the question is about himself only—If judged as event put house representing event at phase—nature of event—question of VIIth house obviously as it was a question of marriage”
(YVP1 475).
See http://www.YeatsVision.com/Lunation.html.
See Phases of the Moon: A Guide to Evolving Human Nature by Marilyn Busteed, Richard Tiffany and
Dorothy Wergin (Berkeley and London: Shambhala, 1974), revised edition by Busteed and Wergin only
(Tempe, AZ: American Federation of Astrologers, 1981). I simplify somewhat here. Busteed et al. have two
methods of determining phases, only one of which uses equal phase division. In Moon Phases: A Symbolic
Key (West Chester, PA; Whitford Press, 1988) Martin Goldsmith prefers what Busteed et al. call the solar
method, which allocates 30 degrees to each of Phases 1, 8, 15 and 22 and ten degrees to all the other
phases. This method derives from those diagrams in A Vision where Yeats gives greater emphasis to the four
phases of crisis than to the other phases. They have thus taken what was a visual symbolism to be literal
fact. David T. Wilkinson also had a website devoted to Moon Phases up until about 2003, but only a few
of his pages survive on the Internet archive, http://web.archive.org. However, Neil Mann lists a published
book in his bibliography, which I have not seen: Your Inner Phase (private [MyPub.com], 1997). The
distance between Yeats’s Sun and Moon is 237 degrees, which gives Phase 19 on an equal-phased wheel.
Stuart Hirschberg long ago attempted to demonstrate that such a calculation would give Yeats’s phase as
Phase 17, although his calculations appear to be based on a misreading of Raphael’s Ephemeris (At the
Top of the Tower: Yeats’s Poetry Explored through “A Vision” [Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitäts Verlag,
1979], 145). Of course, the learned Dr Sturm had tried this method even earlier, and finding it did not
work (LTWBY2 381), resorted to looking at the distance between Sun and Moon in the prenatal epoch
(LTWBY2 383), only to be told by Yeats that he was wasting his time (FPS 88). See the summary by Neil
Mann at http://www.YeatsVision.com/Astrology.html.
That is, if we are to relate to the Opening of the Tinctures the lines which state “IM Past (a closing) | CM
Present (devision),” YVP3 257 and YVP2 233. See also YVP3 272, where WBY says that “the resemblance
between p[hase]25 & description in CM IM (1) card of womans second CM ([Venus] [Saturn]) suggests
the following, 11–12 to 18–19 = mans 1 CM & 25–26 to 4–5 woman 2 CM.” The relevant part of the
description of the woman’s second CM in the “CM IM (1)” card reads as follows: “In [woman’s] second
CM man is always object of pity ‘isolation of the helpless’ is real pity.…[R]emember identification by
isolation of the helpless with p25” (YVP3 273).
My discussion of the dates of the CMs ands IMs is largely dependent on the assistance given by Elizabeth Heine to Ann Saddlemyer, as utilized in Becoming George. For general discussions of CMs and IMs,
one may consult MYV, Margaret Mills Harper, Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual; and Literary Collaboration
of George and W. B. Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), and Janis Tedesco Haswell, Pressed
Against Divinity: W. B. Yeats’s Feminine Masks (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997).
Barbara J. Frieling’s extended discussion in “The ‘Moments of Crisis’ in Yeats’s Vision Papers,” YAACTS10
(1992) 281–95, has by no means been superseded.
Shifting Sands
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
215
Ellmann was amongst the first to recognize the importance of the Moments. Although he was under
the misapprehension that WBY was just beginning to work out the conception in 1938, his referencing of
WBY’s letter to Ethel Mannin of 9 October 1938 is important; see Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats
(New York: Macmillan, 1954), 213–14, and L 916–17. One may also note the use of “moment” in the
“Seven Propositions,” quoted by Ellmann on p. 236. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the “Seven Propositions” were originally drafted in 1929. See also Neil Mann’s http://www.YeatsVision.com/7Propositions.html
for the different iterations of the Seven Propositions.
See http://www.YeatsVision.com/Terminology.html.
Note that Harper gives “sight” in MYV2 234. In YVP2 331, “First sight” is allocated first to October
1910, and then to April 1909, causing Harper et al. some puzzlement, and it is the latter date that stuck.
Saddlemyer points out that GY had her traditional “coming out” in October 1910 (BG 29), so that would
qualify as a “first” of some description.
As for “Nov finish,” GY’s father died on 18 November that year, and on that day Venus and Neptune were
in opposition. See BG 43. See also YVP2 213 and BG 664 n37 for “glass door.”
This is also the script where GY changes her appellation from “Medium” to “Interpreter.” It is, significantly
enough, the first script after the birth of Anne Yeats (YVP2 200), and various commentators have made much
of the change of title, but both questioner and answerer used the term “medium” indifferently in later scripts
as well. Cynics may choose to regard the introduction of the Moments of Crisis as GY’s almost completely
successful tactic to distract WBY from the failure of the communicators to predict the sex of the Yeatses’ first
child. Nevertheless, as I go on to show, the concept remains valid in itself
If “sterium” is an accurate transcription, I suggest that the Yeatses misremembered “stellium” via confusion
with asterism [Editors’ note: the microfilm of the script supports the transcription]. Modern astrologers
have tended to see an Anglo-American split in the usage of “stellium” and its synonym “satellitium,” with
“stellium” being favored in the United States. “Stellium” is however the usage given in James Wilson’s
original A Complete Dictionary of Astrology (London: William Hughes, 1819), which the Yeatses owned
(WBGYL 2299; YL 2284). I suspect it is their source, as it is also for the sole citation in the OED under
“stellium”: “Stellium, a crowd of planets in an angle.…So far as my observation extends, a stellium of 4 or
5 planets in any part of the radix always produces in the course of the native’s existence some tremendous
catastrophe” (380) (I am grateful to Neil Mann for checking the 1819 edition for me). For the March
horaries, which differ from natal charts in any case, although horary astrology treats specific moments as
births, GY seemed to think the patterning “remarkable,” and did not comment on possible disaster. The
horaries of 18 March 1917 and 20 March 1917 are discussed in BG 87, 97, 207–8.
I confess I do not understand which horary Heine means when she says, of “George and Willy’s union”
that it is “the first horary, Moon conjunct Saturn” (BG 207), but the two March horaries make sense with
the comments which follow in Saddlemyer about the two children.
The horary of 29 July 1913 at 2.30 p.m. has Venus and Saturn conjunct GY’s natal Neptune, which might
be considered auspicious as it could be interpreted to signify GY’s psychic abilities, but the other dates do
not seem to have any significant transits. As Saddlemyer notes, there is a problem with the date “17th or
22 Nov 1915 [Mars] [conjunct] [Venus] 2.15 p.m. Sunday,” as neither of these dates falls on Sunday in
that year (BG 80). However, the 22nd is a Sunday in 1914, so it is probable that a transcription error by
the Yeatses was involved, as significant events occurred in November in both years. Mars and Venus were
conjunct on 22 November 1914.
I am unsure if the date “July end 1916” which follows is meant to be linked to CMs or IMs. Harper et al.
mistakenly link the date to Maud Gonne, whereas VNB2 links that date to Phase 14, Iseult Gonne’s phase
(YVP3 193). Moon and Venus are conjunct in late July 1916, but the list in VNB2 seems to imply that the
date corresponds to an IM (YVP3 193). If WBY’s second CM is the nativity of his first child, then Venus
and Mars is correct, rather than Sun, Moon and Mars.
I should add here that WBY himself was not always sure of his own dates. It is only astrologers, inveterate
diarists and those seeking alibis who remember precise dates, and WBY was not an astrologer at all times,
unlike his wife, and only a fitful diarist. Nor is it always possible for an astrologer who has memorialized an
event with a horary to lay hands on the record at a given moment. As an interesting example of hostile crossexamination, one may note that WBY queries the use of 11 degrees separation in what GY claimed was a
conjunction (YVP2 530).
Harper et al. suggest that the OM may be “[an]other BV Moment,” YVP2 559 n29, referencing the automatic script of 22 December 1919 (YVP2 521). Further investigation of the geometry in CF O6 may
confirm this suggestion (YVP3 349). Note that there is a misprint in Harper’s Index for “OM” (YVP2
216
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
593), where 419–21 should read 519–21. The precise meaning of “OM” remains a mystery. Like Barbara
Frieling, I had concluded that it most probably meant “Objective Moment,” but Frieling offers several reasons in support of what, for me, was only a hunch. See “The ‘Moments of Crisis’ in Yeats’s Vision Papers,”
291–92. I might add that the lack of explanation of the term may intentionally add mystery to it, and that
it has overtones of “ominous” and of the Sanskrit “OM,” which obliterates all distinction.
38. Cf. BG 101, 691 n193, 691 n194, and Frieling, “The ‘Moments of Crisis’ in Yeats’s Vision Papers,” 290–91.
39. Bernadette Brady, Astrology: A Place in Chaos (Bournemouth: The Wessex Astrologer, 2006), quotation
from p. 160. Brady herself warns against drawing simplistic parallels in order to give oneself the illusion of
understanding. The proof of the parallels are in what one can make of them
40. The Complete Writings of William Blake with Variant Readings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 151.
41. Ioan P. Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (San
Francisco: Harper Collins, 1992). See also Couliano’s Out of This World: Otherworldly Journeys from Gilgamesh to Albert Einstein (Berkeley and London: Shambhala, 1991). Couliano nowhere mentions Whitehead, but his analogies with the three-dimensional spoon dipping into two-dimensional Flatland remind
me irresistibly of Whitehead’s theory of ingression. For Couliano, the Flatlanders cannot grasp the full
spoon, just as we cannot grasp a fully thought-out system of thought, but must piece it together from the
two-dimensional slices that unfold in time, or perhaps one should say, one must piece it together from the
slices that create time in their unfolding. For WBY, the particulars are likewise the work of the Thirteenth
Cone. As he says in the Seven Propositions: “The acts and nature of a Spirit during any one life are a section
or abstraction of reality and are unhappy because incomplete. They are a gyre or part of a gyre, whereas
reality is a sphere” (Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats, 237).
“METAPHORS FOR POETRY”: CONCERNING THE POEMS
OF A VISION AND CERTAIN PLAYS FOR DANCERS
by Wayne K. Chapman
I
L
ess than four years after the elaborately conceited A Vision A was published, subtitled An Explanation of Life founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka (to acknowledge sources of the poet’s
invention), Yeats’s modus operandi was revealed in the beautifully written A Packet for Ezra
Pound (Cuala Press, 1929; Wade 163), in the section entitled “Introduction to ‘The Great
Wheel.’” Almost as soon as A Vision A had been committed irretrievably to the hands of its
publisher, T. Werner Laurie, Yeats had begun rewriting it. As an apologia written by one
contemporary poet to another, A Packet for Ezra Pound eventually accompanied the 1931
Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends: An Extract from a Record Made by His Pupils
(Wade 167; without the dance play The Resurrection) to become the formal entry way into
the standard, remade, and amplified interior of A Vision B. The story of A Vision in the
making, both A and B versions, provides multiple contexts for this study of the function
of poetry in the service of those versions, as well as of poems and plays in verse coincident
with the writing and rewriting of this difficult book.
Of course, the revelation of A Packet and A Vision B is that Mrs. Yeats and supposed
spirit guides collaborated with the poet to develop a symbolic body of thought from a
mode of “expression that unites the sleeping and waking mind” (AVB 23), and to create
“stylistic arrangements of experience” analogous to abstract modern art (AVB 25). The
“whole system,” he claimed, was “the creation of my wife’s Daimon and of mine” (AVB
22), based on an assumption that “all the gains of man come from conflict with the opposite of his true being” (AVB 13). He reported that the instructors had said (without a
verbatim equivalent in the automatic script): “we have come to give you metaphors for
poetry” (AVB 8). Thanks to George Mills Harper’s The Making of Yeats’s “A Vision,” one is
spared repeating much of his well-known account, particularly as a more recent study by
Margaret Mills Harper is excerpted and available elsewhere in this anthology.1 Rather, the
work undertaken here builds on my own research on the Yeatses as a collaborating couple
engaged to promote the poetry written by one of them. Naturally enough, that research
has occasionally involved the poems printed entirely, or in part, in A Vision A, A Vision
B, or both, as well as the half-dozen outriders in experimental theater, 1917–1924, that
dramatized themes in the manner of the Noh but also issues raised in philosophical investigations conducted by the duo. Aimed primarily at Yeats’s creative writing, the upshot of
late has been a book entitled Yeats’s Poetry in the Making: “Sing Whatever Is Well Made,”2
to which I refer the reader for contexts, materials, and lines of inquiry not necessarily
considered here.
To begin, one must consider the 1919 Macmillan edition of The Wild Swans at
Coole, chronologically the vessel that might have gathered all of Yeats’s uncollected po-
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etry between Macmillan’s 31 May 1916 agreement with the poet for a first edition of
Responsibilities and Other Poems (London, 10 October 1916)3 and their 26 September
1918 formal agreement for The Wild Swans at Coole, with subsequent associated correspondence, up to 3 December 1918, on the question of rights to poems first published
in English and American journals.4 The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) was an artistic success that dramatized the amelioration of several opposed or tangent currents in Yeats’s
life. At least three bodies of work coalesced in this book. One is the poetry of a dejected,
middle-aged man, as formulated in the twenty-three poems reprinted from The Wild
Swans at Coole (Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1917), which Ronald Schuchard has called
Yeats’s “Prufrock volume.”5 Opposed to this is the second, a spousal love poetry first
issued as Nine Poems (privately printed by Clement Shorter, 1918). Related to these
poems and to experiments in automatic writing begun by Mrs. Yeats in October 1917,
a third type of verse developed from subjects investigated in philosophical antecedents
such as Per Amica Silentia Lunae (Macmillan, 1918). For reasons of diplomacy, the wars
in Ireland are an absence even though the poet had not been silent and even though
the European war, wryly acknowledged as a statesman’s affair in the epigram “On being asked for a War Poem” (written in February 1915), shattered the calm reflection of
the title poem with insertion of the Robert Gregory elegies and dramatic monologue
of 1918, written in a period of relative peace during a sometimes broken, three-year
sojourn outside Ireland, in Sussex, Oxford, and America. In contrast to the fertility of
husband and wife in the marketing of manuscripts and literary projects to support the
family they had begun during that same sojourn, regret and anguish presided over the
poems written in 1915 about Maud Gonne. In spite of melding, amplifying, and cooking the Cuala book until it became, as a whole, an object of art fully better than any
of its constituents, the poems “His Phoenix,” “A Deep-Sworn Vow,” “Broken Dreams,”
and “Presences” exhibit his willingness to be believed still troubled by the death of his
love for her and by his bad luck with Iseult Gonne, to whom he had proposed marriage
in 1916 and 1917.
The relevance of such facts to the making of The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) has
been demonstrated in Stephen Parrish’s edition of the manuscripts in the Cornell Yeats
series.6 Much of the context relates to several poems that Yeats deferred to his next book,
Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1921), anticipating a return
to public life in Ireland with the formation of the Free State. A synthesis of different
styles and politics was achieved in assembling five rebellion poems with ten lyrics in
1921—including several contributions to the war between the sexes—seemingly to forge
a link with ensuing poems of conflict in The Tower and later volumes of poetry. The
return to public life was soon marked in London by Macmillan’s publication of Later
Poems (1922), which, with the latest T. Fisher Unwin edition of Poems, presented to
the general public the most complete and textually up-to-date compendium of Yeats’s
lyric poetry then available.7 As Parrish observes, “By pairing ‘The Phases of the Moon’
with ‘The Double Vision of Michael Robartes’ at the close of [The Wild Swans at Coole
(1919)], Yeats clearly intended to signal his turn away from the prevailing mode of the
1917 [Cuala] volume and his work from his marriage onward” (xxxv). As I have dealt
elsewhere with the radical displacement of the chronology of poems in this transitional
period as well as the reasons for it, it is now my objective to address the poetry of A Vision
“Metaphors for Poetry”
219
along the following bifurcated track suggested to me by the two pivotal poems of 1918
as cited by Parrish.8
II
A few months into his marriage and given the occasion of the death of Major Robert
Gregory in Italy, Yeats turned in his reading to Spenser, Virgil, and Theocritus to determine how best, while making an elegy, to impose upon pastoral dialogue the exposition
of an occult tableau. Spenser’s well-known Neo-Platonic prolixity, as Yeats noticed particularly in The Faerie Queene’s Garden of Adonis and in the geometric riddle of stanza
II.ix.22, established precedent for Yeats’s application of Platonic theology derived from
Thomas Taylor and Henry More.9 The automatic script of early 1918 was turned into
literary capital after the fashion of Spenser’s tribute to Sir Philip Sidney (see L 646–48
and 650).10 By June, apparently after a period in which Mrs. Yeats had been away, such
efforts had produced a fictional prose dialogue with a connection in manuscript to the
poem “The Phases of the Moon” (MYV2 30 and 421n).11 The poem, in its prose context, however, seems formally to be inspired more directly by the example of Walter Savage Landor than by Plato. (Yeats then owned copies of The Dialogues and The Republic
but does not seem really to have encountered the Greco-Roman Platonists until later.12)
“The Phases of the Moon” acknowledges, also, a few honest debts of Yeats’s past. The
clustering of Milton, Shelley, Palmer, Blake, and Pater in orbit around a didactic corpus
(VP 373–77, ll. 31–123; CW1 165–68) is characteristic of the poet’s attempt to lend
reality to the abstractions of psychic research in order to make them intelligible.13 In
embryonic state, the poem and prose dialogue of which it was part promised “simple”
wisdom which could not have fully anticipated, as a prolusion, the philosophical toil
of the next two decades. And like “Ego Dominus Tuus”—a dialogue completed late in
1915, affixed as a proem to the philosophical reflections of Per Amica Silentia Lunae
in 1918, and set before the later poem in The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) but for the
intervening “A Prayer on going into my House”—“The Phases of the Moon” (dated
variously “1918” and “Ballylee 1919 Summer” by George Yeats; YPM 237) found its
place at the head of Book I of A Vision A (as “The Wheel and the Phases of the Moon”).
Much later, it served as a prelude to the revised first book of A Vision B, following the
fictional “Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends” from 1931.
Yeats’s conception of the poem changed radically in the course of its writing,
although its scene was always pastoral and possibly always situated at Thoor Ballylee.
The customary view of the poem’s ancestry shifted, however, as unpublished evidence
came to light, a few years ago, among the manuscripts of “The Phases of the Moon”
at the National Library of Ireland—namely in two sheets, or three pages of draft, in
NLI 13,587(21). Augmented with fragments elsewhere in collections (NLI 36,265[2],
1r and 1v, in the Occult Papers of W. B. Yeats), a very different initial mode of exposition is apparent. Leaves 13 and 14, the last in NLI 13,587(21), were evidently kept
because they bear the introductory and concluding parts of the frame Yeats hung
around the poem’s core, which ran from the bottom of page “2” to page “7” in this
version. The first speech of the early version renders imagery parallel to that which was
applied to Fand and the Sidhe in The Only Jealousy of Emer—seductresses who “drop
220
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
their hair upon” men, “Lap them in cloudy hair or kiss their lips” (VPl 549, ll. 214a
and 214; CW2 324), in order to steal men’s souls. References to wind, birds, and
children seemingly call to mind the people of Danu and the children of Lir, as well as
Yeats’s imaginative use of the birds of Aengus’s kisses and the transformation of lovers
in the narrative poem “Baile and Aillinn” (1903). Aengus’s abrupt disappearance at
the conclusion of the second fragment has precedent in Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of
Muirthemne, in the tale “The Only Jealousy of Emer.” Essentially narrative in conception, the surviving early fragments of “The Phases of the Moon” show their visionary
speaker, the Master of Love, Aengus (identified by name in leaf 14r), to be disguised
much as he had been in Yeats’s other poem: that is, a “crude ragged man” here, as elsewhere “an old man” with “ragged long grass-coloured hair,” “that old gaunt crafty one”
(VP 190, ll. 25–26 and 193, l. 100; CW1 404 & 406). It is impossible to know how
the dialogic between Aengus and the author’s surrogate, Cuchulain, was carried out in
full. However, what remains of the draft reflects Yeats’s attempt to bring animation to
his first poem about “the system,” in a way anticipating such later works as “Cuchulain
Comforted.” A complete transcription of the extant fragments of early draft are given
in YPM, pp. 131–35, which may be compared with that of Parrish, who reproduces
photographic facsimiles.
So the first revelation the manuscripts have in store for us is that the initial forebears of “The Phases of the Moon” were Yeats’s own early poems “The Harp of Aengus”
(“young Aengus in his tower of glass”: VP 219, l. 2; CW1 415) and “Under the Moon”
(“Land-of-the-tower, where Aengus has thrown the gates apart”: VP 209, l. 8; CW1 80).
Instead of a Robartes-Aherne dialogue, we find an Aengus-Cuchulain arbitrated vision,
which dissolves supernaturally with the apparent metamorphosis of the Irish god of
love and poetry (a “crude ragged man” at Cuchulain’s side) into an object which, at the
end, “Slid slowly down, & dropped into the stream.” Indeed, “a rat or water-hen…or
an otter” in “The Phases of the Moon,” lines 8–9 (VP 372; CW1 164), recalls by suggestion “Niamh and Laban and Fand, who could change to an otter or fawn” in “Under
the Moon,” line 12. Although the draft ends where the poem begins, Yeats’s “system,”
as delivered in lines 31–123 of “The Phases of the Moon,” seems already in place. The
mystical Robartes had only to take possession of it from Aengus. Hence, the shift from
Aengus-Cuchulain to Robartes-Aherne transferred ostensible authority for the visionary content of the poem from suprahuman sources such as the Tuatha De Danaan to a
mediator (or even medium) in keeping with actual circumstances. This shift occurred
with Yeats’s attempt to transplant the verse exposition of the first draft into two of the
approximately 40-page prose dialogues mentioned above. Conjecturally, this surgical
procedure may have been accomplished by Yeats actually lifting the numbered pages
of the Aengus/Cuchulain version from the early draft of The Only Jealousy of Emer in
NLI 8774(14), where paper types match and lacunae are roughly correspondent. The
change also antedates the revision of the poem, in two stages (around June 1918), based
on an English, especially Miltonic, literary venue and a Platonic doctrine that remained
undetected for a long time in the finished poem.
In revision, the narrative preface of lines 1–7 (set in italic in the next stage) began to take shape around the “rocks & briars,” “uneven road,” and “late scarce risen
dwindling crescent” of the moon—all very much in tune with the scene at the Yeats
“Metaphors for Poetry”
221
tower, but also (and as frequently recognized) in keeping with Samuel Palmer’s engraving “The Lonely Tower” as reproduced in The Shorter Poems of John Milton (London:
Seeley, 1889)14 as an illustration of “Il Penseroso,” lines 85–7 (quoted opposite the
picture), including “two shepherds” who “speak together of the mysterious light above
them.” Giving this scene the local accent of Gort, County Galway, Yeats made Aherne
and Robartes “old men” in “conne mara [sic] cloth worn out of shape.” After the scene
is set in a few lines in NLI 13,587(21), 2r and 2v, the beginning of their talk arises from
the closing scene of the Aengus-Cuchulain draft and introduces most of the analogues
recognizable in VP lines 8–30, the lines of dialogue up to Robartes’s singing, or reciting, the song of his Master.
Yeats himself presides over this creation as in the finished poem. Iconographically,
too, his tower is the same one as Milton imagined (or in Yeats’s words, “saw through the
night”) with his midnight lamp set
…in some high lonely Tow’r
Where I may oft outwatch the Bear,
With thrice great Hermes, or unsphere
The spirit of Plato to unfold
What Worlds, or what vast Regions hold
The immortal mind that hath forsook
Her mansion in this fleshly nook:
And of those Daemons that are found
In fire, air, flood, or underground,
Whose power hath a true consent
With Planet, or with Element. (“Il Penseroso,” ll. 86–96)15
By second draft, the person of Milton had been displaced by the persona of his poem.
After some difficulty with Shelley and Athene (the latter to shift to line 45: VP 374; CW1
165),16 Yeats delivered the lines
From the far tower where Milton’s Platonist
Sat late, or Shelley’s visionary prince:
The lonely light that Samuel Palmer engraved…. (VP 373, ll. 15-17; CW1 165)
Subsequently, the poet discarded Milton’s oily lamp for the self-consuming taper of
Donne’s “The Canonization,” l. 21, as a sheet of manuscript from “The Living Beauty”
joined the poem then in progress, producing “candle-light” in line 14.17 This incident
recalls two of Yeats’s courtships of 1917 and the equally relevant fact that the designated light is beaming from his bedroom (see, for example, “Climb up the narrow
winding stair to bed”: VP 324, l. 5; CW1 132). After a few verses, Yeats permitted
his creations to ridicule the “elaborate style / He had learnt from Pater,” suggestive of
his own marginalia in Plato and Platonism.18 But even before that, at the end of the
first-draft exchange quoted above, the poet had left an important clue to the poem’s
meaning—a clue just as impressive as are the obvious references to his iconographic
models. Unfortunately, readers have tended to make do with retrograde interpreta-
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
tions of the poem based on A Vision since this clue, almost a private allusion, is both
misleading and obscure.
We should be mindful of possible correspondences with the Tarot Hermit and Tower,
as Raine is,19 and suspect links with the “Masters” of MacGregor Mathers, the “Instructors” (later the “singing masters”) of Yeats, and the “Eternals” of Blake (“I dare not pretend
to be any other than the Secretary[;] the Authors are in Eternity”20). Only recently21 have
scholars commented on Aherne’s peculiar use of quotation in line 30, despite its crucial
placement before the important poem-within-the-poem:
Aherne. Sing me the changes of the moon once more;
True song, though speech: “mine author sung it me.”
Warwick Gould and Stan Smith have argued that the phrase approximates Chaucer’s
“For as myn auctor seyde, so seye I” (Troilus and Criseyde II.18), following the valid assumption that in conceiving the heart of the poem Yeats remembered the Franklin’s use
of a hearsay book of “magik naturel” which “spak muchel of the operaciouns, / Touchinge the eighte and twenty mansiouns / That longen to the mone, and swich folye”
(Canterbury Tales, F. 1125ff.).22 This is on a plausible track, pursuing a lead investigated
by the Yeatses on Chaucer’s A Treatise on the Astrolabe. After copying out ll. 1117–34
(and double-scoring 1129–34) of the Franklin’s Tale in long-hand from the Skeat edition,
George Yeats followed up her copying (in NLI 36,274/29) with inscriptions glossing the
passage with much of the editor’s note, itself drawn, almost verbatim, from his preface
to the Astrolabe:
The twenty-eight “moon-stations” of the Arabs are given in Ideler’s Untersuchungen über die Bedeutung der Sternnamen, p. 287. He gives the Arabic
names, the stars that help to fix their positions, &c. See also Mr Brae’s edition
of the Astrolabe, p. 89. For the influence of the moon in these mansions, we
must look elsewhere, viz. in lib. i. cap. 11, and lib. iv. cap. 18, of the Epitome
Astrologiae of Johannes Hispalensis. Suffice it to say that there are 12 temperate mansions, 6 dry ones, and 10 moist ones. (Skeat, Works of Geoffrey Chaucer,
5:392)
Skeat also notes that the “number 28 corresponds with the number of days in a lunation”
(ibid.). George’s copying introduces a number of variants unique to her, as one confirms
when further comparing her version of the editor’s note with Skeat’s preface to A Treatise
on The Astrolabe addressed to his son Lowys (London: Oxford University Press for the Early
English Text Society, 1872), lix.
As an instrument of old used to find the altitude of a star and other astral bodies,
the forerunner of the sextant, the complex astrolabe somewhat resembles the far simpler
Great Wheel the Yeatses imagined together and Edmund Dulac drew for A Vision. One
of Skeat’s illustrations will serve to show the concentric (though off-center) belt of the
heavens labeled with the names of the zodiac (cf. Yeats’s use of only the cardinal signs:
Aries, Cancer, Libra, and Capricorn), within a raised border, in this case resembling a
time-serpent or dragon
“Metaphors for Poetry”
223
From Skeat’s 1872 Early English Text Society edition of Chaucer’s A Treatise on the Astrolabe addressed to his son Lowys, Figure 9 (of 19); also reproduced in The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. 3, Plates IV, Figure 9 (3:[lxxxvii]).
However, in fact, the quotation in “The Phases of the Moon” that Yeats, uncharacteristically for a draft, put between quotation marks, implying that Robartes’s verse discourse ought to be regarded as song, derived from John Milton’s tractate The Doctrine and
Discipline of Divorce (1644 edition), I.vi: “The Fourth Reason of this Law, that God regards
Love and Peace in the family, more then a compulsive performance of mariage.…” Milton’s
“author,” though, (unlike Chaucer’s) is Plato; and his song is a dialectic of love with direct
appeal to Yeats’s theory of the self and anti-self:23
Love, if he be not twin-born, yet hath a brother wondrous like him, call’d Anteros: whom while he seeks all about, his chance is to meet with many fals and
faining Desires that wander singly up and down in his likenes.…But after a
while, as his manner is, when soaring up into the high Towr of his Apogaeum,
above the shadow of the earth, he darts out the direct rayes of his then most
piercing eyesight upon the impostures, and trim disguises that were us’d with
him, and discerns that this is not his genuin brother, as he imagin’d, he has no
longer the power to hold fellowship with such a personated mate. For strait his
arrows loose their golden heads, and shed their purple feathers, his silk’n breades
untwine, and slip their knots and that original and firie vertue giv’n him by Fate,
all on a sudden goes out and leaves him undeifi’d, and despoil’d of all his force:
till finding Anteros at last, he kindles and repairs the almost faded ammunition
of his Deity by the reflection of a coequal and homogeneal fire. Thus mine author
sung it to me.… (emphasis added at close)
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
The “Towr of [Love’s] Apogaeum” seems to be one attraction the passage held for Yeats,
and he would not have found it in the Phaedrus he possessed, if indeed Phaedrus was
one of the “two or three…principal Platonic Dialogues” he said that he had read by then
(AVB 12).24 The poem’s presiding symbol is the tower; moreover, in first draft, Love (or
Aengus in be-towered Ireland) had direct charge of the poem’s vision and song. However,
more important, the Platonic doctrine Milton presented—as a parable on “matrimonial
love”—suited perfectly Yeats’s second ingenious conception of the poem. This conception,
in deference to the Miltonic modification of Plato’s metaphor of the charioteer and two
steeds, placed the soul in a corporeal tower before two travelers, who seem imaginative
projections of the poet’s primary and antithetical selves, rather as we suppose the speakers
Hic and Ille of “Ego Dominus Tuus.” In fact, Yeats had devised a conceit similar to the
one he had once tried to visualize for Spenser’s House of Alma.25 Yet in this case, Milton’s
presentation of “twin-born” Eros and Anteros, opposites who seek reunion in the “homogeneal fire” of their first state, lent the poem a philosophical dynamic Yeats soon attributed
to the fictitious authority of the Speculum Angelorum et Hominum (1594) by “Giraldus.”26
Probably Yeats did consult his Phaedrus, in 1914, when interpreting the auguries
of Lady Lyttelton and W. T. Horton. Their respectively spiritualistic and mystical appropriation of the myth of Phaeton, connected with proceedings involving Miss Georgie
Hyde-Lees and the poet’s discourse with his sixteenth-century “daimon,” influenced almost from inception the collaborative script that gave rise to A Vision.27 Horton’s “strange
adventures” in “Platonic love” with Amy Audrey Locke—commemorated in the dedication and lyric tailpiece of that book (CW13 liii and 208, ll. 22–23; AVA x and 253 [VP
471; CW1 232])—seems pertinent in light of George Yeats’s desire to be recognized as
the “symbol” of her husband’s anti-self, or the instrument by which he came to find his
“Mask.”28 That she succeeded is implicit in his severely elliptical use of Milton’s treatise.
The passage in question affirms that “Love in mariage cannot live nor subsist, unlesse it
be mutual” (i.e., that dual entities such as Eros and Anteros might be joined in a way that
alters the meaning of Plato’s original); but in the next breath, shifting to an authority that
Yeats himself adopted in several philosophical poems on sexual love and the “Beatific Vision” (see CW13 lv; AVA xii), Milton makes a celebration of wedlock in the names of another authority (as “saith Salomon in Ecclesiastes”): “If Salomons advice be not overfrolick,
Live joyfully, saith he, with the wife whom thou lovest, all thy dayes, for that is thy portion.”29
Yet, standing by itself (as Yeats perhaps encountered it), the whole splendid passage seems
less a defense of divorce than a way of envisioning ideal marriage. Presumably George
Yeats caught the allusion, in spite of its obscurity for the rest of us, though the poet would
not have expected his public to recognize such slight personal touches.
In line with Chaucer, Milton used the word “author” when he really meant his own
poetic insight.30 Smith argues that “Mine author” in Yeats’s poem is the poet himself,
whose imaginative reconstruction of the quintessential “narrative paradigm” from multiple “debased variants” must characterize his performance both as a storyteller and perpetuator of Platonic tradition.31 Yeats’s use elsewhere of the tag “mine author sung it
me” (in CW4 245; E&I 340 and, slightly altered, in LDW 26) seems to confirm such
reasoning.32 In a sense, his shadow truths are “without father”; his texts “impostures”; his
spokesmen the mere issue of poetic license. Hence, the Yeatsian tower poet—as “Milton’s
Platonist”—draws ridicule from figments of his imagination for aspiring to wisdom “that
“Metaphors for Poetry”
225
he will never find.” Such overt self-ridicule in the poem is foregrounded in A Vision B by
the irascible character John Aherne, brother of Owen, in a long letter addressed “Dear
Mr. Yeats” (53–5).
An irony, of course, is that as “Milton’s Platonist,” the author W. B. Yeats has already
achieved sufficient transcendence over such self-critics to write the poem and attain greater knowledge than it publishes beneath the window of his “lonely tower.” Solitude can
be ameliorated and spiritual growth achieved, as the legend of Eros-Anteros teaches, with
reconciliation of the divided self. Dialogues, as Yeats read in Plato and Platonism (possibly
the reason Pater appears in this poem), move intelligence up the ladder of the dialectical
process. In Yeats’s first draft, Aengus observes that man “longs / To come into possession
of himself.” The dialogue’s movement, or processus, a term used by Pater (after Arnold, as
Yeats understood), serves just such a purpose since it involves “that dynamic, or essential,
dialogue of the mind with itself.”33 Hence Pater helped define a literary genre for Yeats, it
would seem, if Milton suggested a philosophical basis for its development: “the essence of
that method, of ‘dialectic’ in all its forms, as its very name denotes, is dialogue, the habit
of seeking truth by means of question and answer, primarily with one’s self.”34
The processus of Robartes’s “song” in “The Phases of the Moon” therefore advances by
a succession of aphoristic variations on the Goatherd’s song in the elegy “Shepherd and
Goatherd” (VP 342–43, ll. 95–110; CW1 145). This advance by retrograde progression
of the soul from grave to cradle (here in twenty-eight “embodiments”) is the song’s main
theme, recalling Thomas Taylor’s Orphic theology as well as Spenser’s Neo-Platonic mysticism in the Garden of Adonis section of The Faerie Queene:
[The souls are] sent into the chaungeful world agayne,
Till thither they retourn where first they grew:
So, like a wheele, around they ronne from old to new. (qtd. in Myth 363; cf. CW5 30)
In “The Phases of the Moon,” Robartes’s phrase “When all the dough has been so kneaded
up / That it can take what form cook Nature fancies” (VP 377, ll. 114–15; CW1 168)
expresses Henry More’s idea of the plastic power of the individual and world souls (see
CW5 20–22; Myth 348–52)35 and calls to mind Eros’s supposed ability to “fashion forms
in which a divine soul could dwell” (Myth 284)—grist for later milling in this essay as well
as a by-product of Per Amica Silentia Lunae.
III
The only other poem first collected in The Wild Swans of Coole (1919) and put to later use
in A Vision A and A Vision B is “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes,” though other
lyrics of 1918 are kindred. For instance, “The Saint and the Hunchback” foreshadows
Yeats’s depiction of Phases 26 and 27 on the Wheel of Incarnation, and “A Prayer on Going into My House,” “Two Songs of a Fool,” and “Another Song of a Fool” all celebrate
the empathy of husband (dreamer, fool, scholar) and wife (dream-mate, speckled cat, butterfly) as succeeded by such delightful contemporary poems about their mystical exploits
as “Solomon and the Witch,” “An Image from a Past Life,” and the Complementary Dream
lyric “Towards Break of Day” from Michael Robartes and the Dancer. However, unlike
226
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
“The Phases of the Moon,” which uses verse to introduce figuratively the philosophical
matter to follow it in plain prose, “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes” is quoted
variously, briefly, and always embedded in texts that serve as glosses to help explain the
meaning of its unusual imagery, particularly that of juxtaposed Sphinx and Buddha reconciled by the girl dancing between them, “outdanc[ing] thought,” a state of “Mind moved
yet seem[ing] to stop / As ’twere a spinning-top” (VP 384 ll. 43–44; CW1 173), completing for the reader a geometrical figure summoned to the mind’s eye as in the poet’s vision.
The explanation given for this in A Vision A:
In the Beatitude and in the states that immediately follow, the man is subject
to his Daimon only, and there is no alternation of sleeping and waking. In the
Beatitude communication with the living is through that state of soul, where an
extreme activity is indistinguishable from an equal passivity. (CW13 196; AVA
238)
This occurs in part X of Book IV, “The Gates of Pluto,” unique to A Vision A and its investment in the fictitious Robartes’s supposed Arabian authority, Kusta ben Luka, on the
Dreaming Back and on spiritual cycles approaching and following the discarnate Phase 15.
In Book III of A Vision A, in part of the final movement of “Dove or Swan” withheld from
A Vision B, lines 9–12 are quoted to characterize “the last gyre,” with which “must come a
desire to be ruled or rather, seeing that desire is all but dead, as adoration of force spiritual
or physical, and society as mechanical force [is] complete at last” (CW13 176; AVA 213).
With these earlier glosses gone by 1937, a new Book II called “The Completed Symbol”
reproduced three full stanzas of the poem to illustrate the conjunction of opposites as “heraldic supporters guarding the mystery of the fifteenth phase” (with the caveat that Christ
should have been substituted for Buddha, according to the instructors):
Although I saw it all in the mind’s eye
There can be nothing solider till I die; I saw by the moon’s light
Now at its fifteenth night.
One [the Sphinx] lashed her tail; her eyes lit by the moon
Gazed upon all things known, all things unknown,
In triumph of intellect
With motionless head erect.
The other’s [the Buddha’s] moonlit eyeballs never moved,
Being fixed on all things loved, all things unloved,
Yet little peace he had,
For those that love are sad. (VP 383 ll. 25–36; CW1 173)
An earlier gloss to the same passage occurs in the typescript of the dialogue “The Discoveries of Michael Robartes,” where Robartes explains to Aherne that “[t]he images at fifteen
do not affect the automatic portions of the mind at all[;] for[,] being each one separate
and complete[,] they cannot start any sequence of thought and image[;] the mind in their
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227
presence is stationary in a Buddha[-] or Sphinx[-]like trance of wonder” (YVP4 41 and 58
n139). “All thought becomes an image” at that stage in “The Phases of the Moon” (VP 374
l. 58; CW1 166), and Yeats felt that the latter helped clear up the “too obscure” symbolism of “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes” (letter to Ezra Pound, cit. YVP4 4) and
so gave priority to the former in The Wild Swans at Coole and both editions of A Vision.
The metaphor of the dancer as representative of the mind in trance-like, passive state
could only be suggested, of course, by the example of the actual George Yeats in the creation of the automatic script. But the script itself proved to be a fertile source for the origin
of poetry, as the emergence of “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes” shows, from the
session of January 7, 1919 (YVP2 162–63 and MYV2 198–202). The contemporary plays
were sometimes complexly related to the events of these sessions and grew occasionally from
a number of sessions and therefore were part of the making of A Vision. Out of the analogy
between the beatific mind/soul negotiating the counterpointed “evil and good” of Sphinx
and Buddha, or Christ, grew in 1918–19 a line of inquiry on the Evil Genius. To take up
first the last of Yeats’s original four “plays for dancers,” Calvary began as a “Judas play” and
wound up as a “Christ play” with thematic and constructive parallels born out of Yeats’s
second Noh play, The Dreaming of the Bones.36 A “reconstructive interpretation” of Calvary
from the evidence of the automatic script has even been published by one of the contributors to this anthology, Janis Haswell.37 Perhaps the choral speeches in the manuscript (NLI
30,361) and those of the First Musician in the second draft are all that remains of a Sinn
Feiner (as in The Dreaming of the Bones) conversing “with Judas in the streets of Dublin” (L
645) from first conception. In manuscript, in the opening “Song of folding & unfolding
[of the cloth],” “The savior of men dreams his bitter dream / Sees those that mocked him,”
dreaming himself back through the psychic trauma of the last moments of his life, repeatedly enduring the mockery of those whom he has saved. Thus he carries an invisible cross in
an “Asiatic street,” not a Dublin roadway, the gist of the plot borne by the arguments of the
ungrateful Lazarus and the arch-betrayer, Judas. The “Song for the folding and unfolding of
the cloth” in the published version of 1921 displaces Christ with a symbolic bird, following
the precedents of hawk, sea-bird, and birds crying in loneliness, wheeling overhead in the
plays that accompanied Calvary in Four Plays for Dancers (Wade 129):
Motionless under the moon-beam,
Up to his feathers in the stream,
Although fish leap, the white heron
Shivers in a dumbfounded dream. (VPl 780, ll. 1–4; CW2 329)
Christ “stands amid a mocking crowd” and the First Musician sings:
Oh, but the mockers’ cry
Makes my heart afraid,
As though a flute of bone
Taken from a heron’s thigh,
A heron crazed by the moon,
Were cleverly, softly played. (VPl 781–82, ll. 31–6; CW2 330)
228
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
The pronouncement of mockery and ensuing demonstration of it by the chorus and by
the Roman soldiers at the play’s end recall Yeats’s vituperative treatment of the subject in
the poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”:
Mock mockers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery. (VP 432, ll. 108–112; CW1 213)
And in that poem, the insipient modern age is brought on with the Platonic Year,
“Whirl[ing] out new right and wrong,” reminiscent of that pivotal girl in “The Double
Vision of Michael Robartes,” near the middle of the poem, with the remembered effect
of “Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enwound / A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth”
seemingly changed into a “dragon of air,” “hurr[ying] them off on its own furious path”
(ll. 49–51 and 53).
Incidence of war in 1916—the one in France and the Sinn Féin uprising in Dublin—made Yeats’s first adaptation of the Noh in At the Hawk’s Well only the beginning
of invention, for the Japanese paradigm at hand “arose in an age of continual war and
became a part of the education of soldiers” (CW4 172; E&I 235). Yeats may not have
had an inkling at that time that he had a play within him on the passion of Christ,
although he recognized that such dramatic forms permitted “the most vivid and subtle
discrimination of sense and the invention of images more powerful than sense”; “the
Deity gives us, according to His promise, not His thoughts of His convictions but His
flesh and blood” (ibid.). Intertwined with The Dreaming of the Bones, the making of
Calvary was for the future while the former was for the present and “only too powerful
politically” (L 626), Yeats said, acknowledging the play to be incendiary in its way, like
the group elegy “Easter 1916” and several other insurrection poems that had been too
hot for his oeuvre until, in 1921, the dragon of war had begun to subside in its fury.
The crux of the play, as projected from a thumbnail prose subject (in NLI 8775[1], 1r),
is the question of how love of such legendary proportion as that of Deirdre, Grania,
Helen, or, in this case, Dervorgilla should invite evil and lead to the infamous ruin of
Ireland in the Norman invasion. In the meeting of past (the ghosts of lovers Diarmuid
and Dervorgilla) and present (a fleeing rebel), we marvel that the patriot comes to his
senses and withholds forgiveness from the abject couple just as we realize the irony of
his refusal to acknowledge likeness and culpability in his recent participation in violent
political insurrection in the 1916 Easter Rising. Being human, he lacks heart sufficient
to forgive them for their selfish betrayal, as only God can love joy co-existent with sorrow. His renunciation (“Terrible the temptation and the place!”; VPl 775, l. 282; CW2
315) resembles the protests of Lazarus and of Judas in Calvary, fraught as they are with
the philosophical questions that Yeats and his wife had raised with the spirit guides up
to July 1920, when the preface and notes to Four Plays for Dancers were finished. With
heart running wild at the cry of the curlew and the eddying of cat-headed bird, the play
closes with the lovers lost in their “self-created winding of the labyrinth of conscience”
(VPl 777; CW2 692). Considering Dervorgilla’s few speaking lines, Yeats says her part
“Metaphors for Poetry”
229
may be “taken by a dancer who has the training of a dancer alone,” and, as in the performance of Mr. Ito as the Guardian of the Well in At the Hawk’s Well, “nor need that
masked dancer be a woman” (ibid.).
The Dreaming of the Bones, wherein shades of the dead “dream back” the events of
their lives “in the order of their intensity” according to Cornelius Agrippa, the Judwalis,
and “a Japanese ‘Noh’ play” (ibid.) and slightly later recounted in “The Gates of Pluto”
V and X (CW13 185–88, 195–97; AVA 224–28, 236–39), was more than a year in its
making, as George Yeats dated it: “August 1917 / re-written 1918 summer” (WBGYL
2371; YL 2350). Its writing had collided with and elided into other works, including The
Only Jealousy of Emer, which had given place to it until shortly after her marriage, when
the spirit guides instructed Yeats in the completion of work-in-progress and counseled
him from depression after he had abandoned pursuit of Maud and Iseult Gonne. For a
time, even work on the “philosophical dialogue” from which A Vision originated had to be
stopped to relieve insomnia and to write verse once more, as he reported to Lady Gregory
in December 1917, noting that the way had just cleared to “finish my play & then return
to the dialogue” (CL Intelex 3375). The play to which he referred is evidently The Only
Jealousy of Emer, interrupted by the writing of The Dreaming of the Bones and, like Calvary,
requiring the collaborative genius of the automatic script to get Yeats’s writing into verse.
Unlike the other two plays but like At the Hawk’s Well for its doubling of the protagonist,
Cuchulain, into projections of the playwright, The Only Jealousy of Emer confronted the
demons of an aging man’s feelings of conflicted loyalties and responsibilities on the proverbial sexual battlefield of life. As George Harper has shown—indeed, by reproducing a
diagram unmistakably representing Thoor Ballylee anthropomorphized as Yeats with his
“three birds” (MYV1 frontispiece; YVP3 36)—the women of the play mirror the women
at that moment in his life: Woman of the Sidhe (or Maud Gonne as Fand at Phase 15,
reprised from At the Hawk’s Well), Eithne Inguba (or Iseult Gonne as Cuchulain’s “newest
love”), and Emer (or George Yeats as Cuchulain’s suffering but most worthy wife, with a
tinge of Lady Gregory added for good measure).38 Although warned by one of the guides
not to write about himself as a Phase 17 man superimposed on the hero, “both Yeats
and George were strongly conscious that he had projected himself and his ‘three birds’
in the mythical surrogates of the play” (MYV1 149). The Figure of Cuchulain, actually
the shape-shifter Bricriu (Evil Genius or False Creative Mind), has displaced the Ghost of
Cuchulain (Ego or Will) literally to embody the conflict of good and evil (ibid., 89). But
Cuchulain triumphs and is restored to himself by Emer’s refusal to renounce her love for
him even though he awakens, ironically, calling for Eithne Inguba to comfort him: “I have
been in some strange place and am afraid” (VPl 563, l. 304; CW2 327). The Cuchulain
dialogue that preceded the familiar version of “The Phases of the Moon” in early draft has
been discussed already in this essay, as well as instances in which lines compare with treatment of the seductive Sidhe, shape-changers who “drop their hair upon” men and “Lap
them in cloudy hair or kiss their lips” (VPl 549, ll. 214a and 214; CW2 324), beguile them
until they forfeit their souls. In At the Hawk’s Well, the hawk-woman Fand takes possession
of the passive Guardian of the Well and creates just such a distraction to the entranced
Old Man and Young Man at the well that both miss their chance to collect even a drop of
the waters of immortality; but that play predates Yeats’s marriage, the automatic scripts,
and the writing of A Vision.
230
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Rather more to the point here is the unfinished Noh play, a “summary of 1918,” as
George Yeats called it but a work that occupied Yeats, off and on, until 1923, through
the period of his work on the Robartes dialogues, on three of his Four Plays for Dancers,
and on the poem that most presides over A Vision A as the fictive rudiment of the volume
as a whole, “The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid.” In a scenario that Mrs. Yeats gave to Birgit
Bjersby on the Noh plays At the Hawk’s Well and The Only Jealousy of Emer, we learn that
an “unfinished draft” of another work, not a Cuchulain play, survived in the form “of two
dialogues, one between an old man and a young girl, the other between an old woman
and her son, a young man who is in love” and wants to marry the young girl, who lives in
an old tower upon a hill “in charge of all the goats of the hill.”39 In actuality, though, there
are two drafts, not just the dialogues or scenes that Bjersby describes. The longer draft,
in prose, works out an elaborate plot in no less than five scenes (see my transcription of
NLI 30,427 in Appendix B, Part 1 of YPM). The shorter draft is Yeats’s excessively labored
attempt to versify Scenes 1 and 2 (the transcription of NLI 30,488 given in Appendix B,
Part 2 of YPM). The young girl “comes to see the old man who has a letter for her from
her lover, and she tells him that the young man’s mother does not want her son to marry:
‘She says that I am evil and yet has never set her eyes upon me’” (Bjersby 35). In the course
of the play, Oedipal and Electral myths interfuse with character doubling. The old man
excuses the jealousy of youth by asking the young woman to imagine herself in the place
of the old woman; hence the girl’s imagining and projecting herself into what she imagines, an old woman grieving the loss of a son, adds a touch of magic as well as pathos to
the girl as femme fatale40 because the girl has grievances of her own, like the Old Woman
in Cathleen Ni Houlihan. So the young man, in Scene 2, defends her against his materialist
mother. Like Michael Gillane, this son argues that his beloved wants protection because
“she has neither friends nor relatives.”
After this, the mother curses her son, wishing that, while crossing the rising cataracts
of the river to meet the beggar girl in the old towerhouse, he will “be drowned with that
girl looking on.” Tragically, the embittered mother’s curse comes to pass, as does, ironically, his rejoinder: “If I needs be drowned before the day / In coming from my love, &
not in going.” For, soon after he reaches the other side of the river, a fatal misunderstanding occurs as his sleep-walking beloved reports to him that her lover (the boy himself in
her dream) already lies within the walls of the towerhouse, in her bedchamber. When her
somnambulistic account provokes the young man to a senseless fit of jealousy, he flees.
Eventually both are drowned and mourned by the old man and the mother. The old and
young men are, of course, doubles as are their like in At the Hawk’s Well (Old Man and
Young Man wearing masks) and The Only Jealousy of Emer (Figure and Ghost of Cuchulain, both masked).41 However, to underscore difference between generations and their
respective times, the old fisherman intones ruefully: “They have been carried away to the
cataract. I will take their dead bodies from the water, & I will put a cross above them, &
carve upon [it,] ‘He was jealous of a dream’[;] no one in my youth were jealous of a dream”
(NLI 30,427, 13v; YPM 259); “I heard the noise of the cataract. I will go along the edge of
the shore—I will b[u]ry them under two crossed sticks—no body in my youth were ever
jealous of a dream” (NLI 30,427, 17r; YPM 262).
The unfinished Noh play that I refer to as “The Guardians of the Tower and Stream”
was a rather transparent sequel to The Only Jealousy of Emer based on the legendary beauty
“Metaphors for Poetry”
231
of Mary Hynes at Ballylee as told by the poet Anthony Raftery, the genius loci of the place
(see “The Tower,” VP 410 ll. 33–48; CW1 199). Affected as much by his rhymes as by
her beauty, men were driven out of their wits until “one was drowned in the great bog of
Cloone” (l. 48). Considering Raftery’s blindness, the speaker, Yeats, creator of Hanrahan,
observes: “I find / That nothing strange; the tragedy began / With Homer that was a blind
man, / And Helen has all living hearts betrayed” (ll. 50–3). The lovers in Yeats’s unfinished
play marry as spirits sometimes do in Noh plays, a gesture possibly intended as a tribute
to his mediumistic wife, to whom he bestowed as a wedding present the Anglo-Norman
towerhouse, Thoor Ballylee, restored and furnished. In Michael Robartes and the Dancer,
he led off with the title lyric and two other dialogic poems she inspired (“Solomon and
the Witch” and “An Image from a Past Life”) and closed it with a pair of epigrams (“A
Meditation in Time of War” and “To be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee”), announcing the gift of poems and house in a stormy setting. In November 1922, gossiping in a
way that applied something of the play’s tragic danse macabre drowning sequence, Yeats
employed the figure of the whirlpool to delight his wife in harmless but cruel amusement
at the expense of his friend Edmund Dulac, whose wife had fled to her mother, having
left him to a young woman who had rescued him from a “whirlpool” without being one
herself (CL Intelex 4211; 20 November 1922).42 In the letter, Yeats addressed his own wife
as “Dobbs,” first used in their private correspondence only the day before, an endearment
kindred to the appellation “pretty Huddon, who lives in the tower on a hill over the river”
(NLI 30,427, f. 1r; YPM 247), the only reference the Old Man makes to the Young Girl
by any name in the play. Successive instances of the word whirlpool in letters to various
friends confirm that it was Yeats shorthand for one (often a woman) who causes such
trouble for oneself that others are drawn into it, a human whirlpool as well as the person
who is under such a whirlpool’s spell.43 From 1917 to 1931, the term was common to a
certain kind of news conveyed to intimates such as Lady Gregory, Olivia Shakespear, and
George Yeats (see CL Intelex 3322, 4099, 4100, 4211, 4219, 4969, and 5504).
On May 1, 1923, with writing in the mornings and (ironically) “amusing” afternoon
duty in the Seanad, Yeats applied himself to the often interrupted work of converting his
old “new No[h] play” into verse in consultation with his wife. Significantly longer than
the other dance plays, it was intended for performance in his own lodgings in Merrion
Square, Dublin (Yeats to Dulac; CL Intelex 4317).44 Thus he wished everything to adhere
to the limitations of the Georgian drawing room and had in mind the simplicity of an actor’s climbing on a table to search the darkness with a lantern, as Old Man and Young Girl
do, finally spying her lover singing and dancing (simulated “swimming”) in the whirlpool.
Two months later, progress had begun to falter (CL Intelex 4342; 28 June 1923). By the
end of July, he was still trying to carry it forward, planning to bring it out at the Cuala
Press with one or two short poems (Yeats to Lady Gregory, T. Sturge Moore, and Ezra
Pound of 6, 17, and 29 July [1923]; CL Intelex 4344, 4349, 4352). As yet, he had not
considered substituting a short miracle play, The Cat and the Moon, and two long poems
(“Meditations in Time of Civil War” and “The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid”) for that project
as occurred in the next year (in Wade 145). What happened?
The last Cuala Press volume with such a plan to gather together selected poems and
a play by Yeats was The Wild Swans at Coole, Other Verses and a Play in Verse (1917; Wade
118), forty-seven pages including notes. The play was At the Hawk’s Well. Since then,
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
only Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1920; Wade 127) and Seven Poems and a Fragment
(1922; Wade 132) gave some combination of short lyric poems and verses written in
dialogue. Neither were what Yeats had in mind in 1923, but the former volume, a trifle
at 35 pages, included poems and notes bearing some relation to Yeats’s unfinished Noh
play. The dialogic poem “Images from a Past Life” (with notes on the Judwalis and Kustaben-Luki) and the dramatic lyric “Towards Break of Day” (in manuscript, “the double
dream”45), for example, explore the esoteric course of image and dream from gendered and
dual perspectives of oneself and one’s beloved that in 1918 was also traced in the prose
draft of the play. The “dark stream,” “eddies gleam,” “river imaging the flashing skies,”
“sweetheart from another life float[ing],” “starry eddies of her hair,” “hair stream[ing]
upon the wind” (VP 389–90, ll. 3, 4, 20, 22, 27, 40; CW1 180–81)—seem familiar after
reading the play. Likewise, Yeats’s unusual valediction-to-morning poem of 1918–1919
visits the psychic regions of night and day, past and present forms as the play explores the
precincts of the symbolic nightingale and lark. In both the 1918 and 1923 states, the girl
sleeps and transcends her poverty by summoning in a dream a regal lover on a “horse shod
with silver” who mounts the winding stair and comes covertly to her bedchamber (NLI
30,427, f. 4r; YPM 250).46 But she talks in her sleep, fortunately, so that the Old Man
can inform the audience about psychic behavior the rash Young Man will misinterpret
(see YPM 255–56). The poem “Towards Break of Day” telescopes the drama of doubles
rhetorically into a question:
Was it the double of my dream
The woman that by me lay
Dreamed, or did we halve a dream
Under the first cold gleam of day? (VP 398, ll. 1–4; CW1 187)
In the 1925 edition of A Vision, Yeats quoted these lines and speculated that “A whole age
may be bound in a single dream, or wheel, so that its creations have all the same character
though there is no visible influence” (CW13 141; AVA 174). In Yeats’s Occult Papers at
the National Library of Ireland, one finds among the drafts of the basic system a manuscript of the poem unknown to Parkinson as well as a strikingly different version of Book
II, part XXI in A Vision A, wherein Yeats quotes the opening lines and then asks one to
imagine a couple dreaming or meditating in conflict with one another, the one on Helen’s
birth from the egg of Leda (the creation of beauty), the other on the birth from a second
egg of Castor and Pollux (the creation of war), being part of the same story.47 As possibly
“the best example of Yeats’s experience with Complementary Dreams,” the poem is only
one of several recorded in the so-called “Sleep and Dream Notebooks” (YVP3 3).48 After
numerous “philosophical sleeps” “‘talked out’ during the day and typed” out by Mrs. Yeats
in the summer of 1922, the latter began talking in her sleep and “seemed a different self ”
as she did so. In autumn 1923, when Yeats abandoned the play, her “philosophical sleeps”
ended also, on November 27 (YVP3 3). Just the month before, having dispatched the
manuscript of A Vision to Werner Laurie for typesetting, he had estimated that another
three months were required to finish and to produce his play if the Civil War did not start
up again in Dublin with nightly disturbances (CL Intelex 4381; cf. L 700). With irreducible succinctness, Saddlemyer gives context for the work at hand:
“Metaphors for Poetry”
233
Despite renewed cautions [from George’s instructors], Willy had talked freely if
not entirely openly of their work on the system.…In notes to [“An Image from
a Past Life” and “The Second Coming” in Wade 127] and other poems he had
resurrected the characters John Aherne and Michael Robartes, who “take their
place in a phantasmagoria in which I endeavour to explain my philosophy of life
and death.” The first intimation was in fact as early as 1919, when his coy preface
to Michael Robartes and the Dancer announced his intention of publishing Robartes’s mass of “letters and table talk” and exposition of the Speculum Angelorum
et Hominum of Giraldus. He first planned a series of dialogues involving these
two quarrelers and the persona Yeats, eventually abbreviated in A Vision [AVA
only] to Owen Aherne’s sly “Introduction” and ornate discussion of “Desert
Geometry—or The Gift of Harun Al-Raschid.” (BG 306)49
Yeats’s work on “Guardians of the Tower and Stream” relates to that “coy preface” of
Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Wade 127), in which he promotes future publication
of a “great mass of letters and table talk” (resembling his father’s correspondence, edited
by Pound in 1917 and Lennox Robinson in 1920). Just as Yeats compares himself in the
preface to Goethe, a poet who “needs all philosophy,” so the old but lusty fisherman’s
decision not to withhold from the dreaming girl a love letter the Young Man has sent to
her is occasioned in the manuscript by a note (see YPM 275) from which Yeats developed
in A Vision the paradox of “burning restraint” (here “hot head & a cold heart”): “One
remembers Faust, who will find every wench a Helen, now that he has drunk the witches’
dram” (CW13 48; AVA 56; AVB 123).
The unusual attention given to letters as one of the play’s principal conceits, especially in Scene 1 of the 1923 verse version in relation to the Young Girl’s particular
love letter, leads directly to the poet’s epistolary tribute to his wife’s abilities as medium
and co-author of the philosophy featured in A Vision: An Explanation Founded upon the
Writings of Giraldus and upon Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka (1925),
Book II: “What the Caliph Refused to Learn.” Later called, simply, “The Gift of Harun
Al-Rashid,” the poem traces its origin from a fragment filed with the manuscripts of the
play, preserved that way with the older prose scenario labeled by Mrs. Yeats “MS of ‘A
Play Begun and Never Finished.’” Folio “1a,” as I refer to the fragment to distinguish it
from the folios transcribed in YPM 246–89, is the earliest known precursor to the poem’s
opening lines:50
Kusta Ben Luka is my name, I write
To Abd Al-Rabban; fellow-roysterer once,
Now the good Caliph’s learned Treasurer,
And for no ear but his.
Carry this letter
Through the great gallery of the Treasure House
Where banners of the Caliphs hang, night-coloured
But brilliant as the night’s embroidery,
And wait war’s music.… (VP 460–61, ll. 1–8; CW1 451)
234
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Yeats’s commentary, masquerading as a letter from Owen Aherne, makes clear the veiled
autobiographical nature of the poem: that “his [Kusta ben Luka’s] wife a few days after his
marriage began to talk in her sleep, and that she told him all those things which he had
searched for vainly in his life in the great library of the Caliph and in the conversation of
wise men” (VP 829; CW1 701). Before the note was published with the poem in 1924, it
was preceded by an earlier version that makes Yeats’s charade even more apparent. According to the draft, the “elderly philosopher” had taken a “young bride” who had “fallen in
love with [him]…to the surprise of her friends and relations.” Her sleep-talking is a kind
of cypher for George Yeats’s automatic writing: “She taught him for a number of years,
often walking to the border of the desert in her sleep, and there marking upon the sand
innumerable intricate symbols” (CVA 121, notes p. 30).
As progress on the play bogged down, “The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid” took off at a
tangent to it. Finally, work on the play stopped altogether because Yeats received a telegram, on 15 November 1923, announcing that he had won the Nobel Prize for literature,
which impacted his work terrifically. By the end of January 1924, he acknowledged to
John Quinn that he was only then catching up from the flood of letters and was obligated
to turn attention to A Vision for Werner Laurie and to revising “various volumes” for the
uniform edition of his work for Macmillan (CL Intelex 4464; L 703–4). In the end, Yeats
wrote to his literary agent with instructions that certain poems he had sent to The Dial
(“The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid” and others51) were to be published in the June number
with the interlude “The Cat and the Moon” to follow in July as he saw to it that his sister
simultaneously made up a volume of this work, called The Cat and the Moon and Certain
Poems, at the Cuala Press (WBY to A. P. Watt, 20 April 1924; CL Intelex 4524). Obviously, this book lacked the play that might have become the pinnacle of all Noh plays,
substituting a short work that he had withheld previously because it was “in a different
mood” from that of his Four Plays for Dancers. More of a miracle play than the others, The
Cat and the Moon was eventually reprinted with two later plays for dancers, The Resurrection and Fighting the Waves, in Wheels and Butterflies (1934; Wade 175).
IV
“The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid” bore with it in first printing a mystery about its being
inspired by a Bedouin tradition of “contradictory stories that seem to be a confused recollection of the contents of a little old book, lost many years ago with Kusta-ben-Luka’s
larger book…[but recovered] by some Judwali scholar or saint” (VP 829; CW1 701).
The poem cast a long shadow on the first published version of A Vision in 1925, and not
just because it presided over Book II as introductory verses, as “The Phases of the Moon”
presided thematically over Book I and “Leda [and the Swan]” and “The Fool by the Roadside,” respectively, stood before Books III and IV, with “All Souls’ Night” serving both
the latter and the volume as an epilogue. Together, the first two books, “What the Caliph
Partly Learned” and “What the Caliph Refused to Learn,” scarcely to cite the introduction
by the fictitious Owen Aherne, constituted sixty percent or more of the entire volume,
most of its “desert geometry,” and depended on imaginary authority that Yeats had largely
invented as a ruse and cited as the “Robartes papers,” from the philosophical dialogues he
had begun writing in late 1917,52 encouraged by George Yeats as collaborator. So gifted
“Metaphors for Poetry”
235
a young wife, given, so to speak, by the Caliph to Kusta ben Luka (Yeats), deserved an
epithalamion prominently featured in the one fantastic book of the Yeats canon that she
most engendered.
In addition to the natural frustrations incumbent to any collaboration, the supernatural ones of which Yeats wrote in A Packet for Ezra Pound (Cuala Press, 1929), later
moved, for the most part, to A Vision (Macmillan, 1937), were chiefly withheld from A
Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon Certain
Doctrines Attributed to Kusta ben Luka (1925). The supernatural beings who participated
in the creation of “stylistic arrangements of experience” (AVB 25) by engaging his wife’s
Daimon and his own were the affirmation “that all the gains of man come from conflict
with the opposite of his true being” (AVB 13). Spiritual agents may have come to give
him “metaphors for poetry” (AVB 8), but he undertook writing about that new experience
by reverting to procedures followed by Edwin Ellis, as Yeats said, in mixing “philosophical discussion…with improvised stories” (CW3 145; Au 162). In developing structures
for the changing logic of A Vision between 1925 and 1937, Yeats traded out old for new
sequences of invention in fiction and poetry. Initially struggling to write a long dialogue
between Owen Aherne and Michael Robartes, Yeats abandoned this plan to the A Vision A
scheme, where these two characters are given to quarrel with the author and each other in
an introduction supposedly by the imaginary Aherne; in the verse dialogue that functioned
as the prologue of A Vision Book I, “The Wheel and the Phases of the Moon” (where they
rehearse the book’s philosophy as speakers); and in A Vision I.2, “The Dance of the Four
Royal Persons,” also by Aherne, who vows to “discuss all these matters at length in [his]
own book upon the philosophy and its sources” (CW13 12; AVA 11).53 Both the 1925
and 1937 editions of A Vision conclude with Yeats’s elegiac remembrance of three of his
actual friends from early life as a creative mystic. “All Souls’ Night: An Epilogue,” a tribute
to fellow mystics William Horton, Florence Farr, and MacGregor Mathers, Yeats believed
to be one of his best poems, though worrying that his own excitement over the book’s
philosophy might not be matched by that of his poetry-reading public. So one precaution
taken was to limit the first edition. The other was to issue a caveat, acknowledging that
he had doubts that certain parts of the book would elicit enthusiasm from such readers:
I have moments of exaltation like that in which I wrote “All Souls’ Night,” but
I have other moments when remembering my ignorance of philosophy I doubt
if I can make another share my excitement. As I most fear to disappoint those
that come to this book through some interest in my poetry and in that alone, I
warn them from that part of the book called “The Great Wheel” and from the
whole of Book II, and beg them to dip here and there in the verse and into my
comments upon life and history. (CW13 lv; AVA xii)
In 1937, “The Phases of the Moon” remained as a prelude to Book I, “The Great Wheel,”
but without the Owen Aherne pieces, because it still anticipated much of the new first
movement, incorporating some rudiments of geometry from the expunged Book II to the
“Table of the Four Faculties” through the long section in A Vision A called “The Twentyeight Embodiments.”54 He longed for the time when “I need no longer write poems like
‘The Phases of the Moon’ nor ‘Ego Dominus Tuus,’ nor spend barren years, as I have done
236
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
some three or four times, striving with abstractions that substituted themselves for the
play that I had planned” (CW13 lv; AVA xii; a possible allusion to his abandoned Noh
play). Like the poetic service of “Ego Dominus Tuus” to the abstract body of Per Amica
Silentia Lunae (1918), Yeats’s use of the sonnet “Leda and the Swan” (part 1, “Leda,” of
A Vision B’s Book V, A Vision A’s Book III), set in apposition to the figure “The Historical Cones,” remained at the outset of “Dove or Swan,” the review of history through the
evidence of art that Yeats left roughly intact except for about seven pages (CW13 174–78;
AVA 210–15) that he cut when shifting forward rewritten matter from Book IV (“The
Gates of Pluto,” later “The Soul in Judgment”). Considering the general framework of the
book, much had either to be radically altered or replaced.55
One reason for a major rewriting of A Vision involved additional reading and calculations on the Magnus Annus, or Great Year of the philosophers, that Yeats undertook after
publishing A Vision A, Book II, “What the Caliph Refused to Learn.” Ruminations in the
pages of his Rapallo notebooks of the late 1920s and elsewhere were brought to fruition, by
1937, in A Vision B, Book IV, “The Great Year of the Ancients,” although, sadly, the fantastic
verse epistle that had inaugurated the superseded section had to be expelled after disclosure,
in 1929 in A Packet for Ezra Pound, that W. B. and George Yeats were the same as the “Two
contemplating passions [who had] chose[n] one theme / Through sheer bewilderment” in
“Desert Geometry or The Gift of Harun Al-Raschid” (VP 466; CW1 454). Therefore, one
of Yeats’s masks, that of Kusta ben Luka, came to be shed with the removal of preliminaries by Owen Aherne, so that Giraldus might remain. The likeness of Yeats, bearded and
turbaned, by Dulac was moved from the frontispiece to the interior of a wholly new unit of
“improvised stories” entitled “Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends: An Extract from
a Record Made by His Pupils” (first published by the Cuala Press in 1931 beside the play The
Resurrection). The gambit of the Judwalis and the education of the Caliph had given place
to the contemporary scene of bohemian artists and mystics updated from the pages of The
Secret Rose and particularly the stories “Rosa Alchemica,” “The Tables of the Law,” and “The
Adoration of the Magi.” The setting straight of “Dear Mr. Yeats” by means of transcripts
signed by John Aherne, Owen’s brother, and John Duddon, a new character based on an old
Irish tale about the fleecing of gullible yokels, offers a tongue-in-cheek counterpoint to the
serious point of Yeats’s open letter to Pound on the authority of A Vision.56
In spite of great extravagance and charm in the context of A Vision A, “The Gift of
Harun Al-Rashid” had a checkered history, drawing creative energy away from what was
to have been Yeats’s most ambitious Noh adaptation from Ballylee legends and rather
incongruously used to fill out pages to make a book of The Cat and the Moon and Certain
Poems (1924). More satisfactorily, the poem took up a climactic position in The Tower
(1928) before “All Souls’ Night” (which, as in A Vision A, concluded the arrangement)
and after numerous masterpieces as well as the lyric sequence “A Man Young and Old.”
The environment was far different from that of the chronologically arranged “Narrative
and Dramatic” section of The Collected Poems (1933). The latter context makes the poem
seem an anomaly, one of six pieces, the first five of which are obviously Celtic. Still, even
Yeats’s note in The Tower cultivated the impression that the poem was only one section
of a broken field, “Part of an unfinished set of poems, dialogues and stories about John
Ahern and Michael Robartes, Kusta ben Luka, a philosopher of Bagdad, and his Bedouin
followers” (VP 830; CW1 700).57
“Metaphors for Poetry”
237
Naturally, the poetic crux of A Vision A, Book II, “What the Caliph Refused to Learn,”
largely disappeared from sight in A Vision B, with scattered traces of Blake and Swedenborg (and Heraclitus) being all that remained from vital sections on background such as
II.2.III “Blake’s Use of the Gyres” (CW13 107–8; AVA 133–34), and II.2.V, “Blake and
the Great Wheel” (CW13 112–13; AVA 139). Indeed, what might be called the Blakean
crux of A Vision as a whole and as indicated in the first edition was “The Mental Traveller.”
As a footnote in A Vision B testifies, Blake’s poem had been especially intriguing to him
as an editor: “Neither Edwin Ellis nor I, nor any commentator has explained the poem,
though one or another has explained certain passages. The student of A Vision will understand it at once” (AVB 189). In fact, consistent with editorial procedures agreed upon
by the two men, Ellis and Yeats worked independently as well as in concert for a printing
of “The Mental Traveller” and discussion in their edition of The Works of William Blake
(1893; see WWB2: “Interpretation and Paraphrased Commentary”). Consequently, we
have the text (on WWB2 31–33, with displaced note on the text on p. 41) and the collation Ellis made (on WWB2 34–36) of parallels traced to Blake’s other works; and we have
all but one page of a five-page synopsis by Yeats.
On the first page of this unpublished manuscript of c. 1891, beneath the title “The
Mental Traveller,” the male and female of Blake’s poem are said to be facets of the imagination and, according to descriptions by the Cambridge Platonist Henry More, of the
Anima Mundi (NLI 30,289). Pages “3,” “4” (verso) and “5,” located in another file (NLI
30,534, drafts of the Ellis-Yeats Works of William Blake), show Yeats trying to interpret
the countervailing stories of such mental facets as “man” and “woman.” The first story is
about the man’s growth from aimless traveler to one who attains the spiritual gifts of love
and suffering as he achieves dominion over the woman while the second story is about the
woman’s growing away from the man’s tyranny toward her achievement of dominion over
him. She gives life to him as he grows young, just as he, as an old man, gives life to her as
she grows young (3). This law of dominance is not due to the master’s gifts of imagination
but to gifts of love, the perhaps twenty-five-year-old Yeats had surmised. In “the pulsation
of the artery” (Blake’s measure of time in Milton), a poet accomplishes his work and all
the momentous events of his life are conceived and carry forth (4). From unhappiness, the
man “endows” the body with beauty and then endeavors to subdue it with law, with emotion, consequently evading that law if it brings him pleasure. As abstraction goes, Yeats
discerned a pattern in this observation and recalled one of Blake’s best known sayings
from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 3: “Without contraries is no progression”
(5). So, according to “The Mental Traveller,” when the man grows old, he imposes himself
for good upon a woman, giving her the master’s gifts. But when he grows young as she
imposes herself on him, he awakens to the world of reason. Conversely, the old woman,
cruel but growing younger, denies him her love and relinquishes eternity, yet, while young
and growing older, she brings him the ecstasy of natural love (4). Like intersecting points
of the primary and antithetical gyres, the points at which the protagonists of the two stories are of equal age (by turns, the one aging as the other grows young) are marked by “a
plight”: that is, if he makes life a desert, she pitches her tent in that desert (4).
In 1925, quoting Blake to stress the rapture of precisely such moments, Yeats writes
that:
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
238
Blake, in the “Mental Traveller,” describes a struggle…perpetually repeated between a man and a woman, and as the one ages, the other grows young. A child
is given to an old woman and
Her fingers number every nerve
Just as a miser counts his gold;
She lives upon his shrieks and cries
And she grows young as he grows old.
Till he becomes a bleeding youth
And she becomes a virgin bright;
Then he rends up his manacles
And bends her down to his delight.
Then he in his turn becomes “an aged shadow” and is driven from his door,
where “From the fire on the hearth a little female babe doth spring.” He must
wander “until he can a maiden win” and then all is repeated for
The honey of her infant lips
The bread and wine of her sweet smile
The wild game of her roving eye
Does him to infancy beguile.
...............
Till he becomes a wayward babe
And she a weeping woman old[.]
…The woman and the man are two competing gyres growing at one another’s
expense, but with Blake it is not enough to say that one is beauty and one is wisdom, for he conceives [of ] this conflict as that in all love…which compels each
to be slave and tyrant by turn. (CW13 107–8; AVA 133–34)
A few pages earlier, the waxing and waning, female- and male-gendered gyres conjoin Flaubert’s “La Spirale”; the “gyrations,” “spiral movement of points” and “vortexes”
of Swedenborg; Descartes’ “vortex”; Boehme’s “gyre”; and like “allusions in many writers
back to antiquity,” including a passage in the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (CW13
103; AVA 128–29). The dynamic of the system went back somewhat to the notes on Henry
More and the Anima Mundi, for, as Yeats wrote, “It is as though the first act of being, after
creating limit, was to divide itself into male and female, each dying the other’s life[,] living
the other’s death” (CW13 105; AVA 130). His reading notes in John Burnet’s Early Greek
Philosophy (1892 [WBGYL 316; YL 308]) betray a different application of the admired locution. In Burnet’s English, Heraclitus actually said: “Mortals are immortals and immortals
are mortals, the one living the other’s death and dying the other’s life” (p. 138).58 Marking
the symmetry and points of balance, or “plights,” were a geometrical business left to succeeding sections of A Vision A—such as II.2.V, “Blake and the Great Wheel,” where Yeats
adjusts Blake on the evidence of men studied “true to phase” as opposed to “out of phase”:
“Metaphors for Poetry”
239
We interpret the symbol differently from Blake because his tyrant and slave, slave
and tyrant are man and woman out of phase, and their youth occurs at Phases 8
and 22 of our symbol because there is the greatest passion, whereas their old age
is at Phase 1 and Phase 15…[whereas] [w]ith us these are the moments of the
greatest Beauty and Wisdom respectively because we have mainly studied men
true to phase.…As it is, the system constantly compels us to consider beauty an
accompaniment of war, and wisdom of decay. (CW13 112–13; AVA 139)
Yeats included “The Mental Traveller” without comment in his edition of The Poems
of William Blake (1893). But the “Summary” he composed at the end of his unused note
for The Works of William Blake suggests that Yeats had grasped the relationship between
Love and Strife as a paradigm for A Vision some forty years before he came to present,
in 1923, “the first big bundle” of the latter in manuscript (letter to Laurie, 7 September
1923, CL Intelex 4364). Coming either into separation or manifestation, truth and love
become antagonists; love is made a cruelty, an “external law,” against which truth struggles
and makes of its gifts of the spirit, lacerated by suffering, an external beauty until truth
becomes love (NLI 30,354, p. 5).
Even without the evidence of Yeats’s early commentary, the importance of Blake’s
poem to the system developed in A Vision has been apparent for a long time.59 The crux
of the book was hardly a poem that he failed to understand; rather, it proves to have been
a poem he understood better in light of his own invention. With much less Blake evident
in the 1937 Macmillan edition (AVB) because two sections had been dropped that bore
his name, there was still the footnote in “The Completed Symbol” (AVB 189), references
to the Creative Mind and Will in relation to Blake’s symbolic woman and man (AVB 212,
262), and quotations left without attribution because of those cuts (AVB 106, 277) to
testify to the importance of “The Mental Traveller.” Yeats congratulated himself, moreover,
for having found the key to interpreting Blake’s poem:
When my instructors see woman as man’s goal and limit, rather than as mother,
they symbolise her as Mask and Body of Fate, object of desire and object of
thought, the one a perpetual rediscovery of what the other destroys; the seventh
house of the horoscope where one finds friend and enemy; and they set this
double opposite in perpetual opposition to Will and Creative Mind. In Book
III [“The Soul in Judgment”] I shall return to this symbolism, which perhaps
explains, better than any I have used, Blake’s Mental Traveller. (AVB 213)
And such a poem might constitute a potent textual gene for some of Yeats’s own poetry—
for example, in the lyric “Girl’s Song” (“Saw I an old man young / Or young man old” [VP
515; CW1 265]), following seven Crazy Jane poems and counterpointed by “Young Man’s
Song” (“‘She will change,’ I cried, / ‘Into a withered crone.’ / …And all shall bend the
knee / To my offended heart / Until it pardon me” [VP 516; CW1 266]), at the heart of
the sequence “Words for Music Perhaps.” Like Yeats’s intersecting primary and antithetical
gyres, the gene provided a blueprint for oscillating sequences “A Man Young and Old”
and “A Woman Young and Old,” which Yeats began composing from fictive characters
and arranging in complementary units between 1926 and 1928 (see “A Chronology of
240
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
the Composition of the Poems” in YPM). At the same time, he began reassigning to The
Tower poems that had appeared in A Vision A in the direct service of creative mysticism.60
All but one of Yeats’s poems featured in A Vision A appeared in The Tower. The exception was “The Phases of the Moon,” which originated from The Wild Swans at Coole
(1919). The first stanza of “Towards Break of Day,” a poem from the collection Michael
Robartes and the Dancer (1921), had been quoted in A Vision A in evidence of “Complementary Dreaming” but not borne forward into A Vision B just as “The Fool by the Roadside” had failed to do so as the epigraph to “The Gates of Pluto” when Book IV of A
Vision A was deleted.61 Still, the epigraph appeared in The Tower, strategically cycled into
a new context as the concluding movement of a poem entitled “The Hero, the Girl, and
the Fool” (formerly “Cuchulain the Girl and the Fool” in Seven Poems and a Fragment
[1922]). In revising the poem for Collected Poems (1933), the dialogue between the alpha
male and female was cut, leaving “The Fool by the Roadside” to face “Owen Aherne and
his Dancers” and, after that, the sequence “A Man Young and Old,” and in slightly altered
circumstances as “my days” had become “all works” in line 1. Notably, in A Vision A and
The Tower, the Fool had spoken, in the first stanza, of life in view of “The Mental Traveller”
and the doctrine of the Dreaming Back:
When my days that have
From cradle run to grave
From grave to cradle run instead;
When thoughts that a fool
Has wound upon a spool
Are but loose thread, are but loose thread.
These lines forecast one ending, the same ending, for both books:
Such thought, that in it bound
I need no other thing
Wound in mind’s wandering,
As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound. (“All Souls’ Night” 97–100)
In The Collected Poems, the poetic sequence amounts to a complex medley of voices
that balance out, in number and sense, its female complement in The Winding Stair. The
ten songs of “A Man Young and Old” in The Tower version of 1928 were the unnumbered
aggregate of poems first published in April 1926 and May 1927 in The London Mercury
and then assembled into two numbered units in October Blast (Cuala Press, August 1927;
Wade 156). The units were called “The Young Countryman” (numbered I–IV) and “The
Old Countryman” (I–VI), assigning a rough identity to speakers in the order maintained
in The Tower. But in having made a single sequence from two, Yeats gave the ensemble a title paired with a single, universalized speaker, a “Man” young and old. “The poet imagines
a man speaking the passionate moments of his life from youth to age,” but the songs collectively register more than one person can say, “as if he, like the fool by the roadside, is an
unknowing oracle who has somehow managed to say more in the whole than in the parts”
(Adams 175). The first four poems (“First Love,” “Human Dignity,” “The Mermaid,” and
“Metaphors for Poetry”
241
“The Death of the Hare”) are a young man’s story. The pivotal fifth poem (“The Empty
Cup”) is an old man’s reflection on “one’s youth as to [a] cup that a mad man dying of
thirst left half tasted,” as Yeats observed in a letter to Olivia Shakespear (L 721).62 The allusion this past lover would have understood is compound, based on a quatrain addressed
to the young protagonist of “The Tale of the Steward” from the Arabian Nights (“A year or
two I wasted / And then I drank it up, / Love which is love, a cup / You never tasted”) and
on the comical tale of “The Sleeper Wakened,” about the “gift” of magnificent dreaming
to which Harun Al-Rashid was introduced via the feasting cup.63 The comic background
of the story also follows from sources that Yeats mined to celebrate his marriage, notably
Tarot and Grail emblems.
However, the pivotal poem of Yeats’s sequence was not the central poem, nor could
there be a numerically central poem until the sequence was altered slightly in The Collected
Poems. Whereas in The Winding Stair (1929) the poet had devised an eleven-poem arrangement for “A Woman Young and Old,” closing on the choral translation “From ‘The
Antigone,’” an ingenious decision was made to transpose two external poems that had
followed the male sequence in 1928: “The Three Monuments” and “From ‘Oedipus at
Colonus.’” Hence the latter poem became poem XI of “A Man Young and Old,” complementing “From ‘The Antigone’” and making a middle lyric of “His Memories” (VI), a
poem since associated with a carnal union between Yeats (Paris) and Maud Gonne (Helen
of Troy) in 1908:64
My arms are like the twisted thorn
And yet there beauty lay;
The first of all the tribe lay there
And did such pleasure take—
She who had brought great Hector down
And put all Troy to wreck—
That she cried into this ear,
“Strike me if I shriek.” (VP 455, ll. 11–18; CW1 228)
This remembered moment of rapture by the old male speaker of the poem has its complement (or Blakean “contrary”) in the plight of love in “Chosen” (“A Woman Young and
Old,” VI):
The lot of love is chosen. I learnt that much
Struggling for an image on the track
Of the whirling Zodiac.
Scarce did he my body touch,
Scarce sank he from the west
Or found a subterranean rest
On the maternal midnight of my breast
Before I had marked him on his northern way,
And seemed to stand although in bed I lay. (VP 534–35, ll. 1–9; CW1 277)
242
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Living the moment and accepting her fate as chosen, the female speaker offers a contrasting view to the embittered, nostalgic young man old in the contrary sequence.
Blending elements of John Donne’s “A Nocturnall upon St. Lucies day” with some
actual study of Macrobius’s fifth-century commentary on “Scipio’s Dream,” described
in both A Vision A (AVA 152–54, 162) and B (AVB 69) concerning movements from
gyre to sphere (Yeats’s Thirteenth Cycle or Cone), the soul of the man and of the woman
attain their final resting place. At that instant in Yeats’s poem, the ultimate objective
attained affirms the mystic aspect of conjugal union in which there is only one love, two
lovers but one soul.65 Zodiacal images come with great passion, as in Donne’s poem,
beginning with an image of eclipse in manuscript that permeated, with revision, into a
case of poetic expropriation: the “Nocturnall” of Donne initially attaches “midnight”
to the speaker’s idea that her life’s “flood” might be caught in “night’s deep overflowing
cup,” a symbol of both sexual consummation and spiritual unity. Possibly a distortion
of Donne’s discussion of degrees of nothingness in his poem, the apocalyptic gyres or
“whirling Zodiac” are here evidence of the affirmative metaphysics of “that intoxicating
‘St. Lucies Day’” (L 710), which had, by 21 February 1926, lent its stanza to Yeats’s
own poem, “just finished.” The speaker (that is the generalized Woman of the sequence)
vows:
…If questioned on
My utmost pleasure with a man
By some new-married bride, I take
That stillness for a theme
Where his heart my heart did seem
And both adrift on the miraculous stream
Where—wrote a learned astrologer—
The Zodiac is changed into a sphere. (VP 535, ll. 11–18; CW1 277–78)
As Yeats noted on “The Mental Traveller,” if Man makes a desert, Woman casts a
tent in the desert. They are plighted as protagonists of two stories. They are met, equal
for the moment, but perpetually bound to move in opposite directions and at values
inversely related to each other. Yeats’s reading of Cicero’s fictional “Dream of Scipio”
in The Republic and Macrobius’s fifth-century Commentary for A Vision gives the lovers’ plight a cosmic significance metaphorically. For A Vision A, Yeats had before him
a Theosophical Society booklet, Volume V of Collectanea Hermetica (1894) edited by
W. Wynn Westcott, which bore Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis (translated into English)
and but three shorter pieces, an essay and two notes on other subjects written by fellow
members of the Golden Dawn: Percy Bullock (“L. O.”), Frank Coleman (“A. E. A.”),
and Westcott (“S. A.”).66 From late January to March 1926, Yeats’s unofficial consultant
on Kusta ben Luka, Gyraldus, and Latin-to-English translation, Frank Pearce Sturm,
put Macrobius squarely before Yeats and clearly helped him see the need for a thoroughgoing revision of A Vision. Both the Latin of the Teubner edition of the Commentary
(1893) and his own translation of it (Lib I, Cap. xii, Sec. 5) was placed in evidence as
the latest instance of “the voice of W. B. Giraldus, of cones & gyres,” in his reading (FPS
92).67 Hence the credit in A Vision B to Sturm, who, in Yeats’s words, “has also found
“Metaphors for Poetry”
243
me passages in Dr. Dee, in Macrobius, in an unknown mediaeval writer, which describe
souls changing from gyre to sphere and from sphere to gyre. Presently I shall have much
to say of the sphere as the final place of rest” (AVB 69). After reading Yeats’s poem “Chosen” and its “vague notes” in The Winding Stair (New York, 1929), Sturm wrote again
to quote the same passage in the Commentary, explaining that Macrobius “tells how
the descending soul, when it reaches the contact point of zodiac & milky-way, changes
from a sphere to a cone (not from a cone to a sphere),” allowing, dismissively, that “It
would be folly to hope for accuracy in a poet.…I hear your contemptuous mutter[,]
‘wretched pedant,’ but I don’t care” (FPS 102). Yeats’s note in the Macmillan edition
of The Winding Stair (London, 1933) acknowledged Sturm as a “too little known poet
and mystic” (cf. “poet and scholar” in A Vision B) and as the poem’s authority on the
“learned astrologer,” Macrobius, in l. 17 of the poem. Leaving the poem uncorrected
and having it both ways in A Vision B by means of some “unknown mediaeval writer,”
Yeats pointed to the passage
from Macrobius’s comment upon “Scipio’s Dream” (Lib. I. Cap. XII. Sec. 5):
“…when the sun is in Aquarius, we sacrifice to the Shades, for it is in the sign
inimical to human life; and from thence the meeting-place of zodiac and Milky
Way, the descending soul by its defluction is drawn out of the spherical, the sole
divine form, into the cone.” (VP 831; CW1 607)
Figure V (below) in the edition of the Commentary to which Sturm twice referred Yeats
(subsequently cited in the note above)68 should be helpful.
244
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
The concentric spheres in diagram V are represented by circles ABCD and SXTV, respectively the celestial and the mundane, or earthly, spheres. The diagonal line drawn through
both, like an axis, is the “Zodiac line,” as defined by Macrobius’s editor William Harris Stahl
for the line between the solstices.69 Horizontal lines to denote the earth’s zones, or belts,
run parallel to those of the heavens that govern them. The Zodiac line FP is marked by the
tropical signs of Capricorn and Cancer as “the sun never travels beyond Cancer nor south
beyond Capricorn” to cross the torrid zone (ibid. 210). These two signs, called the “portals
of the sun” by natural philosophers, defined the path by which souls were supposed to have
passed either in their transit from heaven to earth or vice versa, Capricorn (F) being called
“the portal of the gods,” as souls returned by way of it to their “abode of immortality,” while
Cancer (P) was called “the portal of men” because by its way souls descended “to the infernal
regions.” Continuing in this vein in Book I, Chapter XII, Section 5, Macrobius considered
the descent of souls in terms of contrary influences effected by Leo and Aquarius (next to
Capricorn) as they reached the intersection of the Zodiac and the Milky Way:
The soul, descending from the place where the zodiac and the Milky Way intersect, is protracted in its downward course from a sphere, which is the only divine
form, into a cone, just as a line is strung from a point and passes this indivisible
state into length; from this point, which is a monad, it here comes into a dyad,
which is its first protraction.70
Yeats’s inversion of this protraction from cone to divine sphere in “Chosen” is intentional,
for portraying sexual rapture as spiritual ascent is natural to love poetry, indeed a Metaphysical figure in Donne’s “Aire and Angels” (“So thy love may be my loves spheare” [25]) and
magnificent conceit in “The Sunne Rising” (“Shine here to us, and thou art every where; /
This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy spheare” [30]). In Donne’s time, the winter solstice,
which marks the sun’s entry into Capricorn, fell on St. Lucy’s Day, “the yeares midnight.”
Yeats’s countervailing travelers were understood to be “double cones,” a man and woman as
“competing gyres growing at one another’s expense” (CW13 108; AVA 134) but in “Chosen”
plighted heart to heart, the signification of Capricorn on the Great Wheel of incarnations
(CW13 14; AVA 13).71
V
The Blakean crux of A Vision and the kind of oracular poetry that it seems to have engendered in Yeats’s work does not end in the paired sequences from The Tower and The
Winding Stair, of course. One could turn for additional examples to Crazy Jane and the
lyric company she keeps in Words for Music Perhaps, to the old hermit Ribh on the topic
of love in the “Supernatural Songs” of A Full Moon in March (1935) and the play with
the same title, and to those broadside lyrics in New Poems (1938) written in competition
with Dorothy Wellesley. The gene was a fantastically fertile one as it developed from
Yeats’s immersion in Blake at different times and from his resourceful wife’s unseen
communicators between late 1917 and 1925. Combining such stimuli to the imagination, though only two of the many that would occur on the least eventful day in the
life of a poet, tremendously profited Yeats in the making of poetry, not to mention the
“Metaphors for Poetry”
245
writing of his plays and short fiction. Aside from the oblique treatment of “Huddon,
Duddon, and Daniel O’Leary” in this essay, the making of Stories of Michael Robartes
and His Friends (not originally intended for A Vision, it seems) remains a tale for another
time and outside my topic. The “poems of A Vision” are the poems by Yeats in that book
without counting several lyrics by other poets besides “The Mental Traveller.” Given
the essay’s focus on poetry, including several discussed for sake of background, several
contemporary plays for dancers were considered because their story, a new development
for Yeats as a verse-dramatist, channeled much of Yeats’s creative energy over the years
required to write A Vision in its original state. One might easily project the philosophy onto the second generation of his dance plays—on The Resurrection as a sequel to
Calvary; on The King of the Great Clock Tower as a precursor to A Full Moon in March,
subsequently rewritten to become its sequel; on his masked Sophoclean tragedies; and
on The Herne’s Egg, Purgatory, and The Death of Cuchulain as last plays. Yet it seems sufficient to me to leave off with the verse sequences of The Tower and The Winding Stair as
far as making projections from A Vision to poems that at least were written during the
rewriting of that extraordinary text.
As early as 1919, the emergence of a “set” of philosophical dialogues, lyric poems, and
stories about Michael Robartes and pseudo-Arabian lore began to draw fire from critics
who decried a waywardness or lack of intelligibility in the turn that Yeats had just taken
in his poetry. But, as Michael Sidnell has observed, “the evidence of Yeats’s poetic inanition, the intercourse with the phantasmagoria, was, of course, the opening of a splendid
phase in Yeats’s work, not the sterile conclusion to it.”72 On the poems to which the writing of A Vision contributed most, critics complained impatiently about his being misled
by “spooks” and, consequently, writing foolishly and unintelligibly,73 reminding one of
Pound’s affectionate ribbing of Uncle William in The Pisan Cantos and Yeats’s pre-emptive
self-defense in A Packet for Ezra Pound: “I remember that Swedenborg has described all
those between the celestial state and death as plastic, fantastic and deceitful, the dramatis
personae of our dreams” (AVB 23). Perhaps intended as an ironically self-referential play
on Swedenborg as sentinel at the tomb of Poetic Genius, his writings the folded shroud,
or, to mix metaphors, merely the index of “already publish’d books,” as Blake wrote in
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Plate 21: 5–6). Concluding A Vision A and B with
the same lines, about contemplating “the damned [who] have howled away their hearts”
and “the blessed [who] dance,” allows Yeats a subtle self-ribbing, a humble effacement
of those “mummy truths” told in the book as a whole rather more than revealed in the
elegiac “All Souls’ Night: Epilogue to ‘A Vision’” (VP 474 ll. 95–6; CW1 234). The poem
was assigned the same place in The Tower. As a complement to the peregrine soul of the
first-person speaker in “Sailing to Byzantium,” the “mind’s wandering / As mummies in
the mummy-cloth are wound” (ll. 99–100) recalls what the famous imperative bade the
sages at the outset of the collection: “Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, / And be
the singing-masters of my soul” (VP 408, ll. 19–20; CW1 197). Metaphors suggest such
different things, of course, depending on context. Something like the ritual folding and
unfolding of the cloth, the curtain ceremony in Yeats’s plays for dancers, is inherent, too,
in the metaphor of a literary work viewed as the linen clothes of an author, folded up. In
fine, I believe, Yeats preferred the role of poet to that of prophet although, with dramatic
irony, he never discounted that a great poet might also be a prophet.
246
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
Sounding its own note, Margaret Mills Harper’s Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual and Literary Collaboration of
George and W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) develops a premise acknowledged by Yeats
himself but first investigated in detail in the two volumes of MYV and supported by the evidence of YVP
in four additional volumes. She argues convincingly, too, that what the instructors communicated to Yeats
in the automatic script, “misquoted” by him when referring to pages filed with the manuscript of A Packet
for Ezra Pound, was “philosophy to give you new images you ought not to use it as philosophy” (ibid. 90).
She restates the case in her contribution to this volume.
Wayne K. Chapman, Yeats’s Poetry in the Making: “Sing Whatever Is Well Made” (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); hereafter cited as YPM. See especially chapters 5, 7, and 9.
See BL Add. MS 54897, f. 197.
See BL Add. MS 54898, ff. 11–15. On the correspondence concerning rights for poems appearing in British and American periodicals, see note 30, below.
Ronald Schuchard, “Hawk and Butterfly: The Double Vision of The Wild Swans at Coole (1917, 1919),”
YA10 (1993) 112.
W. B. Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole: Manuscript Materials, ed. Stephen Parrish (Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press, 1994); hereafter cited as Parrish.
For a detailed account of the derivation of Later Poems (1922) as such a compendium, see YPM, Ch. 3.
Inspiration for this strategy came when reading the introduction of W. B. Yeats, “At the Hawk’s Well” and
“The Cat and the Moon”: Manuscript Materials, ed. Andrew Parkin (Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 2010), xxv, where Parrish is quoted at somewhat greater length.
Yeats’s debt to More and Taylor for the infusion of Platonic theology in “Shepherd and Goatherd” is discussed by F. A. C. Wilson, W. B. Yeats and Tradition (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 201. See also below,
note 35, on More. In reading for his select edition of Spenser, Yeats made particularly interesting notations
in WBGYL 1992A (YL 1978A)—The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. Payne Collier, 5 vols. (London: Bell,
1862), 2:246 and 255. Beside The Faerie Queene, II.ix.22 (with vertical strokes to the left of a corresponding footnote), Yeats made his first of three attempts to visualize the “goodly Diapase” of Spenser’s House of
Alma, avoiding, as Collier directs, the “mystical interpretation of…Sir Kenelm Digby.” This rather crudely
anthropomorphic figure is followed by two uncharacteristically elaborate tower designs sketched beside
stanzas 47 and 48.
Yeats, in an elegiac mood, often recalled Sidney, as he did in 1910 after the death of Synge. In tribute, “J.
M. Synge and the Ireland of His Time” (CW4 234; E&I 323) reprinted ll. 3–6 from Song VII of Astrophel
and Stella (WBGYL 1931; YL 1917) to support Yeats’s view that Synge had failed to articulate a “definite
philosophy” only because he was a “pure artist.” Hone asserts that Yeats trained for this essay, in May 1910,
by “reading a little of Milton’s prose every morning before he began to work”—Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats,
1865–1939 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1943), 252.
Two of the four Robartes-Aherne manuscripts contain lines from the poem. Because of this, and also because the poem was not originally conceived around either one of these characters, as one may read in National Library of Ireland MS 13,587(21), the poem may have preceded the prose dialogues. See, too, YVP4
17 and 49 n27 regarding the “Discoveries of Michael Robartes” typescript (“We have now come to Yeats’s
chambers and I can see by the light in his study that he is at home”; cf. VP 373, ll. 11–18; CW1 165).
See AVB 19–20, WBGYL 1598–99A (YL 1586–87A) and 1601–7A (YL 1589–95A); see also WBGYL
1090–94 (YL 1080–4) (much annotated), Landor’s Imaginary Conversations and verse dialogues. On 1
December 1916, Yeats told Alexandra Schepeler that he was reading Landor while composing a letter to his
“daimon,” Leo Africanus (HM 28379, Huntington Library, San Marino, California; see below, note 25).
Many of Yeats’s queries for his spirit “communicators” were about how specific people, living and dead,
related to the system that evolved in this way. Some of those people were cited as examples of the twenty-eight incarnations in A Vision. Milton, as Harper shows (MYV2 42, 93, and 170), originally stood with
Horace, Dr Johnson, Flaubert, and Napoleon in Phase 21 (see YVP1 192–93; YVP4 44, 113), a slot finally
occupied by Shaw, Wells, and George Moore.
Surprisingly, T. R. Henn’s frontispiece in The Lonely Tower: Studies in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats (New York:
Pellegrini, 1952) is not the illustration Yeats would have encountered in Palmer’s book. The picture differs
somewhat in content and substantially in form, being the reversal of Palmer’s illustration in The Shorter
Poems of John Milton. Although Yeats may have known this other engraving, since he was an expert on Palmer, as he was on the illustrators Blake and Calvert—see WBGYL 340–41, 1333–34, 2217–18 (YL 333–4,
“Metaphors for Poetry”
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
247
1320–1, 2202–3), and YA4 (1986) 286—this is not the picture that brought him to Milton’s text. For the
correct image, see YPM 136.
In John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Odyssey, 1957), 74.
No doubt, Athene appears because she is the goddess of wisdom. Her transfer to l. 45 in VP (“Athene takes
Achilles by the hair”) receives comment in “Dove or Swan” (CW13 177; AVA 215). Jeffares’s speculations
(NC 174) about the influence of “Il Penseroso” on Shelley’s “Prince Athanase, A Fragment” (1817) seem
apt given the complex Yeats discloses at the outset of his poem. But emphasis on Shelley is misplaced
in light of additional evidence and in light of Shelley’s poem itself, which features no tower at all, but a
soul which had “wedded Wisdom…clothed in which he sate / Apart from men, as in a lonely tower…”
(ll. 31–33; emphasis added). In his first revision, Yeats associated “Shelleyan” “subterranean caves,” the
source of the river’s “bubbling up,” with the well “of natural instincts”—a passage excised from the poem
before completion.
The conceit of oil and wick in “The Living Beauty” (VP 333–34; CW1 139), a poem addressed to the
young Iseult Gonne, is reminiscent of Donne’s line “We are Tapers too, and at our owne cost die.” The
Donnean nature of Yeats’s metaphor seems especially apparent in NLI 13,587(4)—and in the fragment
which joins the manuscript of “The Phases of the Moon” in NLI 13,587(21).
The scorings in Yeats’s copy of Pater’s Plato and Platonism (London: Macmillan, 1893 [WBGYL 1549; YL
1538]) often mark passages or phrasings that caught Yeats’s attention. Occasionally, particularly between
pp. 60 and 64 in “Plato and the Doctrine of Number,” the poet seems mostly attracted to the length of
Pater’s sentences. Several marginally scored passages are accompanied by the comment “long.” One such
passage, on pp. 67–68, bears the emphatic remark “style!” Obviously, such evidence reinforces a simple
point Yeats confessed in “The Phases of the Moon”: that Pater’s prose style influenced his own.
Kathleen Raine, “Yeats, the Tarot and the Golden Dawn,” Yeats the Initiate: Essays on Certain Themes in
the Work of W. B. Yeats (Mountrath, Co. Laois: Dolmen Press, 1986; London: Allen and Unwin, 1986),
235-44. We might recall, too, the similarity between Blake’s twenty-seven churches of the time-world (or
“Mundane egg”) in Milton and Yeats’s twenty-eight phases of existence in A Vision. Raine’s “From Blake to
A Vision” (Yeats the Initiate, 106–176) offers detailed insight into such complicated parallels.
The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), 730. The Romantic poet and artist must not be far in the background, for Yeats knew
well Blake’s Milton and Blake’s illustrations for Milton’s works. See WBGYL 213 and 1333–34 (YL 206
and 1320–1). What is more, Yeats made considerable use of Blake’s system in the 1925 edition of A Vision.
Stan Smith, “Porphyry’s Cup: Yeats, Forgetfulness and the Narrative Order,” YA5 (1987) 38; Warwick Gould,
“‘A Lesson for the Circumspect’: W. B. Yeats’s Two Versions of A Vision and The Arabian Nights,” in ed. Peter
L. Caracciolo, “The Arabian Nights” in English Literature, (London: Macmillan, 1988), 245–6, 254 and 277.
See Harper, MYV1 54 and 97, and CVA (notes) 10, on how the “28 mansions” got into the automatic
script and the poem, having been marked in Chaucer and typed out by Mrs. Yeats. The text she used
(hence the one followed here) was The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Walter W. Skeat, 6 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894) vol. 4, Canterbury Tales, Group F, 1117–25, 1129–34 (pp. 493–94) and
corresponding notes (5:392). Cf. WBGYL 385–88; YL 376–8. In the Yeats library at the present time, the
Skeat edition of Chaucer’s The Poetical Works (WBGYL 385; YL 376) is a 3-volume set of 1903.
The text presented here is from the Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Douglas Bush et al. 8 vols.
(New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1953–82) 2:254–56. The Richard Garnett edition of the Prose of Milton (London: Walter Scott, 1894; see YA4 [1986] 287) is the probable source of
Yeats’s quotation. But possibly his attention was first drawn to this passage by the editor’s preface (1: xvi)
in The Prose Works of John Milton, ed. J. A. St. John, 5 vols. (London: Bohn’s Library, 1848–54), where it
is prominently featured (quoted in full from 3:194–5) as “a grand dithyrambic digression.” I am grateful
to Professor John Creaser for alerting me to this possibility.
The Phaedrus he may have consulted is in vol. 1 of a five-volume set of Plato, The Dialogues, tr. Benjamin
Jowett (1875 [WBGYL 1598; YL 1586]). The set originally belonged to Yeats’s school friend Stephen
Gwynn, and it is impossible to say when Yeats came by it. The only notes and markings in vol. 1 seem to
belong to Gwynn (in Phaedo). The closest thing in the Jowett Phaedrus to Milton’s metaphor the “Towr
of…Apogaeum” is a “steep” incline “to the top of the vault of heaven” up which the procession of the gods
“march in their appointed order” (p. 453). See Donald T. Torchiana, “Yeats and Plato,” Modern British
Literature 4.1 (1979): 5–16.
See above, note 9.
Yeats’s fiction was, as Raine observes, “a kind of scholarship in reverse” (“Giraldus,” Yeats the Initiate, 410).
248
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
She also argues effectively that his fictional author was a composite of a number of historical sources
centering upon the sixteenth-century Neo-Platonist and courtier, L. G. Gyraldus of Ferrara, rather than
the twelfth-century Giraldus Cambrensis and other candidates proposed by Yeats scholars. She cites Robartes’s story in AVA xvii/CW13 lix (told second-hand by Aherne), which associates Gyraldus with Dr
John Dee (see WBGYL 513; YL 501) and the alchemist Edward Kelley. Travel literature such as Charles M.
Doughty’s Wanderings in Arabia (see WBGYL 550–51; YL 538-39), mentioned by Raine, found an avid
reader in Yeats, who believed he had discovered his antithetical self during various spiritualist events and in
A Geographical Historie of Africa (1600 [WBGYL 1116; YL 1106]) by John Leo or “Leo Africanus.” Yeats
recorded both sides of their correspondence across time but found “Leo” a hindrance to experiments with
Mrs. Yeats. See Arnold Goldman, “Yeats, Spiritualism, and Psychical Research,” YO 116–122, and Steve
L. Adams and George M. Harper, “The Manuscript of ‘Leo Africanus,’” YA1 (1982) 3–47.
George M. Harper, W. B. Yeats and W. T. Horton: The Record of an Occult Friendship (Atlantic Highlands,
NJ: Humanities Press, 1980), 35, 58–63. See also MYV1 10–15, 22, and MYV2 277–8, 344–45, and 398.
See again Harper, MYV1 121–22 and MYV2 316–17, on the impact of the Platonic Horton-Locke liaison on
W. B. and George Yeats; and especially Harper’s interpretation of Mrs. Yeats’s “symbolic” role as read from the
script (MYV2 292) and of the tower as “symbol of conjugal union” (MYV1 245). See also my review “From
Platonic Metaphor to Yeatsian Scripture,” Cauda Pavonis: Studies in Hermeticism, Spring 1989, 12–14.
Milton, Complete Prose, 2:256.
See ibid., n9.
Smith, in YA5 (1987) 39, 19.
Yeats’s two other uses of the quotation, in 1910 and 1935, respectively, are discussed in ibid., pp. 40–41.
Pater, Plato and Platonism (London: Macmillan, 1893 [WBGYL 1549; YL 1538]), 166–7. Pater’s phrase
“the dialogue of the mind with itself ” was drawn from Arnold’s 1853 Preface to his Poems. The passage, on
Arnold’s withdrawal of Empedocles on Etna, specifically came to mind when Yeats referred to it, in 1936, in
OBMV xxxiv (CW5 199).
Pater, Plato and Platonism, 161.
Following Yeats’s discussion on the pages I cite, Yeats anticipated his cook-dough metaphor of 1918 with
a similar sculptor-clay metaphor which concluded his work of mid-1917. Being “in the place where the
Daimon [or the anti-self ] is,” he writes, “I am full of uncertainty, not knowing when I am the finger, when
the clay” (CW5 32; Myth 366). An old and not very widely accessible discussion of More’s idea may be
found in Gerta Huttemann’s dissertation Wesen der Dichtung und Aufgabe des Dichters bei William Butler
Yeats (Bonn: Leopold, 1929), 36–41. Yeats makes explicit use of More in Per Amica Silentia Lunae; in
“Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places” (CW5 47–73; Ex 30–70); in “Witches and Wizards and
Irish Folklore” (CW5 74–83) and “Notes” for Lady Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (CW5
258–88); and in “My Friend’s Book” (CW5 113–17; E&I 412–18).
See W. B. Yeats, “The Dreaming of the Bones” and “Calvary”: Manuscript Materials, ed. Wayne K. Chapman
(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), especially pp. xxxv–xlii, for the detailed account that
I cannot afford to give here and below.
Janis Haswell, “Resurrecting Calvary: A Reconstructive Interpretation of W. B. Yeats’s Play and Its Making,” in ed. Wayne K. Chapman and Warwick Gould, Yeats’s Collaborations: YA15 (2002) 159–89.
Harper argues that the alignment of Yeats’s “three birds” and the play’s three masked women lacked a
fourth woman (possibly Olivia Shakespear) in the supposed “tetradic plan in Yeats’s life.” That plan was to
bring this fourth Cuchulain play into the cycle—following On Baile’s Strand, The Green Helmet, and At the
Hawk’s Well, allowing Yeats a fifth at the end of life, The Death of Cuchulain, twenty years later.
Birgit Bjersby (Birgit [Johansson] Bramsbäck), The Interpretation of the Cuchulain Legend in the Works of W.
B. Yeats (Darby, PA: Folcroft Editions, 1970; Copenhagen and Dublin: Uppsala Irish Studies, 1970), 35;
hereafter cited as Bjersby. Bjersby actually gives “all the ghosts of the hill” rather than the manuscript’s “all
the goats” (see YPM 102).
In “Cuchulain[,] the Girl and the Fool,” a vagrant dialogue in Seven Poems and a Fragment (Dundrum:
Cuala, 1922) but not picked up in The Tower as the other lyrics were, The Girl turns the mirror trope around
as she considers the way the hero is regarded by other men: “I am jealous of the looks men turn on you / For
all men love your worth; and I must rage / At my own image in the looking-glass / That’s so unlike myself that
when you praise it / It is as though you praise another, or even / Mock me with praise of my mere opposite”
(16, ll. 1–6; cf. VP 447–48 variants).
The Japanese models for Yeats’s first three adaptations from the Noh are roughly as follows: Yoro (At the
Hawk’s Well), Nishikigi (The Dreaming of the Bones), and Awoi no Uye (The Only Jealousy of Emer). Calvary
“Metaphors for Poetry”
249
seems to be tenuously modeled on Kakitsubata. Begun in the context of the third of these adaptations, the
unfinished fifth play for dancers may have combined features of two models: that of the fisher characters and
the dance of wind and wave in Hagoromo as well as the dialogue between Old Man and Old Woman in Genjo.
All of these models were at hand in the Pound-Fenollosa translations. See Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound: Translations, with an introduction by Hugh Kenner (New York: New Directions, 1963), 308–14 and 345–52.
42. In a letter from Yeats to “Dobbs” written seven days later, this time on the Lady Ottoline Morrell/Bertrand
Russell social set, the term “whirlpool” was applied to a “sky bride” (or possibly “shy bride”) by the name of
Miss Baker (27 November [1922]; CL Intelex 4219).
43. Huddon and Duddon are rival farmers in “Donald and His Neighbors,” a tale that Yeats reprinted in FFTIP
299–303, giving the source as a “chap-book” entitled “Hibernian Tales,” “mentioned by Thackeray in his Irish
Sketch Book” (1842 and later), where the story is quoted in full. The Thackeray-Yeats version was reprinted
in the anthology Irish Literature (cited above), but Yeats seems to have known another version, “Huddon,
Duddon and Donald O’Neary,” credited to Alfred Nutt and appearing in Celtic Fairy Tales, ed. Joseph Jacobs
(1892 and later). Yeats’s poem “Huddon, Duddon and Daniel O’Leary” serves as a light-spirited epigraph to
Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends: An Extract from a Record Made by His Pupils (Cuala Press, 1931;
Wade 167), and both poem and story appear in AVB. See Walter Kelly Hood, “Two Occult Manuscripts,”
YO 204–224. Possibly, in the play’s 1918 draft, the Old Man calls the Young Girl “pretty Huddon” because
she is pretty and naive, like the foolish Huddon and Duddon in the folktale, who jump in a river and drown
because they are persuaded that “all the sight of cattle and gold that ever was seen is there” (FFTIP 399). Like
her mistakenly jealous sweetheart, in the end the girl jumps and drowns, too, but for love rather than money.
44. The Cat and the Moon, a “Kiogen” of 301 lines intended “to come as a relaxation of attention between, let
us say ‘The Hawk’s Well’ and ‘The Dreaming of the Bones,’” is not “much longer than the others” (VPl 805;
CW2 897; that is, than the four “plays for dancers” published in Wade 129 and 130).
45. See W. B. Yeats, Michael Robartes and the Dancer: Manuscript Materials, ed. Thomas Parkinson with Anne
Brannen (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 122–23.
46. The only parallel to silver-shod horses elsewhere in Yeats occurs in The Unicorn from the Stars (VPl 682,
Act II, l. 261; CW2 222): “the horses themselves shod with no less than silver!” a line spoken by the beggar
Johnny Bocach and possibly written by Lady Gregory.
47. NLI 36,263/29, f. 35. Neither does Parkinson cite the fragment of “The Second Coming” (f. 33) though
quoting from NLI 36,254/16 (as “MBY1”) in the Cornell Yeats edition of Michael Robartes and the Dancer.
48. George Mills Harper and Robert Anthony Martinich, “Sleep and Dream Notebooks: Introduction.”
49. By 1937 (in AVB), the “sly ‘Introduction’” by “O. A.” had been replaced by the even more elaborate craftiness
of A Packet for Ezra Pound (Cuala, 1928; Wade 163) and Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends (Cuala,
1931; Wade 167), reprinted with “The Phases of the Moon” to introduce the five books of the treatise. The
poem “Desert Geometry or the Gift of Harun Al-Raschid” was also deleted.
50. The fragment, reproduced in facsimile and transcribed in YPM 124, is older than the fair-hand copy (NLI
30,540) in W. B. Yeats, The Tower (1928): Manuscript Materials, edited by Richard J. Finneran with Jared
Curtis and Ann Saddlemyer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). Evidence in support of that claim
is given in YPM 318–19, n52. See Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines: W. B. Yeats’s Poetry in the Making (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 54–86.
51. See Wade, “Contributions to Periodicals,” 351–52.
52. In The Tower (1928), Yeats said that “The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid” was a poem in “an unfinished set of
poems, dialogues and stories about John Ahern and Michael Robartes, Kusta ben Luka, a philosopher of
Bagdad, and his Bedouin followers” (VP 830; CW1 700). Without delving into the extant unpublished
writings on the subject, Michael J. Sidnell explores the “published relics” of this “set,” which he defines as
“a number of poems and plays, some notes, some stories, and A Vision,” and explores much the same body
of Yeats’s work as I have been considering in this essay; see his “Mr. Yeats, Michael Robartes and Their
Circle,” YO 225. Interestingly, in the same book, Walter Kelly Hood transcribes two unpublished “relics”
of the set, “Appendix by Michael Robartes” and “Michael Robartes Foretells.” His essay is cited above in
note 43. “Michael Robartes Foretells” features the fictitious Huddon, Duddon, Denice [sic], and O’Leary
and might be a rejected tailpiece written for AVB around 1936, to follow “All Souls’ Night” and complement the introductory “Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends.” See Hood, YO 215–17 and 219–24.
53. The editors of Scribner’s recent critical edition of AVA do not comment on this obviously comic vow but clearly
grasp Yeats’s game in the post-dating of Owen Aherne’s two submissions to “May, 1925,” after Yeats’s “Dedication” of “February.” Aherne’s “date may not point to a date of composition, but it does further the fiction that
Aherne wrote the essay after WBY’s book manuscript was finished, so that Aherne can make reference to and
250
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
pass judgment upon it,” say editors Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper, CW13 234, n28.
54. I leave it to A Vision editors Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper to provide the details of these
and other textual alterations made toward AVB. Their scholarly edition of the 1937 text is forthcoming in
Scribner’s multi-volume Collected Works of W. B. Yeats.
55. The most interesting, thoroughly annotated copy of AVA in the W. B. Yeats Library (WBGYL 2466b; YL
2433c) provides “Extracts for new Vision to be taken from the book & as corrected here / WBY.” Changes
marked in this and, to a lesser degree, in three other copies are noticed in the Appendices of A Vision
(1925), eds. Paul and Harper, CW13 340–52.
56. See note 43, on Yeats’s Irish sources (one of them edited by him in FFTIP) for the characters Peter Huddon, John Duddon, and Daniel O’Leary (also acknowledged in the verse-epigraph of “Stories of Michael
Robartes and His Friends”). The apocryphal Yeats poem “Huddon, Duddon and Daniel O’Leary” is wry
but also perplexing in suggesting that the eponymous characters from the folktale have been applied to his
fictional characters the same way a subtext applies to a text: “I put three persons in their place / That despair
and keep the pace / And love wench Wisdom’s cruel face” (8–10). The epigraph initiates the narrative and
transitions from Pound’s lyric “The Return,” quoted at the end of “To Ezra Pound”: “See, they return; ah, see
the tentative / Movements, and the slow feet, / The trouble in the pace and the uncertain / Wavering!” Yeats’s
epigraph is apocryphal because subsequently deleted from the canon with only a trace left of it in “Tom the
Lunatic” in Words for Music Perhaps (1932) and The Winding Stair (1933) (VP 528–29; CW1 273).
57. See also W. B. Yeats, The Tower (1928): A Facsimile Edition, introduction and notes by Richard J. Finneran
(New York: Scribner, 2004), 110. In AVB, Yeats recalls that his wife had originally declined to let him
divulge her “share” of the work, causing him to invent “an unnatural story of an Arabian traveller which I
must amend and find a place for some day because I was fool enough to write half a dozen poems that are
unintelligible without it” (AVB 19). The tone is dismissive but there is no claim that the poem is unfinished.
58. Paul and Harper frequently note Yeats’s discrepancies from Erdman’s Blake. On Yeats’s limited knowledge
of the pre-Socratics outside Burnet’s book, see Matthew DeForrest, “Philosophical Differences and Yeats’s
Corroborative System in A Vision,” South Carolina Review 32.1 (Fall 1999): 212–28.
59. See, for example, Virginia Moore, The Unicorn: William Butler Yeats’ Search for Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 278; and Hazard Adams, Blake and Yeats: The Contrary Vision (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1955; 2nd ed., New York: Russell and Russell, 1968), 240–43. In Yeats’s A Vision (1925), Paul and
Harper state that “The Mental Traveller” “is most important to the understanding of A Vision” (CW13 271),
and they cite several occasions in which the automatic scripts investigated specific parallels. Like A Critical
Edition of Yeats’s “A Vision” (1925), edited by George Mills Harper and Walter Kelly Hood (London: Macmillan Press, 1978), the documentation of Catherine Paul’s and Margaret Harper’s work in CW13 suggests
that Blake was profoundly influential on the whole Vision project in its first iteration of 1925.
60. I find useful here Hazard Adams’s term “oscillating,” which he applies to the voices and arrangements of
poems in The Tower and Winding Stair generally; his attention to the lyric sequences of the latter is greater
than that of the former, understandably, in The Book of Yeats’s Poems (Tallahassee: Florida State University
Press, 1990), cf. 173–78 and 203–13; hereafter cited as Adams. This was due to the complication of the
“Words for Music Perhaps” sequence. The appendix affirms Adams’s claim that The Tower sequence “A
Man Young and Old” begins “to presage The Winding Stair and Other Poems, with its sequences and aphoristic prophecies arranged deliberately without respect to ‘chronology,’ as the dated poems show” (173).
61. In A Packet for Ezra Pound, Yeats employed a lyric called “Meditations upon Death” to mediate between
the prose sections “Rapallo” and “Introduction to the Great Wheel.” The poem, in two parts, became two
poems in The Winding Stair: “At Algeciras—a Meditation upon Death” and “Mohini Chatterjee,” respectively. Thus, revision involved addition as well as subtraction although neither new poem found any place
in AVB when A Packet for Ezra Pound was substituted for the introductory inventions of 1925.
62. For an account of the making of this poem and its sources, see Wayne K. Chapman, Yeats and English
Renaissance Literature (London: Macmillan Press, 1991), 174–76 and 257 n100.
63. The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night Rendered from the Literal and Complete Version of Dr. J. C.
Mardrus and Collated with Other Sources by E. Powys Mathers, 4 vols. (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964),
1:197 and 3:230–267 (cf. London: The Casanova Society, 1923 [WBGYL 258; YL 251]).
64. See Moore, The Unicorn, 202. Foster dates it to December 1908 (Life1 393–96).
65. On the making of “Chosen” and its sources, see Chapman, Yeats and English Renaissance Literature, 179–84.
66. The absence of Macrobius’s Commentary was no doubt a matter of economy. The booklet (WBGYL 397; YL
387) originated from the library of Yeats’s uncle G. T. Pollexfen and contains crib notes on authorities on the
“Great Year” (on back leaf in WBY’s hand) and a later draft (on back of title page) of the passage in AVB 243,
“Metaphors for Poetry”
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
251
beginning “To the time when Marius…” (drawing on Censorinus, per a note on the endpaper of the booklet). A bibliographic reference to Macrobius and a single marginal note attributing to him fifteen thousand
solar years for the completion of a Great Year suggests some acquaintance with the Commentary from other
sources. My thanks to Warwick Gould for naming the three contributors of the Westcott volume.
The reference, quotation from Macrobius, and its translation are in Sturm’s letter to Yeats of 22 January 1926.
Listed in the catalogue of the National Library of Ireland as “Macrobius, Ambrosius Aurelius Theodosius,
Commentariorum in Somnium Scipionis I–II [with text of ‘Somnium Scipionis’]” (shelf list 87m C4), the
formal bibliographic citation is introduced here from this copy: Ambrosii Theodosii Macrobii | Viri Clarissimi et Illustris | COMMENTARIORVM IN SOMNIVM SCIPIONIS | Liber Primus || Biblioteca |
Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum | TEVBNERIANA. | — | MACROBIVS | Franciscus Eyssenhardt
| — | Lipsiae | in aedibus B. G. Tevbneri | 1893 (MDCCCLXXXXIII). The passage discussed by Sturm
and Yeats appears (also in Latin) on pp. 530–31; the diagrams are on a foldout tipped in at p. 676.
This and the following English translations are from Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, translated by William Harris Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952). The discussion of diagram V
occurs in II.vii, pp. 208–12. The first quotation is on p. 210.
Stahl, on p. 134, refers to Macrobius I.vi.18 on the soul’s protraction of its monadic to its dyadic state as
a cone or, as Yeats preferred, a human gyre.
“Chosen” was probably written early in 1926 (YPM 242), around the release date of AVA (see Wade 149).
At that time, Capricorn and Cancer were identified with “Heart” and “Loins” respectively in the diagram
of the Great Wheel on AVA 13, as they had apparently been since their emergence in the automatic scripts
of November 1917 (see YVP1 111, 116ff. and as summarized in the notebooks—e.g., YVP3 187, 202—
and card files—e.g., YVP3 282, 296). As such they were in agreement with Macrobius’s Commentary.
However, handwritten notes transpose Capricorn and Cancer in two of the Yeatses’ copies of AVA
(WBGYL 2466 and 2466b; YL 2433a and 2433c) as noted in Table 2 and 3 in Paul and Harper, CW13 341
and 343. Subsequently, AVB presents the two signs reversed on the redrawn Wheel (AVB 81) in relation
to their positions in AVA (cf. also Edmund Dulac’s engraving: CW13 lviii; AVA facing p. xv; transposed in
SMRF facing p. 8; AVB [66]). Effectively, this represents a decision to view the zodiac as running in the
opposite direction, while retaining the positioning of “Head, Heart, Loins and Fall” (or, in the case of the
Dulac engraving, the elemental attributions—though these were also transposed in the copy WBGYL 2466,
see CW13 341). This change from a counter-clockwise to a clockwise ordering of the zodiac represents an
identification with the solar aspects rather than lunar, which was appropriate to the identification of these
points with positions in the precession of the solar equinox (AVB 254). The Rapallo Notebooks, the earliest
of which date from 1928, show Yeats expending considerable effort in clarifying his understanding and exposition of the different zodiacs involved in his system. My thanks to Neil Mann for help with these details.
At the same time, the early Blakean symbols of Head, Heart, Loins and Fall were never fully integrated
into or used in the system, while the diagonal cross embraces a variety of disparate ideas—not just “Head,
Heart, Loins and Fall,” but also the position of the equinoxes and solstices at the center of the next civilization
(AVB 254); the points of equidistance for all the Faculties (cf. CW13 53; AVA 62; AVB 127); points associated with the opening and closing of the Tinctures (e.g., CW13 51; AVA 59); and linked to the four types of
wisdom, where Yeats also had doubts: “I have more than once transposed Heart and Intellect, suspecting a
mistake” (AVB 100n), though deciding in this instance to keep the automatic script’s original attributions.
Similarly, the cardinal signs of the zodiac, especially Cancer and Capricorn, comprehend a variety of different ideas besides these crux points within the Wheel. Interestingly, beneath a theme entitled “Concerning
love,” which relates to Michael Robartes’s confession about love’s dying just as it is affirmed with a crying out
in rapture, Yeats inscribed several signs of Capricorn and Cancer beside fire and water symbols in NLI 13,577,
a notebook bearing drafts of Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends c. 1929–Feb. 1930 (see YPM 3–5).
Matthew Gibson believes that Plato’s Myth of Er in The Republic is involved in “Chosen,” as in “His
Bargain” from the sequence “Words for Music Perhaps,” because “The lot of love” that “is chosen” in line 1
seems to refer to Lachesis throwing down lots to souls of the dead before they choose their next life in another
turn on Plato’s spindle. “Chosen” would thus be a metempsychosis-based poem, as well as about the Great Year,
which was measured, before Hipparchus, by the alignment of the planets under Capricorn or Cancer.
Sidnell, “Mr. Yeats, Michael Robartes and Their Circle,” YO 117; the critic was J. Middleton Murry; his
review was entitled “Mr. Yeats’ Swan Song,” in the Athenaeum (4 April 1919).
My thanks to Catherine Paul for the reference to Seán O’Faoláin, “Mr. Yeats’s Kubla Khan,” The Nation
(4 Dec. 1929): 681. The review is available at www.YeatsVision.com/G552.html.
A VISION OF EZRA POUND
by Catherine E. Paul
W
hen W. B. Yeats revised A Vision—almost making it a new work—he chose to
begin the occult book with “A Packet for Ezra Pound.” This cluster of essays
had first seen light in a book of the same name, published by the Cuala Press
in 1929.1 A sort of rumination on his new home and community in Rapallo, Italy, these
essays were intimately linked to A Vision from their earliest draft states. On the first page
of this new version of A Vision, then, as printed by Macmillan in 1937, Yeats writes:
I shall not lack conversation. Ezra Pound, whose art is the opposite of mine,
whose criticism commends what I most condemn, a man with whom I should
quarrel more than anyone else if we were not united by affection, has for years
lived in rooms opening on to a flat roof by the sea. (AVB 3–4)
As a part of his rumination on Rapallo, such a comment makes perfect sense, but a reader
of A Vision wonders what the firebrand American poet has to do with the system revealed
by the Yeatses’ spirit guides and with the book that Yeats made of those revelations. This
essay offers an answer. Despite differences between the two poets on matters of politics,
poetics, and even the relationships between this world and the next, their work was mutually influential. And in the context of Yeats’s A Vision, Pound remains an important presence—a figure needing description, resistance, incorporation, collaboration. This essay
traces the two poets’ literary relationship, Pound’s influences on A Vision, the ways that A
Vision grappled with the young American poet, and offers a sense of the interrelationships
between A Vision and Pound’s lifework, The Cantos.
By the summer of 1908, twenty-two-year-old American Ezra Pound had had enough
of Venice. He had arrived there in May, looking to escape American academic life and
become a poet, but after a fairly short stay, and having had A Lume Spento, his first book
of poetry, printed by a Venetian publisher, he determined that he needed to be in London,
where he could meet some “real people”—“Wm B. Yeats more espeialy especialy [sic].”2
Pound had likely known about Yeats’s poetry since his days at Hamilton College, and in
1907 he called Yeats “The celtic Eagle” who “set a whole land singing.”3 As Pound would
comment later in life, “I went to London because I thought Yeats knew more about poetry
than anybody else.”4 And a number of Pound’s earliest published poems show Yeats’s great
influence: Pound acknowledged in a note to the first poem of A Lume Spento, “La Fraisne,”
that the poem’s metaphysical scheme (barely discernible upon reading the poem) came in
part from Yeats’s poetry of his “Celtic Twilight” period.5 Rarely has a young writer imagined his path to literary success with so sharp a focus on a single literary idol. But Pound
was not wrong: getting to know Yeats and his circle opened up important opportunities
and exposed him to texts and traditions that would be important to his writing for the
rest of his career. Indeed, as Pound became more established in literary circles in London,
Yeats (to whom he had been introduced by Olivia Shakespear) was always present as an
A Vision of Ezra Pound
253
inspiration and as a figure to resist. But even as Pound was defining his own modernism,
centered on reinvigorating the works of the past and making new art from them, he still
recognized the significance of Yeats’s poetry and aesthetics. Pound wrote to fellow American poet William Carlos Williams in May 1909 that “If you’ll read Yeats and Browning
and Francis Thompson and Swinburne and Rossetti you’ll learn something about the
progress of Eng. poetry in the last century.”6
Starting in November 1913, Pound and Yeats spent the first of three winters together
at Stone Cottage in Sussex, outside London. Pound was to be Yeats’s secretary, but both
pursued their own writing. Pound was initially skeptical about the plan, writing to his
mother in November 1913, “My stay in Stone Cottage will not be in the least profitable. I
detest the country. Yeats will amuse me part of the time and bore me to death with psychical research the rest. I regard the visit as a duty to posterity” (SLEP 25). Pound could not
have been more wrong, as the time the two writers spent together was immensely profitable to their respective work and their mutual influence substantial. As Yeats described the
place to his father in January 1915, “we have four rooms of cottage on the edge of a heath
and our back is to the woods” (CL Intelex 2583, 18 January 1915; L 590). Pound had had
plans for “a long poem” as early as 1911, but at Stone Cottage he read Browning’s Sordello
and began his Cantos, a sequence of poems that he would continue the rest of his life,
and that features prominently in “A Packet for Ezra Pound.” As Pound would remember
the time later in life, his service to Yeats was “mostly reading aloud…And wrangling”:
he said, “The Irish like contradiction. [Yeats] tried to learn fencing at forty-five, which
was amusing. He would thrash around with the foils like a whale.”7 Pound frequently
dismissed Yeats’s interest in the question of life after death, as he did in a letter to John
Quinn of November 1918: “I notice with Yeats he will be quite sensible till some question
of ghosts or occultism comes up, then he is subject to a curious excitement, twists everything to his theory, usual quality of mind goes” (SLEP 141). Still, Pound’s work from the
period suggests more interest in occult matters than he would admit. Yeats was drafting
Per Amica Silentia Lunae, and despite Pound’s attempts to downplay it, the early drafts of
“Three Cantos” (1917) show the influence of the reading in occult literature that both had
undertaken. Both Pound and Yeats were discovering the Noh drama of Japan, and James
Longenbach has observed an “Irish lilt” to Pound’s translations of these plays, noting that
through his dialectal choices, Pound wanted to show a relationship among Irish folklore,
occult literature, and Noh drama.8 Both poets wrote dialogues with the dead and poetic
responses to war, and both poets concerned themselves with the artist’s relationship to the
spirits of his ancestors, whether biological or artistic. There are geometric and philosophical similarities between the gyres that would power the system of Yeats’s A Vision and the
vortex of Vorticism—which Hugh Kenner has described as “a circulation with a still center: a system of energies drawing in whatever comes near”9—that was for Pound a powerful image of the interplay between individuals, historical events, and greater knowledge.
Pound’s esoteric conception of modernism, whereby some hidden knowledge is needed
to understand the workings of great modernist literature, may have derived from shared
explorations with Yeats.10
On 20 April 1914, Pound married Dorothy Shakespear. Even after their marriage,
Dorothy spent much time with her close friend and step-cousin Georgie Hyde-Lees, who
would marry Yeats in 1917, with Pound as best man. The couples traveled together in Italy
254
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
in January and February 1925, when Yeats notes he finished the first version of A Vision.
The couples met up in Sicily, and then traveled to Naples, Capri, and Rome.11 Yeats wrote
or reworked many sections of A Vision during this trip with the Pounds. In Yeats’s papers
at the National Library of Ireland are numerous high-quality photographs purchased during this trip, the great majority of which feature mosaics from churches and palaces that
Yeats visited. These include the duomo of Cefalù, the Palazzo Reale in Palermo (including
a large-format photograph of its Cappella Palatina), the Cathedral at Monreale, and the
grotto of Dionysius at Siracusa. Yeats seems to have purchased every photograph sold that
featured details of mosaics. In Rome, he made visits to nearly all of the medieval churches,
including many that are off the beaten path. There, too, he bought photographs of mosaics from the basilicas of Santa Maria in Trastevere, San Giovanni in Laterano, and Santa
Maria Maggiore, and the churches of San Marco, Sant’ Agnese in Via Nomentana, San
Clemente, Santa Prassede, Santa Pudenziana, and Santi Cosma e Damiano.12 In A Vision
A, Yeats centered his discussion of the Byzantine aesthetic on monuments seen during
this trip:
Could any visionary of those days, passing through the Church named with so
un-theological a grace “The Holy Wisdom,” can even a visionary of to-day wandering among the mosaics of Rome and Sicily, fail to recognise some one image
seen under his closed eyelids? (CW13 159; AVA 192)
Later he would shift his locus to Ravenna and Sicily (AVB 280), as that northern Italian
city is more famous for its Byzantine mosaics than are the churches of Rome, but at the
stage of composing the first version of A Vision, he was thinking of the churches he visited
with the Pounds.
In his work toward A Vision, Yeats considered where Pound might appear in the
system that he and George devised through conversation with spirit guides. A script of 30
November 1917, wonders, “Where would you put Ezra Pound?” (YVP1 131). Then an
undated script, likely of late January 1918, considers Pound’s placement in relation to that
of other poets, seeing Virgil as akin to Pound as “more in the mind than in writing” (YVP1
286). (There is an irony here, as Pound was no fan of Virgil, calling him “a second-rater,
a Tennysonianized version of Homer” [SLEP 87] and claiming elsewhere that the Aeneid
“has no story worth telling, no sense of personality.”13) They placed Pound at Phase 12
of the “Twenty-eight Embodiments.” In May 1918, consideration of Pound and Phase
12 emphasizes the “intellectual ugliness” and “violence” of that phase (YVP1 453–54).
The Card File summarizes this session: “Ezra & Violence” (YVP3 359). As described in
A Vision, this phase is “before all else the phase of the hero, of the man who overcomes
himself, and so no longer needs…the submission of others, or…conviction of others to
prove his victory.” A man of this phase defends his ambitions “by some kind of superficial
intellectual action, the pamphlet, the violent speech, the sword of the swashbuckler” and
“spends his life in oscillation between the violent assertion of some commonplace pose,
and a dogmatism which means nothing, apart from the circumstance that created it.” The
phase also holds the opportunity for “a noble extravagance, an overflowing fountain of
personal life” (CW13 52–54; AVA 61–63; cf. AVB 126–29).14 Given the descriptions of
Pound that we find elsewhere in Yeats’s commentaries, and despite the negative cast that
A Vision of Ezra Pound
255
this phase’s description carries, these characteristics make for a fitting placement, which
even anticipates the activities that Pound would undertake later in his career.
Pound appears again in an early draft of A Vision, written as a dialogue between Owen
Aherne and Michael Robartes. In this draft, these fictional characters who originated in
Yeats’s stories of the 1890s are given the job of explaining the Yeatses’ system. Aherne poses
questions, and Robartes answers them, often at length. They say that they would like to
visit Yeats but fear an encounter with Pound. Both Aherne and Robartes, it turns out, have
met Pound before, and neither of them is fond of the young American poet. They call him
“rude,” “a very violent talker,” having “no manners” (YVP4 17–18). Later in the dialogue,
when Robartes places Pound in Phase 12 together with Nietzsche, he says,
I feel more sympathy with twelve where Nietzsche emerges and all men may
discover their superman. though the more violent types of the phase among
whom I would be sorry to discover your enemy Mr. Pound, not transfigured but
transfixed contemplate the race in some form of his collective opinion till hatred
turns the flesh to wood and the nerves to wire. (YVP4 31)
Again, Pound is a “violent type” and the “enemy” of Aherne. By having these words come
from Robartes rather than himself, Yeats can express something of the dangers of Pound’s
type, and readers who know of Pound’s later turn to fascism and more virulent antiSemitic remarks might recognize a sort of prescience of Pound’s growing obsession with
and violent opinions about constructions of race.
When A Vision was published in 1925, Yeats took out references to his personal
friends: Lady Gregory, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Maud and Iseult Gonne, and of course
Pound (YVP4 48). Pound makes one appearance in this published version of A Vision.
In “Dove or Swan,” where Yeats applies his thinking about the phases to an examination
of history, Pound—along with Eliot, Joyce and others—appears in Phase 23, the period
beginning in 1927. This period is inhabited by many “who have a strong love and hate
hitherto unknown in the arts,” and who “defend their conscience like theologians,” as it is
a time “where the intellect turns upon itself.” These persons, Yeats writes, “are all absorbed
in some technical research to the entire exclusion of the personal dream.” The figures in
this phase are artists
who either eliminate from metaphor the poet’s phantasy and substitute a strangeness discovered by historical or contemporary research or who break up the logical
processes of thought by flooding them with associated ideas or words that seem
to drift into the mind by chance; or who set side by side as in Henry IV, The Waste
Land, Ulysses, the physical primary—a lunatic among his keepers, a man fishing
behind a gas works, the vulgarity of a single Dublin day prolonged through 700
pages—and the spiritual primary delirium, the Fisher King, Ulysses’ wandering.
(CW13 175; cf. AVA 211–12)
Yeats stresses how far apart myth and fact have fallen in this period, and adds that “If there
is violent revolution, and it is the last phase where political revolution is possible, the dish
will be made from what is found in the pantry and the cook will not open her book”
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(CW13 175; AVA 212). This version of Pound focuses less on the individual and more on
his generation, of which Yeats does not consider himself a part. (He had described his own
generation as belonging to Phase 22.) Yeats cut this passage before the 1937 Macmillan
edition of A Vision, but the spirit of the passage would find its way into A Packet for Ezra
Pound where Pound must bear the burden of his generation alone. If A Vision is a book
concerned at least in part with ghosts, we do well to note the shadows of Ezra Pound lurking in the margins of its early versions.
Pound and his Cantos played an important role in Yeats’s thinking during his time
in Rapallo, so it is no surprise that he would compose for Cuala Press a book entitled A
Packet for Ezra Pound, and later incorporate much of its contents into A Vision. When the
Pounds settled in Rapallo, Italy, on the Ligurian Riviera in 1924, Pound quickly became
enamored of Benito Mussolini, whose fascist “revolution” had started in northern Italy
around the time of the First World War, coming to a visible climax with 1922’s March on
Rome. Pound continued to publish individual cantos, which, he suggested in the title to
A Draft of XVI Cantos (1925), were intended to be “for the Beginning of a Poem of some
Length.” Pound published A Draft of XXX Cantos in 1930 and then three more volumes of
cantos—seventy-three poems. The subject matter is unusual and diverse. Eleven New Cantos (1934/35) encompasses Pound’s economic thinking; his more journalistic ideas about
the workings of modern Europe; the cult of amor as in the writings of Cavalcanti; the long
epistolary conversation of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams; the founding of an American central bank and the significance of the Founding Fathers to American history; and
the biography of Mussolini. The Fifth Decad of Cantos (1937) adds the foundation of the
Monte dei Paschi bank in Siena; a bit of ancient Chinese history and philosophy; a harsh
condemnation of usury; and the poet presented both as an Odyssean wanderer and as
able to see that to which others have become desensitized. Cantos LII–LXXI (1940) brings
together the so-called Chinese History Cantos (LII–LXI) and the “John Adams Cantos”
(LXII–LXXI). Pound described his compositional method as “ideogramic,” “presenting
one facet and then another until at some point one gets off the dead and desensitized
surface of the reader’s mind, onto a part that will register.”15 Pound’s sense that the various
elements of these poems combine to form new wholes was crucial to his evolving poetics.
In part because the Pounds were living there, the Yeatses moved to Rapallo in February 1928, seeking the rest, sun, and warmth necessary to help Yeats recuperate from
illness.16 Almost immediately, Yeats began writing about his life there, and reimagining a
description of Rapallo and its community as the basis of a new introduction to A Vision.
The Yeatses lived for many months in the Albergo Rapallo, along the sea, before moving
to a flat at via Americhe 12-8, now Corso Colombo. W. B. and George spent time with
the Pounds, who by now had a complicated marital situation. Pound’s long-time lover,
the violinist Olga Rudge, had an apartment not far up the mountain near the Church of
Sant’ Ambrogio di Zoagli, and Pound and Rudge spent significant time in Venice and
organized regular concerts in Rapallo. Their daughter Mary lived with a foster-family in
the north of Italy. Dorothy’s son Omar (fathered by another man) lived with her mother
Olivia in England, where Dorothy spent summers. For George, Dorothy Shakespear was
an important presence, and we can recognize the layers of meaning in this letter Yeats
wrote to Olivia Shakespear early in their stay:
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Ezra & Dorothy seem happy & content, pleased with their way of life & Dorothy & George compare their experiences of infancy & its strange behavour [sic],
George instructing Dorothy out of her greater store. If we carry out our plans &
settle here they will renew all their old friendship & to George at any rate that
will be a great happiness. (CL Intelex 5079, 28 February [1928])
For Yeats, Pound’s company was a huge part of Rapallo’s appeal, and while much had
changed since their days at Stone Cottage, poetic collaboration was still possible. Yeats
writes in a letter to Lady Gregory, written shortly after his arrival in Rapallo, “Ezra Pound
has been helping to punctuate my new poems, & thinks the best of all is a little song I
wrote at Cannes just before I was ordered to stop work, so you must not think of me as out
of the saga” ([24 February 1928], CL Intelex 5081; L 738). Pound connected Yeats with
other modernists—Basil Bunting, George Antheil, Gerhart Hauptmann, Max Beerbohm.
Yeats noted in a letter to George, “Ezra explains his Cantos & reads me Cavalcanti & we
argue about it quite amicably” (27 February 1928, CL Intelex 5085). He and Pound talked
and argued about many things—including poetry, politics, the ethnographic writings of
Leo Frobenius, modern music, and Wyndham Lewis’s theories of modernism.
This new setting saw Yeats’s revision of A Vision, the writing of the material for “A
Packet,” and a great deal of poetic experimentation. We see from a letter Yeats wrote to
Lady Gregory in March 1928 that these processes were all rather intertwined: “I am working on alternate days, that is to say writing on alternate days some paragraph for ‘The Vision’ or for a little book I am writing for Lolly, an account of this place, & Ezra & his work
& things that arise out of that” (12 March [1928], CL Intelex 5089). Yeats was extremely
fond of Rapallo and the opportunities it afforded. He wrote to Lady Gregory: “This is an
indescribably lovely place—some little Greek town one imagines—there is a passage in
Keats describing just such a town. Here I shall put off the bitterness of Irish quarrels, and
write my most amiable verses. They are already, though I dare not write, crowding my
head” ([24 February 1928], CL Intelex 5081; L 738). For several years, the Yeatses spent
winters in Italy and summers in Ireland, and in November 1929, Yeats wrote to Lady
Gregory, “I am looking forward very much to the quiet of Rapallo and I long for the sight
of a table with my papers arranged upon it and a prospect of so much writing per day” (16
November 1929, CL Intelex 5311; L 770).
At an early stage of composing the material for A Packet, Yeats imagined an essay
focused on a poem by the late-medieval Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti, discussing “the latest movements in contemporary literature” (1 April [1928], CL Intelex 5097; L 739). He
likely links Pound to the Italian poet because at this time Pound was trying to complete
an edition of Cavalcanti’s poetry, and, as Yeats wrote to Olivia Shakespear in November
1928, “He constantly comes around to talk of Guido who absorbs his attention” (23
November [1928], CL Intelex 5191; L 748). Pound had been translating Cavalcanti since
the mid-1910s, and in the late 1920s he had leads on publishing an edition in England.
These prospects eventually fell through, and he finally published it in 1932 in Italy, and
the Yeatses owned a copy of the edition.17 Also during this time, Pound was publishing a
series of essays about Cavalcanti in the American magazine The Dial: there, he was most
interested in defining a Tuscan aesthetic, in understanding what was particular about art
and writing in that place and that period. That Yeats saw in Cavalcanti’s poetry a way of
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addressing “the latest movements in contemporary literature”—of which Pound was his
most dominant example—shows how involved he was in Pound’s work.
As published by Cuala Press in August 1929, A Packet for Ezra Pound has four parts.
First is an essay called “Rapallo,” in which Yeats sets this town in Italy as the scene for
writing. By this time, Pound was deep into his long poem, The Cantos, and Yeats dedicates part of “Rapallo” to trying to make sense of it.18 Second in the volume appears the
two-part poem “Meditations Upon Death,” not retained for A Vision.19 The third section, “Introduction to the Great Wheel,” lays out the story of the automatic script. Yeats
returns to Ezra Pound in the final section of A Packet, presented as a letter to Pound.
This final section—and therefore the book—concludes by quoting Pound’s poem “The
Return” (1912).20 In some ways this letter seeks to justify A Vision to a friend and fellow
poet who might be loath to accept it. Indeed, Pound had long been skeptical about Yeats’s
investment in occult experimentation, calling the project of A Vision “very very very bughouse.”21 As its own volume, this collection of four seemingly disparate things—things
that seem randomly compiled into one envelope—offers Yeats’s attempt to understand
the relationship between his system for encompassing heavens and earth, and the literary
moment of which he considered himself a part.
We are most familiar with this book as the opening section of the 1937 revised version of A Vision. There it acts as a preface, replacing the more fantastical fiction about the
origins of the Yeatses’ system that had opened the first printing, published in a small edition by T. Werner Laurie. That original opening had couched the system in a complicated
layering of tales about characters from The Thousand and One Nights, prefatory material
supposedly written by and about characters from Yeats’s own fiction, and a woodcut portrait of the fabricated author of the material that Yeats claims only to compile. “A Packet
for Ezra Pound,” though itself a compilation, offers a different introduction. “A Packet”
situates A Vision in the expatriate modernist community in Rapallo, asking readers to see
the book as a parallel to Pound’s Cantos, about which long series of innovative poems
Yeats admits some confusion, saying, “I have often found there brightly printed kings,
queens, knaves, but have never discovered why all the suits could not be dealt out in some
quite different order” (AVB 4). As we shall see, Yeats seems to have similar concerns about
his own Vision.
Yeats had begun revising A Vision in mid-1926, during the same time that he was
reading works by such thinkers as George Berkeley, Plotinus (as translated by Stephen
MacKenna), Alfred North Whitehead, and Oswald Spengler.22 Increasingly the pages of
his notebooks are filled with rewritings of the various sections of A Vision. In all cases, there
is a concern with the exactness and correctness of terminology, diagrams, geometry, and
the interrelationships of various parts of his system. The same notebooks in which Yeats
was revising A Vision contain the early drafts of the material that would become “A Packet
for Ezra Pound.” Although Yeats eventually abandoned the plan to focus on Cavalcanti, he
kept Pound as a centerpiece of the essay that became “Rapallo.”23 In this essay, of course,
we find the mention of Pound that I quoted in this essay’s introduction. Given Pound’s
growing interest at this time in Benito Mussolini, Italian fascism, and economics, it is not
hard to imagine the quarrels that Yeats describes in his mention of Pound’s presence in
Rapallo. And given the vehemence with which Pound tended to make claims—whether
about politics, art, poetry, money, criticism, passports, music, usury, little magazines, or
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copyright—it is hard to imagine what issue he might commend or condemn without the
vehemence that Yeats had identified with Pound as early as the automatic script. And for
Pound, issues of art, economics, and politics are never separate: as he would write in Guide
to Kulchur (1938), “…the one thing you shd. not do is to suppose that when something
is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY. When a given hormone defects, it
will defect throughout the whole system.”24 His interest in the ways that art and culture
were being used by Mussolini to fortify the fascist state, meant that he brought his political and economic concerns into his thinking about poetry and the arts.25
In “Rapallo,” Yeats attempts to make sense of Pound’s Cantos, still very much in process. Yeats’s drafts of the essay show him working and reworking his description of Pound’s
“long poem,” a text with which he was neither the first nor the last to have trouble:
There will be no plot, no chronicle of events, no logic of discourse, but two themes,
the Descent into Hades from Homer, a Metamorphosis from Ovid, and, mixed
with these, mediaeval or modern historical characters. He has tried to produce
that picture Porteous commended to Nicholas Poussin in Le chef d’œuvre inconnu
where everything rounds or thrusts itself without edges, without contours―conventions of the intellect―from a splash of tints and shades; to achieve a work as
characteristic of the art of our time as the paintings of Cézanne, avowedly suggested by Porteous, as Ulysses and its dream association of words and images, a
poem in which there is nothing that can be taken out and reasoned over, nothing
that is not a part of the poem itself. (AVB 4)
In so saying, Yeats acknowledges Pound’s range of models and parallels, and also Pound’s
own sense of poetry from his Imagist days. But Yeats also expresses uncertainty about
Pound’s goals and approach, commenting, as already noted, that he might delight in
the cards laid before him without seeing why they “could not be dealt out in some quite
different order” (AVB 4). Indeed, Pound’s own conception for the long poem changed
frequently during his life. Sometimes he imagined it as a follow-up to Browning’s Sordello,
and other times as a modern reworking of Dante’s Commedia, and at still other times he
resisted an overarching structure, calling it only “a poem including history.”26
Yeats is clear about the problems with Pound and his attitudes. As he wrote to Lady
Gregory in April 1928, the opening essay of A Packet “takes up the controversy and explains Ezra Pound sufficiently to keep him as a friendly neighbour…” (CL Intelex 5097, 1
April 1928; L 739). Yeats’s thinking about Pound derives at least in part from his reading
of the British painter, sculptor, and writer Wyndham Lewis, who Yeats notes “attacked
Ezra Pound and Joyce in Time and Western Man, and is on my side of things philosophically” (L 739). Pound, he says in that letter, “has most of Maud Gonne’s opinions (political and economic) about the world in general, being what Lewis calls ‘the revolutionary
simpleton’” (L 739). By framing his critique of Pound in terms borrowed from Lewis,
Yeats is continuing his rumination on this next generation of modernists from the passage
cut from A Vision A about the historical Phase 23. Yeats’s engagement with Lewis makes
it into a footnote in the published text of “A Packet,” though the critique of Pound is
more oblique. There are strong similarities between the description of Pound’s work in
“A Packet” and that in Yeats’s “Introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse” (1936),
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where he describes Pound as “mid-way in an immense poem in vers libre called for the
moment The Cantos, where the metamorphosis of Dionysus, the descent of Odysseus into
Hades, repeat themselves in various disguises, always in association with some third that is
not repeated” (CW5 192; OBMV xxiv). Yeats notes that “Like other readers I discover at
present merely exquisite or grotesque fragments,” and that in order to follow along with
Pound’s own conception of the poem, he must “suspend judgment.” He further describes
the work as having “more style than form,” and describes it as “constantly interrupted,
broken, twisted into nothing by its direct opposite, nervous obsession, nightmare, stammering confusion.” He offers a similarly tangled list of descriptors for Pound: “he is an
economist, poet, politician, raging at malignants with inexplicable characters and motives,
grotesque figures out of a child’s book of beasts” (CW5 192–93; OBMV xxiv–xxv). In February 1939, Pound wrote to Hubert Creekmore, referring either to the ideas in “A Packet”
or in the “Introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, and saying, “God damn Yeats’
bloody paragraph. Done more to prevent people reading Cantos for what is on the page
than any other one smoke screen” (SLEP 321). These disagreements between the poets
about the virtue of clarity, the relationships between style and form, the interaction of
personality and history, and how exactly one is to represent myth mark the distinctions
between their poetics, and Yeats’s critique of the Cantos is as much about the kind of writer
he aims to be as it is about how to perfect Pound.
But even if Yeats has problems with Pound, he still acknowledges the American’s
power as a poet. Reflecting on a confusing, almost mathematical description of the Cantos
that Pound had “scribbled on the back of an envelope,” Yeats commented that he found
that the mathematical structure, when taken up into imagination, is more than
mathematical, that seemingly irrelevant details fit together into a single theme,
that here is no botch of tone and colour, all Hodos Chameliontos, except for some
odd corner where one discovers beautiful detail like that finely modelled foot in
Porteous’ disastrous picture. (AVB 5)
This realization of a larger structure to the Cantos—a structure that only makes sense
“when taken up into imagination”—allows for meaning and beauty beyond the seeming
chaos of the poems’ welter of detail. Yeats’s idea of “Hodos Chameliontos,” a phrase meaning “the Path of the Chameleon,” appears prominently in The Trembling of the Veil to suggest the experience of being lost taken from his reading of a cabalistic manuscript (CW3
215; Au 270). Elsewhere in A Vision, he uses the same phrase to explain the confusion
facing those of his generation: “Our generation has witnessed a first weariness, has stood
at the climax, at what in The Trembling of the Veil I call Hodos Chameliontos, and when
the climax passes will recognize that there common secular thought began to break and
disperse” (AVB 299–300; cf. CW13 173 & AVA 209). By applying that language here to
Pound’s literary situation, he likens Pound’s poetic project to his own attempts to create
order out of the hidden knowledge revealed in the automatic script.
Yeats’s assessment of Pound’s poetry is more extensive in the Cuala version of A Packet,
as that volume contains a final section of “Rapallo” that would be omitted from the 1937
Vision. In this section, Yeats describes rereading Pound’s poetry, now that Personae: The Collected Poems (1926) had recently been published.27 The poems in Personae are pieces not
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included in The Cantos—early, pre-Cantos poems, translations, and shorter works that stand
on their own. Yeats writes of reading poetry again after time spent focused on A Vision, noting that “at first it was faint like an old faded letter, and then an excitement that I had not
felt for years” (PEP 7). In this context, he recognizes the strength of Pound’s poetry, as he
could now assess it in Personae:
In this book just published in America are all his poems except those Twentyseven Cantos which keep me procrastinating, and though I had read it all in
the little books I had never understood until now that the translations from
Chinese, from Latin, from Provencal, are as much a part of his original work, as
much chosen as to theme, as much characterised as to style, as the vituperation,
the railing, which I had hated but which now seem a necessary balance. He is not
trying to create forms because he believes, like so many of his contemporaries,
that old forms are dead, so much as a new style, a new man. Again and again
he breaks the metrical form which the work seemed to require, or which, where
he is translating, it once had, or interjects some anachronism, as when he makes
Propertius talk of an old Wordsworthian, that he may pull it back not into himself but into this hard, shining, fastidious modern man, who has no existence,
who can never have existence, except to the readers of his poetry. (PEP 7–8)
That what he finds in these shorter poems provides a necessary balance to “the vituperation, the railing,” frames Pound’s literary character in terms very much taken from A Vision. He emphasizes that Pound’s technical innovation occurs not for its own sake but for
the purpose of new creation—an assessment with which Pound agreed when he wrote in
Canto 81, in a line that does what it describes, “To break the pentameter, that was the
first heave.”28 Yeats further tries to understand his own relationship to Pound’s generation
of modernists, a group to which he does not really belong or fully admire, but whose
importance he recognizes:
Synge once said to me “All our modern poetry is the poetry of the lyrical
boy,” but here, in spite of all faults and flaws,—sometimes that exasperation
is but nerves—is the grown man, in “Cathay” his passion and self-possession,
in “Homage to Sextus Propertius” his self-abandonment that recovers itself in
mockery, everywhere his masterful curiosity.
“Go, my songs, seek your praise from the young and from the intolerant,
Move among the lovers of perfection alone.
Seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean light…”
March and October, 1928. (PEP 8–9)
By closing the essay with the entirety of Pound’s short poem “Ité,” first published in
Poetry in November 1913 and then in Lustra (1916), Yeats lets Pound’s verse speak for
itself—much as he does when he quotes from “The Return” at the end of “A Letter to
Ezra Pound”—insisting that remnants of these short poems be present to balance out his
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critique of The Cantos. And given the connections that A Packet suggests between these
poems and A Vision, he allows an even greater connection between his own work and that
of his younger American friend.
Yeats devotes an entire section of “Rapallo” to an image of Ezra Pound feeding Rapallo’s stray cats. Pound “knows their histories,” Yeats writes, alluding to Pound’s long
interest in felines. His letters frequently contain sketches of cats, references to their behavior and tendencies, and those written to his wife Dorothy and his longtime lover and
companion Olga Rudge often open with a greeting of “mao” (like “meow”), a representation of the feline voice. But Yeats suggests that he thinks Pound “has no affection for cats”
but rather feels an affinity with them. For Yeats, the real importance of Pound’s attention
to the cats—a tendency he shared with Maud Gonne—is the insight it offers into his
relationship with people:
I examine his criticism in this new light, his praise of writers pursued by ill-luck,
left maimed or bed-ridden by the War…Was this pity a characteristic of his generation that has survived the Romantic Movement…some drop of hysteria still
at the bottom of the cup? (PEP 5; AVB 7)
This sense that Pound identifies with the cast-offs fits both Pound’s own self-conception
as a revolutionary outcast and Yeats’s concern that Pound’s politics, like Maud Gonne’s,
would lead him astray.
The middle essay of “A Packet” tells the now famous but then surprising story of the
automatic script as the origin of A Vision. This essay closes with a rumination on the question of whether Yeats believes what his book contains. As it was published in the Cuala
edition of A Packet, Yeats explores this question partly through a reference to the poetry of
Giacomo Leopardi, as translated by Pound:
I will never think any thoughts but these, or some modification or extension of
these; when I write prose or verse they must be somewhere present though not
it may be in the words; they must affect my judgment of friends and of events;
but then there are many symbolisms and none exactly resembles mine. What
Leopardi in Ezra Pound’s translation calls that “concord” wherein “the arcane
spirit of the whole mankind turns hardy pilot”—how much better it would be
without that word “hardy” which slackens speed and adds nothing—persuades
me that he has best imagined reality who has best imagined justice. (PEP 32–33)
Where in the first draft he noted “yet it is all a myth,” now he concludes “but then there
are many symbolisms and none exactly resembles mine”—a formulation that focuses far
more on differing interpretations and methods of representation. Present here, too, is
Yeats’s lingering frustration with Pound and his poetics: even as he uses Pound’s translation, he disagrees with it. Still, this way of thinking about the relationship between reality
and justice he places in literary conversations with Pound. As Yeats revised the passage for
A Vision B, however, he left Pound and turned instead to other modernists whose engagement with form he can recommend without an aside:
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To such a question [of belief in the actual existence of my circuits of sun and
moon] I can but answer that if sometimes, overwhelmed by miracle as all men
must be when in the midst of it, I have taken such periods literally, my reason has
soon recovered; and now that the system stands out clearly in my imagination I
regard them as stylistic arrangements of experience comparable to the cubes in the
drawing of Wyndham Lewis and to the ovoids in the sculpture of Brancusi. They
have helped me to hold in a single thought reality and justice. (AVB 25)
Where the reference to Leopardi via Pound enabled a realization about reality and justice,
here Yeats makes himself more the modernist by likening his system to the abstracted
representations of Lewis—whom we already knew he admired—and sculptor Constantin
Brancusi, both seen as emblems of modernist art. All references to “myth” are gone, replaced by the hard lines and forms of modernist experimentation. But in all versions, the
question of belief persists. From the juxtaposition of Yeats’s notebook entries and drafts
of what would become A Packet and then A Vision, we can see how some extra-systemic
elements—in this case the conversation of Ezra Pound that he foregrounds in the beginning of “Rapallo” and his sense of his own relationship to the modernist movement—help
shape the thinking behind A Vision. But we also see how those violent quarrels with Pound
helped cement Yeats’s views in opposition to Pound’s and in concord with other modernists. And it becomes clearer why so much of A Packet for Ezra Pound was included as a new
sort of preface to A Vision.
Ezra Pound becomes central again in the final section of A Packet, presented as a
letter to Pound. In some ways this letter seeks to justify A Vision to a friend and fellow
poet who might be loath to accept it. It is no wonder: Pound said later in life about
Yeats’s writings during the Rapallo years that he “tried for God’s sake to prevent him from
printing a thing,” adding that “All he did was print it with a preface saying that I said it
was rubbish.”30 Yeats’s letter couches itself in terms of Yeats’s and Pound’s personal and
literary relationship, opening, “Do not be elected to the Senate of your country” (AVB
26)—even though there are few things Pound would have preferred to having his own
government require his expertise. Pound settled for such a role in Italy, noting that Italy “is
the first country I ever had a city invite me to shout in,” adding that “the fact that I have
been asked…is something.”30 Pound loved the opportunity to shout, and even more, the
invitation to do so. During the 1930s, Pound corresponded with members of the fascist
party’s political and cultural hierarchy, with the goal of building a culturally strong Italy,
which he believed necessary not only to Italy’s imperialist aims, but to peace and stability
in Europe. Pound tried to convince Americans of the rightness of the fascist model, and
his Jefferson and/or Mussolini: L’Idea statale, Fascism as I Have Seen It (1935) offered an
introduction to Italian fascism, Mussolini’s achievements, and the Italian system’s benefits
more broadly. These matters were also important to his Cantos. For Yeats, unlike Pound,
“those few generalities that make all men politicians” are impossible to reconcile with the
making of poetry.
Still, Yeats knew that this Pound he knew in Rapallo was the same poet who had
written “The Return” in 1912, and Yeats closes the final section of A Packet by quoting
that poem in full (AVB 29–30). Yeats could see in Pound’s earlier, Imagist poetry not just
technical mastery, but also the ability to make art out of his political and spiritual beliefs.
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
For Yeats, this poem illustrated his own hypothesis, expressed in A Vision, that “every two
thousand and odd years something happens in the world to make one [scale of a balance]
sacred, the other secular; one wise, the other foolish; one fair, the other foul; one divine,
the other devilish” (AVB 29). In this closing section, Yeats is asking for Pound’s acceptance
of A Vision’s model of the universe, of history, of human personality, and of the relationships among living and death. By using Pound’s poem, and by suggesting that it offers an
image of the balance he sees at play—a balance similar to that he had found in Pound’s
own poetry—Yeats argues for a parallel between his work and Pound’s.
In a way, Pound assented. Even after Yeats died in 1939, he would continue to be
a strong presence in Pound’s poetry. In Pound’s Pisan Cantos (1948), Yeats figures as a
memory so powerful as to take on an almost ghostly embodiment. The situation of these
poems’ writing was unusual. Starting in 1940 and continuing through the Second World
War, Pound gave radio addresses from Rome, urging Britain and the United States not
to fight against Italy. At the end of the war in 1945, Pound was arrested for treason, and,
at age fifty-nine, incarcerated at the Disciplinary Training Center at Pisa for about six
months. At a point in the writing of his Cantos when he was supposed to have ventured
up out of hell, through purgatory and have paradise in his sights, Pound instead found his
world in ruins, bearing not only his own captivity and news of Mussolini’s capture and
murder, but also the bombing of many of the sites around Italy he held sacred. The poems
that would become The Pisan Cantos were written during his captivity at Pisa. They began
as an attempt to stave off madness and the loss of memory, and they bring together memories from Pound’s past, political issues he still believes to be important, the day-to-day life
of the DTC, and his concerns about identity and writing. The Pisan Cantos describe the
loss of loved ones and friends, loss of monuments to bombings, loss of political dreams,
loss of artistic tradition, loss of opportunities, loss of youth, loss of freedom, and, worst of
all, the fear of losing memory and all that it contains.
Yeats appears frequently in these poems, as Pound quotes from the Irish bard’s poetry
and passing remarks. Among other losses, ends of eras, and memories, Pound remembered
Yeats, Stone Cottage, and Yeats’s poem “The Peacock,” written there in November 1913:
What’s riches to him
That has made a great peacock
With the pride of his eye? (VP 310; CW1 120)
Even as Yeats’s poem imagines the peacock in the pride of his eye, and offers art as its
own reward, it connects to the landscape of Ashdown Forest, with reference to “wet rocks
and heather” (l. 8). Dorothy Pound remembered the heath around Stone Cottage as covered with heather and called it “a drippy kind of place.”31 Pound’s Canto 83 offers not
just echoes of Yeats’s poem, but an image of Pound’s memory of living with Yeats as he
composed. Always attentive to the cadences of spoken language, Pound gives a somewhat
parodic rendering of Yeats’s brogue and of his exaggerated recitation:
A Vision of Ezra Pound
265
so that I recalled the noise in the chimney
as it were the wind in the chimney
but was in reality Uncle William
downstairs composing
that had made a great Peeeeacock
in the proide ov his oiye
had made a great peeeeeeecock in the…
made a great peacock
in the proide of his oyyee
proide ov his oy-ee
as indeed he had, and perdurable
a great peacock aere perennius[…]
at Stone Cottage in Sussex by the waste moor
(or whatever) and the holly bush
who would not eat ham for dinner
because peasants eat ham for dinner
despite the excellent quality
and the pleasure of having it hot
well those days are gone forever (ll. 163–184)32
In Pound’s canto, the images and language of Yeats’s earlier poem are transformed into
pure sound and personality, so that readers get less a sense of the poem’s meaning, than of
Yeats’s voice, his writing process, his presence as a roommate. The story of poetic composition blends with images of the site as a powerful place of memory, and even such mundane
details as what kind of food they ate combine to create a sense of being there, of writing
there, and of having lost those days. As The Pisan Cantos try to stave off the further loss
of memory or even the fears of losing one’s mind, they frequently point to what is already
gone—“Stone Cottage in Sussex by the waste moor / (or whatever)…” (my emphasis).
This canto includes numerous other lacunae, expressed with this same phrase “or whatever,” as if those details are already gone. But Pound offered a more positive sense on forgetfulness in Guide to Kulchur: “Knowledge is NOT culture. The domain of culture begins
when one HAS forgotten-what-book.”33 The power of these memories, then, lies not in
what has been lost, but in why they are remembered. So, we find elsewhere in Canto 83
such lines as “the queen stitched King Carolus’ shirts or whatever” (l. 11) or
and you might find a bit of enamel
a bit of true blue enamel
on a metal pyx or whatever
omnia, quae sunt, lumina sunt, or whatever (ll. 16–19)
and a couple lines later
266
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Le Paradis n’est pas artificiel
and Uncle William dawdling around Notre Dame
in search of whatever
paused to admire the symbol
with Notre Dame standing inside it
Whereas in St Etienne
or why not Dei Miracoli:
mermaids, that carving[…] (ll. 22–29)
Whatever it was that Yeats hoped to find, Pound suggests, what matters is his persistent
emphasis on the symbolic. The “symbol / with Notre Dame standing inside it” might
have been a statue of the Virgin and Child haloed by a rose window, or it might have been
simply the presence of a statue of the Virgin within the church named for her. Either way,
that emphasis on the symbolic stands in opposition to the two churches named next—St.
Etienne in Toulouse and Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Venice—churches important to
Pound’s sense of the workings of culture.34 Even as he remembers Yeats, Pound is arguing
with him.
A few lines later in the same canto, we find a small passing reference to Yeats:
as the grass grows by the weirs
thought Uncle William consiros
as the grass on the roof of St. What’s his name
near “Cane e Gatto” (ll. 38–41)35
Readers of Yeats’s early poetry will recognize in the first quoted line a part of a line
from “Down by the Salley Gardens” (VP 90; CW1 18). When Yeats published this poem
in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), he titled it “An Old Song Resung,” describing the poem in a footnote as an attempt to reconstruct an old song “from three lines
imperfectly remembered by an old peasant woman in the village of Ballysodare, Sligo,
who often sings them to herself ” (VP 90; CW1 627). In Pound’s canto, this memory of
Yeats’s poem of imperfect memory combines with Pound’s own imperfect memory of a
particular conjunction of streets in Siena near San Giorgio cathedral. Yeats’s poem, made
from the relics of memory, but also branching beyond what is remembered to invent a
new work, stands as a powerful emblem of Pound’s own memory art. In this way, Pound
has poetically adopted Yeats’s view of a soul lingering after death.
What is it about Ezra Pound, then, that is so important to A Vision? In part, as Yeats
himself acknowledges, it is the affection that unites them—an emotion that can bridge
differences. But those differences matter, too, as the arguments (vehement and otherwise)
between the two poets became rich loci for further insistence on their own senses of
poetic form, translation, life after death, politics and literature, and the value of occult
methods. Even the ways in which the two poets did not like each other very much were
productive, literarily speaking. For Yeats to open the second version of A Vision with an
A Vision of Ezra Pound
267
explicit evocation of Pound—not unlike the summonings that close the volume in “All
Souls’ Night”—demands the presence of the younger poet, whose dismissal of Yeats’s occult tendency Yeats dismisses in turn with his emphasis on their arguments. While Pound
haunted the margins of the first published version of A Vision, in this new version he could
be foregrounded because of Yeats’s new understanding of the interrelationships of their
literary ventures. Yes, Pound discounted the value of the very methods the Yeatses used to
gather the material for A Vision, but what he made in his Cantos and what Yeats made in
A Vision were not ultimately that different. And perhaps the material in “A Packet for Ezra
Pound” that positioned Yeats’s volume with respect to other modernist literature provided
a necessary balance to the explicit story about the origins of the system in the automatic
script. Together, these various ways that Pound matters to A Vision gesture to how very
different the 1937 version of the book was from its previous published incarnation.
Notes
1
2
3
4
5
Throughout this essay I use punctuation and typeface to distinguish between these two versions, referring
to the prefatory material of A Vision as “A Packet for Ezra Pound” and to the volume published by Cuala
Press as A Packet for Ezra Pound.
Ezra Pound to Homer Pound, 7 July [1908], in Ezra Pound to his Parents: Letters 1895-1929, ed. Mary de
Rachewiltz, A. David Moody, and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 120. Pound
had expressed a similar intention in a letter to his mother of June of the same year (118).
A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet; A Portrait of the Man & His Work, Volume I, The Young Genius 1885–
1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 99.
Donald Hall and Ezra Pound, “The Paris Review Interview,” The Paris Review 28 (Fall 1962), reprinted as
“The Art of Poetry, No. 5” (2004), 15.
In a note published with the poem until 1920 or so, Pound comments that:
“When the soul is exhausted of fire, then doth the spirit return unto its primal nature and
there is upon it a peace great and of the woodland
“magna pax et silvestris.”
Then becometh it kin to the faun and the dryad, a woodland-dweller amid the rocks and
streams
“consociis faunis dryadisque inter saxa sylvarum.”
Janus of Basel.
Also has Mr. Yeats in his ‘Celtic Twilight’ treated of such…
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
K. K. Ruthven, A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Personae (1926) (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 158.
Ezra Pound, Selected Letters, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1971), 8. Hereafter
SLEP in text.
Hall and Pound, “The Paris Review Interview,” 8.
James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1988), 47–48.
Hugh Kenner’s description of “a Vortex,” The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 239.
For more detail on this period, see Longenbach, Stone Cottage.
For greater detail about their itinerary, see Russell Elliott Murphy, “‘Old Rocky Face, look forth’: W. B. Yeats,
the Christ Pantokrator, and the Soul’s History (The Photographic Record),” YAACTS14 (1996): 69–117.
NLI MS 40,590 and 40,591. Yeats also kept photographs from the Vatican palaces, the Capitoline museum, the Museo delle Terme, and Castel Sant’ Angelo.
Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (1954; New York: New Directions, 1968), 215. I am indebted
to Peter Liebregts for reminding me of these references.
On Pound’s presence in this phase in early drafts see CW13 250 n129.
Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (London: Faber and Faber, 1938; New York: New Directions, 1970), 51.
For the specifics of Yeats’s illness and the decision to recuperate in Rapallo, see R. F. Foster, Life2 353–61
268
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
and Ann Saddlemyer, BG 379–421.
For the details of this book’s publication, see Donald Gallup, Ezra Pound: A Bibliography (Charlottesville:
The University Press of Virginia, 1983), 152–54. Further references to Gallup’s bibliography will be cited
using Gallup’s reference numbers. See WBGYL 364.
Since the Stone Cottage days, Pound had continued to publish individual cantos, which, he suggested
in the title to A Draft of XVI Cantos (1925), were intended to be “for the Beginning of a Poem of some
Length.” Early volumes were printed in small, illuminated fine-press editions—A Draft of XVI Cantos with
Three Mountains Press in January 1925 and A Draft of the Cantos 17–27 with John Rodker in September
1928 (Gallup A26 and A29). By the time this material was compiled into A Vision B, Pound had also published A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930), Eleven New Cantos, XXXI–XLI (1934), and The Fifth Decad of Cantos
(1937)—fifty-one poems (see Gallup A31, A37, A43). Pound also published these poems in periodicals,
individually or in small groups; for instance “Cantos XLII–XLIV” appeared in The Criterion in April 1937
(Gallup C1401). Since Yeats says in A Vision B that “There are now forty-nine,” we must imagine that if
he was not mistaken, he was basing this number on a conversation with Pound about poems written and/
or forthcoming.
“Meditations Upon Death” was a late addition to the work, written in early February 1929. The two parts
would later be split into two separate poems: “At Algeciras—a Meditation upon Death” and “Mohini
Chatterjee.” In Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (Wade 168), the first poem was titled “A Meditation written during Sickness at Algeciras.” See VP 493–94 and 495–96.
“The Return” was first published in The English Review in June 1912 and then in Pound’s volume Ripostes
in the same year (Gallup C47 and A8).
Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (New York: Delta, 1988), 462.
Yeats’s letters from 1926 expound on his reading. His own copies of some of these works—such as Spengler’s Decline of the West (WBGYL 1989; YL 1975) and Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (WBGYL
2274; YL 2258)—are heavily annotated.
For details of Yeats’s consideration of the Cavalcanti subject, and his reasons for abandoning it, please see
my “Compiling A Packet for Ezra Pound,” [forthcoming in Paideuma 38].
Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 60.
Catherine E. Paul, “Italian Fascist Exhibitions and Ezra Pound’s Turn to the Imperial,” Twentieth-Century
Literature 51, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 64–97.
Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1934; New York: New Directions,
1960), 46.
Gallup A27.
Pound, The Cantos, 13th printing (New York: New Directions, 1995), 81:538. Further references to
Pound’s Cantos will similarly be cited by Canto number and page number.
Hall and Pound, “The Paris Review Interview,” 10.
Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound’s Economic Correspondence, 1933–1940, ed. Roxana Preda (Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 2007), 130.
Longenbach, Stone Cottage, 51.
Pound, The Cantos, 83:554.
Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 134.
I deal with Pound’s treatment of these carvings in Santa Maria dei Miracoli (Venice) in “Italian Fascist
Exhibitions and Ezra Pound’s Turn to the Imperial,” 81–83.
Pound, The Cantos, 83:549.
REFLECTED VOICES, DOUBLE VISIONS1
by Margaret Mills Harper
I
I
n the autumn of 1917, after years of frustration in both romantic and religious questing, Yeats found a good measure of fulfillment in both realms. He gave up hope of
marrying either Maud Gonne MacBride, the woman whom he had desired, of whom
he had despaired, and about whom he had made love poetry for decades, or her daughter
Iseult Gonne, the subject of a messy emotional interlude that had begun the previous year.
A quick turn led Yeats to Georgie, or George, Hyde Lees, a young member of his English
set, who had been interested when the poet had approached her several years earlier, and
she now returned the attention. The two were well matched in intelligence and strength of
will, as well as artistic and spiritual inclinations, though the age difference was sharp. By
1917, she was ready to commit herself to a risky chance at happiness with a husband who
seemed challenging enough to suit; he was convinced that an annus mirabilis was in his
stars, if he could but grasp it.2 They both may have been right: as it happened, challenge,
revelation, and a measure of happiness were both finally at hand.
After initial difficulties that threatened to destroy the new marriage along with the
psychic well-being of both partners, by the end of the year all seemed thrillingly well.
The turn came in the midst of a traumatic honeymoon, when Yeats was physically ill and
near emotional breakdown, caused in large part by the sense that he had made a potentially ruinous mistake. During the crisis, George Yeats tried and succeeded in producing
automatic writing, a type of mediumship well known in spiritualist circles, in which the
writer touches a pen to a sheet of paper and empties her mind as if she were engaging in
formal meditation. Inexplicably, sometimes the pen moves. This is the moment of mystery, the moment that, in retrospect as well as on the immediate occasion, may provoke
either ridicule or true belief. It has done both as the tale of the automatic writing has been
told and retold in Yeats studies. For the Yeatses, the mysterious event caused neither fullblown belief nor dismissal. Rather, it impelled them to further investigation. The writing,
and the almost obsessive inquiry, lasted for several years of almost daily work, during
which messages purporting to be from disembodied communicators from realms of spirit
brought thousands of bits of information, information that was questioned, trusted, distrusted, and elaborated upon. Gradually, it coalesced into a philosophic and religious
“system,” which Yeats eventually compiled into his strangest book, A Vision. The work
lessened in intensity during the mid-1920s, when Yeats’s writing of A Vision seemed well
in hand, and the couple settled into a companionable partnership; but they resorted to
automatic writing well into the next decade, if only to check on a stray detail for the book
or its revised version. George tired of the activity before Yeats; beside the ongoing occult
work, she was rearing children, acting as secretary, bookkeeper, and nurse to her often ill
husband, and organizing any number of household moves. Automatic writing is hard on
its practitioners: that it was potentially dangerous was a commonplace in the contempo-
270
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
rary spiritualist press. “Much power is needed for this work,” one source explains, “and it
is drawn from the mediums themselves and not from the spirit people. I speak of physical
power—not mental—and only those whose health is good, and whose body is strong,
should ever attempt this work.”3
At first, George wrote seemingly disconnected words and phrases, for the most part
in large rounded letters sloping down sheets of paper, a far cry from her normally neat
and angular hand. On one of these sheets, a large word “NO,” a response to a question
presumably spoken by her husband, is followed by a prophetic sentence: “I give you philosophy to give you new images you ought not to use it as philosophy and it is not only
given for you—.”4 The philosophy that arrived did indeed provide Yeats with images, a
wealth of them, which he used in his creative work for the rest of his life, but any analysis
of the automatic experiment must recognize how inextricably personal as well as abstract
the Yeatses’ project was. In fact, part of the genius of that project is its determined blend
of daily activity and intellectual or imaginative structures. Two word-loving occultists had
rushed into marriage, and they came to know each other, build their joint lives, and justify
them in an oddly appropriate way: through psychomantic writing.
Beginning on 5 November 1917, the automatic sessions were carefully dated and
identified as to which of the many spirit “communicators” was speaking, as well as the
precise location in physical reality. As the couple moved from the Ashdown Forest Hotel,
where they spent their honeymoon, to other homes and temporary lodgings, in Ireland,
England, and elsewhere, they took their esoteric work with them. The communicators
came along, in all their varied glory: controls, guides, mendacious frustrators, secondary
personages from other lifetimes, and behind them other spirits, Daimons, and a whole
complicated array of presences and essences. Reading the documents, one cannot but be
impressed at the Yeatses’ extraordinary diligence in sorting it all out.
As time went on, they found ways to make their work more efficient. The script
almost always retains some free-flowing discourse, for the most part at the beginnings of
sessions. However, as time passed, an increasingly urgent need to organize makes itself
felt. The Yeatses numbered questions and answers, and worked to have the messages
give them the information they needed, pressing for complete answers or suggesting
topics, especially once the foundations of the system were in place and the couple were
looking for details to fill in charts, lists, or ideational symmetry. After the first fortnight,
they recorded questions in one book and answers in another. The questions are now in
Yeats’s hand, suggesting a refinement that presumably saved George from having to shift
gears from one mental state to another as she took down phenomenal questions and
then waited for noumenal answers. As the months passed, George’s automatic handwriting also altered. In script from early sessions, large rounded letters that are very unlike
her normal hand underscore the alterity of the automatic state, but as the supernormal
experience becomes increasingly integrated into the Yeatses’ “normal” lives, George’s automatic hand came to look no different from the one she used to write letters or make
notes.5 Sometimes, though, George remained both automatist and scribe. She was also
typist, diagrammist, and co-“codifier” as the amount of script became large enough to
be unmanageable without efforts to summarize, describe, and arrange the elements of
the underlying “system” that the partners believed from very early on to underlie the
individual messages.
Reflected Voices, Double Visions
271
Beginning in 1920, the various methods of reception underwent a major change, as
Yeats recorded in a notebook, under the heading “New Method”: “George speaks while
asleap” (YVP3 9). In fact this “new method” consisted of a number of methods, all involving George in a sleep-like state, during or after which she would speak.6 Later, she or Yeats
would write down what they recalled, or they would have a conversation that elaborated
on the ideas consciously. They also experimented with discussions of dreams, joint meditations, or even, “now & then,” revelations “from vision” (YVP3 75). The communicators
were by now felt to be present in the Yeatses’ daily life as well as the automatic one, and
messages crossed paths through waking and sleeping states. For example, a notebook entry in George’s hand, from the same spring of 1920 when the first change in method was
tried, notes that the communicator would now use the couple’s rereading to further his
own formulations: “There was to be a new method. We were to read over sleep accounts
& Dionertes would then develop the subject” (YVP3 21). This discussion continues with
an argument about whether this development would occur over many days or in one
exposition (“no no no I said I would write in once the entire subjective after life state,” the
voice insisted). These new methods, perhaps appropriately, as they increasingly blurred the
lines between normal and supernormal states, were accompanied by signs like smells and
sounds, from flowers and burnt feathers to whistles and trumpets.
By the end of the experiment, the Yeatses had spent years working devotedly to take
fragmentary pieces of data and assemble them into a system to explain truths about the
universe, history, and individual lives—not to mention how the mysterious communicators themselves might be explained. Despite attempts (such as the sleeps) to ease some of
the burden of the automatic writing, George was often overloaded. For her, the end of the
affair was as exhausting as the beginning, though it had provided fascinating productivity
and a successful creative and conjugal partnership. For her husband, the years of intense
concentration on the occult system had also resulted in a number of poems, plays, and
expository prose, not to mention a systematic philosophy that sustained him for the rest of
his life. Yeats recalled much later, in the words of a poem, his “Gratitude to the Unknown
Instructors” and their redemptive system: “What they undertook to do / They brought to
pass” (VP 505; CW1 258).
Despite the monumental status of Yeats as a literary and historical figure (and because of that status, among other reasons), the part played by his mediumistic wife in
some of his most important works and ideas tended for many years to be understated or
misrepresented, although the publication of Saddlemyer’s definitive biography is doubtless changing matters for the better.7 It has generally been known that George was the
source for many of the ideas that occupied her husband’s time and creative energy in his
astonishingly productive late years, and it is also no secret that she was a woman of dauntingly independent intelligence;8 yet she and her work remain occluded in Yeats studies.9
This indistinctness has long interested me. George Yeats has tended to be overshadowed in
Yeats studies and the popular imagination by other influential women like Maud Gonne
MacBride and Lady Gregory. Many readers over the years have assigned her biographical importance but little literary relevance other than the oddity of having functioned as
medium in the occult revelations that she and her husband received. In turn, the spiritual
knowledge that the Yeatses believed they gained through automatic writing and other
related methods is often acknowledged for having inspired certain poems and plays, but
272
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
tends not to be interpreted as having much critical value. Yet the famous Irish poet and his
work were both changed utterly by a young Englishwoman with magical interests, a gift
for automatism, and a quietly imposing intelligence. As Terence Brown puts it, since the
start of the script, “Yeats’s own creative work had been increasingly dependent on a collaborative engagement with his wife’s mediumistic powers.”10 Her work affected his, most
profoundly in the 1920s and 1930s, decades during which he produced his best writing.
George Yeats hid her labors from public view. In fact, especially in the years between
Yeats’s death in 1939 and her own in 1968 she was one of the most powerful makers of
the myth of the poet that ignores her. She hand-picked scholars who would write about
material in her possession and supervised what they saw with great care.11 In particular,
she kept unpublished and for the most part unseen the more than 3,600 pages of the automatic script and related documents stored in a chest in her house on Palmerston Road
in the Rathmines section of Dublin.12 These papers reveal her making of the system, the
hybrid of psychological, astrological, geometric, historical, and spiritual theory that lies
behind A Vision (1925 and 1937).13
She was anything but a passive medium during the proceedings, a supposedly empty
vessel whose hand was guided across the page by “controls” from the other world. Such a
highly idealized figure, derived from the popularization of the spiritualist movements of
the nineteenth century in North America, England, and elsewhere, was common. However, the Yeatses were too familiar with the large and varied bodies of writing about and
direct experience of spiritualism, which regularly tried to counteract this stereotype, to be
determined by it.14 Their practice was at least as informed by notions of joint adeptship,
including the idea of an occult marriage. The Yeatses’ sense that they were chosen to accomplish profound spiritual work together is echoed in a number of variants in occult
tradition on the idea of superhuman agents working with a couple or group of human recipients, whose power would thus be greater than that of someone working alone.15 Their
daily ritual of writing together quickly assumed a form of its own, with unique patterns
of questions and responses, the development of intricate relationships among the personalities of the participants (the human partners as well as their many spirit collaborators),
and increasingly subtle considerations of the facets of their personalities and conscious or
subconscious minds that were causing the ideas and images of the system to emerge. The
system was not, in the words of the control and the guide16 for 9 April 1919, “pre-existant
in anima mundi,” that is, already formed in the collective memory of humanity, waiting
for discovery. Rather, “all the bones are in the world,” not the astral plane. Nor is the being
fully fleshed there either. The whole is formed thus: “we only select & our selection is subordinate to you both—therefore we are dependent on you & you influence our ability to
develop & create by every small detail of your joint life” (YVP2 240, emphasis original).17
In other words, the system is both personal and collaborative, the necessary product of
what George Yeats called in a notebook entry the “Wisdom of Two” (YVP3 146).18
The Yeats who presents A Vision and has a secondary role as a character in some of
its bewilderingly prominent framing stories and poems is in fact several Yeatses, sliding between subject and object positions, who refer to each other in complex ways that
are uncertainly and simultaneously serious and comic. Moreover, A Vision is two books,
separated in time by some eleven years, which refer to each other in terms that are equally
slippery and equally performative. A duality or multiplicity of subject makes itself felt
Reflected Voices, Double Visions
273
throughout this/these work(s), in points of view, rhetoric, the relation of framing material
to what is inside the frames, and within the content of the system itself (so that one gyre
becomes two at the least touch, for example). This dramatic doubling and multiplying, no
less integral to the book than it has been maddeningly difficult for many readers, may be
analysed also in terms of the joint endeavor that was its inception and elaboration.
I also stretch the plain meaning of the term “book” to include the messy, necessarily
unfinished book of the system, of which a fraction appears in the printed work, as well
as various poetic, dramatic, and prose texts that are related to it. A personal book—I am
tempted to quote Yeats out of context and call it “the book of the people,” two of them,
at any rate—also exists in the vast amount of material in the Vision papers related to the
Yeatses’ intimate lives. To see George Yeats’s work properly requires looking at all of these
“books,” a task that requires replacing the idea of a final, public, and written document
that has a recognizable individual as its author with something less fixed temporally or
spatially than what is often meant.
There is a further complication for any editorial or critical project involving the automatic
script, of course. To assign the communications written by the hand of George Yeats to her
volitional authorship is to ignore the spirit communicators, difficult as they are to reckon
with. Barthes’ mort de l’auteur is almost too cute a phrase to describe a project whose “authors are in eternity,” to use one of Yeats’s favorite quotations from Blake.19 Should they be
granted any status besides that of fiction, self-delusion, or fraud? Should they be regarded
as distinct from George? or from her husband? What meaning should we assign to the fact
that both partners believed that they had independent existence as well as depending on the
Yeatses’ joint psyches for their abilities? How does their existence sit with various social and
cultural phenomena, such as conventions of authorship, technologies of representation or
communication, or political ideologies, which are also present as determinants of the spirits’
energies?
Simple dismissal of all these spirit collaborators in the name of scholarly or commonsense rationality is also unacceptable. George was not a fool, nor did she suffer fools
willingly, a fact to keep in mind when analyzing her occult work. Indeed, one mark of
her sanity, as of her husband’s, might be their willingness to engage in activities that challenged them, whether or not they might be thought foolish to doing so. As Terry Castle
has noted in a similar context, a supernatural event experienced collectively raises epistemological and rhetorical issues that may multiply difficulties for a skeptic bent on discrediting its objective validity. The need to explain such an experience away may well embroil
skepticism in “its own kind of folly—[a] debunking ‘mania,’ or compulsion to disprove,”
so that “to disbelieve…is to risk losing oneself in an alienating welter of evidence and
counterevidence.”20 The force of such a desire to disprove should not be underestimated.
Through several generations of Yeats scholarship, discussion of the Yeatses’ occult experimentation stills tends to begin, and often to end, at the question, Did they, or Do you,
believe it?—with lines between camps drawn on the basis of the answer to the latter. The
Yeatses themselves were by no means distracted by such compulsions.
Saddlemyer’s detailed psychological account of what might have happened in the
nightly sessions draws attention to the heterogeneous sources of what she suggests may
have been self-hypnosis. Saddlemyer also points to two interesting facts: that George
herself apparently used the critical word fakery in association with her first attempt at
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automatic writing; and that she was keenly aware that, having done so, the word would
damage her reputation. As she told A. Norman Jeffares, “the word ‘Fake’ will go down
to posterity” (BG 103). Interestingly, George’s use of the term occurred in the context of
working with Yeats scholars who took the script seriously (notably Virginia Moore and
Richard Ellmann) and were working to understand its elaborate ideas as such, hardly efforts they would have made if they thought that George had simply made everything up.
On the contrary: her honest admission added to the complexity of the affair.
The issue was not new to the Yeatses’ script, of course. It was a common theme in psychic research. In June 1911, for example, Yeats mused in an address before a like-minded
audience that “Like every other student of the subject [spiritualism], I have been bewildered by the continual deceits, by the strange dream-like manifestations, by the continual
fraud.” He continues:
Why, e.g., does Miss “Burton” when she is entranced commit ingenious frauds
which deceive not only the sitters but Miss Burton when she is awake?…Why is
it that when Albert de Rochas asks his sensitives to go back into past lives & tell
him who they were they can sometimes describe scenery, names families even,
that they have never heard of in their waking state, & yet claim to be people
whose existence can be disproved? Why this mixture of reality, of messages that
seem to come precisely as they say they do from the dead, with messages that but
express the thoughts of the living?
He goes on to propose complex interplays between mind and reality, comparing
psychic phenomena with dreaming and hypnosis. Two further comments in particular
seem almost to foretell these issues as they are raised in the automatic script. First, Yeats
suggests, “the dead are simply dreaming souls, souls suggestable from without or from
within, when they go to seances they are constrained by us when we question them, for
every question is a suggestion. It suggests an answer. And that we would only get from
them the truth in our own sense of the word.” Second, “They are all phases of the dissolution of the fixed personality.”21
William James also addresses the issue of fakery in “The Last Report: The Final Impressions of a Psychical Researcher,” written in 1909. James suggests bearing in mind that
“In most things human the accusation of deliberate fraud and falsehood is grossly superficial. Man’s character is too sophistically mixed for the alternative of ‘honest and dishonest’
to be a sharp one.” Later in the essay, James addresses automatic writing in particular:
I have come to see in automatic writing one example of a department of human activity as vast as it is enigmatic. Every sort of person is liable to it, or to
something equivalent to it; and whoever encourages it in himself finds himself personating someone else…Our subconscious region seems, as a rule, to be
dominated by a crazy “will to make-believe,” or by some curious external force
impelling us to persuasion.22
The Vision documents take this observation one step further to claim not only that every
person is “liable” to such a phenomenon, but that it is in fact essential. The Mask, one of
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the four Faculties whose interactions describe each human being, is defined as “something
put on and worn: a form created by passion” (YVP4 15) in order “to reveal or conceal
individuality” (YVP1 262; YVP3 164) “as a protection or revelation of the soul” (YVP3
145, 163) or, finally, “to unite us to ourselves” (YVP4 15; CW13 18; AVA 18; AVB 82), in
various rephrasings, which suggest in their repetition how important the idea is.
From an intellectual point of view, oppositions between the material and the supernatural in Yeats’s work are complicated by the arrival of the spirit communicators of the
automatic script. It is just this unmanageable eruption of spirits into the Yeatses’ daily life
and writing, however, that makes these documents exciting. Among other things, they are
indices of significant and widespread aesthetic and philosophical trouble with writing and
the real. Such trouble haunts a number of modernist texts, but the Yeatses’ experiment
dramatizes it in especially bold ways. For example, voices here are not merely standard
terms in literary critical discourse, signs of an orality or bodily immediacy imagined as
lost from Western literary culture. Nor are they synecdoches only for the uncanny, that
lack of fit between an imagined perceptible world and an unimaginable real so common
in the modern period, and so commonly expressed through the instability of texts.23
The communicators of the script intrude into historical and textual analysis no less than
they did into the lives of the people who summoned them. They complicate a number of
polarities, for example, of material versus spiritual worlds, the individual will as opposed
to machine-like automatism, agency as male or female, and conscious or unconscious
sources of knowledge. They point to the inadequacy of formulations that feature such neat
oppositions. We might think of them as a third term that makes the Yeats couple, and
their joint production, possible.24
One of the last notebook entries that the Yeatses made in their years of elaborating
the system together contains a particularly rich explanation of the “incredible experience,”
meaningful, as the documents are generally, in its attribution and symbolic resonances no
less than at the surface level of information. “When I asked how they could adapt themselves to our language and limitations,” Yeats recalls, “he said it was plain I did not understand the nature of communication through Interpreter”—that is, George, the medium
who outgrew her original title. In a glorious mélange of writerly confusion, Yeats was here
dictating to his wife a message he had heard from her lips earlier, when she was “asleep”
(whatever state that may have been). George wrote the name of Dionertes in parentheses
at the start of the entry to indicate to whom “he” refers, but did not need to indicate who
was meant by the “I” of the paragraph she was taking down as secretary. Then she enclosed in quotation marks her own–Dionertes’–Yeats’s exact words: “‘She finds the words,
we send the wave & she as it were catches it in a box[’]”(YVP3 102). The metaphors are
significant. Does finding words imply invention or revelation? Are the wave energy and
the box a sort of spiritual version of an electric transformer (reminiscent of a number of
nineteenth-century theories about psychic phenomena)? If the system is caught in a box,
does George play the role of scientist or stage magician by trapping it in words? Does Yeats
play the role of Pandora when he writes A Vision and opens the box in public? Does he
play Aladdin when he traps inspiration in verse? (In a letter to Dorothy Wellesley, years
after the script and the marriage had waned in intensity, Yeats repeated the striking figure,
noting that “The correction of prose, because it has no fixed laws, is endless, a poem comes
right with a click like a closing box.”25)
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II
An analysis of the Yeatses’ automatic writing or the compositions derived from it needs to
take account of some of the presuppositions that the texts imply before going very far. No
less significant than the questions of beliefs brought by readers or author to Yeats’s magical works are questions begged by genre. Different kinds of texts deliver different sorts of
messages. That is to say, considerable networks of predetermined information exist in the
categories themselves, for example, of religious or literary, philosophical or personal, poetic or technical discourses. Of course, categorization raises other familiar questions, and
the boundaries between kinds are not always distinct. It is often less simple than it appears
to determine what markers make a sacred text recognizably different from a secular one,
or the extent to which philosophy or history is poetic or fictional. Moreover, a single text
can happily blend more than one kind of discourse, drawing attention, for example, to the
personal quality of its matter as well as its general claims.
For A Vision, genre has been problematic from first to last. Indeed the history of the
book’s reception might reasonably be written as a history of argument over what kind
of thing it might be.26 Nor did its author tend to diminish the confusion. Writing to
the prospective publisher Werner Laurie in 1923, Yeats suggested that Macmillan would
probably release it from his contract with that company “as the book is entirely unlike any
other work of mine and will not appeal to the same public. When you see the specimen
pages you may reject it on the same grounds” (13 March 1923, CL Intelex 4300). His next
letter voices his concern more openly, as well as the generic difficulty:
I send you the first big bundle of my new book. I send it with alarm & shall not
be surprised if you will have nothing to do with it. Here & there—in certain
chapters passages of the analysis of the 28 phases into which I divide human life
there is perhaps good writing but good writing is not my object, & Part 1 (for
instance) can only be very dry and tec[h]nical. My object is the exposition of
certain symbols.
There is a public for a book of this kind but you may not think it your public. (7 September 1923, CL Intelex 4364)
The problem of an audience is a recurring concern in this correspondence, with good
reason.27 Generic expectations are of prime importance in the business of selling books:
people buy new works based on the kind of writing they know that they like or want. Yeats
was keenly aware of such practicalities and knew that this book would probably confound
the literary, aesthetic, and political expectations of his carefully nurtured public. He also
knew that he had on his hands a hybrid, different in kind from one section to another. At
one point, he even toyed with the idea of printing some parts in a smaller typeface, in italics, or perhaps in red ink, to help “the reader’s mood,” since then “he would know when
to expect beauty of form, or my attempt at it, and when to expect mere explanation” (to
Laurie, 11 September 1924, CL Intelex 4649).
The difficulty continued through the preparation of the second edition as well. Yeats
wrote to Harold Macmillan in March 1934 that he would send the copy of the revised
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A Vision “in a week or two.” Trying to pave its way, the author explained, “It is a book
which will be very much wanted by a few people—I get letters already asking for it—but
will puzzle the bulk of my readers.” Nonetheless (asking for the impossible), Yeats told
Macmillan, “I want it to be taken as a part of my work as a whole, not as an eccentricity. I have put many years of work into it” (9 March 1934, CL Intelex 6019). Macmillan
replied favorably to Yeats (although offering a royalty rate that was lower than usual until
the book had sold 2,000 copies), but nine months later, after a visit from Yeats, he wrote
a worried letter to Yeats’s agent A. P. Watt. Surely, Macmillan complained, “you will realize that the subject matter of the book is one that makes a very limited appeal. To most
ordinary minds it appears to be quite mad, and I cannot believe that the sale will be anything but a very small one. I rather gathered from Mr Yeats that he shared this view.”28
So he did. In May 1937, while correcting proofs for the second version, Yeats wrote to
Edith Shackleton Heald about A Vision (which is “not to be confused with its first edition
published years ago”): “This book is the skeleton in my cupboard. I do not know whether
I want my friends to see it or not to see it. I think ‘Will so-and-so think me a crazed
fanatic?’ but one goes on in blind faith. The public does not matter—only one’s friends
matter” (L 888–89).
Whether the book is “mad” and its author “a crazed fanatic” is a question of whether
the book makes claims that it can demonstrate to the satisfaction of its readers—and one
complexity of A Vision is that it makes competing claims. A significant part of the book’s
strangeness results from a number of mixed signals about what sort of messages it contains. This phenomenon was, of course, immediately obvious. One of the first reviewers
of the revised edition, Mary Colum, wrote in the pages of The Forum and Century in April
1938 that Yeats “flings in the face of the public one of the most fantastic constructions of
the intellect that has ever been produced, a remarkable medley of astrology, spiritualism,
philosophy, Hermetic wisdom, poetry, credulity, and necromancy”—yet “he is willing
to admit, too, that the mysterious instructors of A Vision may also be ‘created beings,’
an invention of his dream life.”29 Luckily, though, some of the generic confusion can be
lessened for contemporary readers by making a few critical distinctions between the two
versions of the book, while remembering that although the second edition is to some extent a new book, it also to some degree contains the older book within it. In other words,
the skeleton in Yeats cupboard should be regarded as not one but at least two related
skeletons, a piece of information that should make it a little easier to sort through the
jumble of bones.
In purpose and form the second A Vision is very different from the first. The revision
was not merely a clarification or elaboration: the book changed in kind between 1925 and
1937. In order to appreciate the shift from one Vision to the next, it may be instructive to
recall that A Vision is not the only occult text that underwent such reworking. It is worth
comparing the revision of A Vision with two other texts begun in similarly ambiguous and
engaging experiences: the unpublished manuscript titled “Leo Africanus” and the monograph Per Amica Silentia Lunae, which grew from the experience with a mysterious entity
whom Yeats came to identify as an anti-self. Both pairs of texts, “Leo” and Per Amica and
the two versions of A Vision, represent movement in time from an encounter (to whatever
extent imaginary) with a non-corporeal world in the form of voices or written communication toward retrospective synthesis in a published product. Both also travel a distance
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
away from discursive immediacy and toward the kind of transcendental appropriation
with which Yeats was more comfortable, the tonal mastery that he had for years practiced
in his other occult essays. For both pairs, the former text, the least finished, can be greatly
intriguing, and I find it unfortunate that most readers of Yeats encounter Per Amica and
the second edition of A Vision and not their quirky predecessors. The later works, and not
their odder cousins, have been easily available.30 This fact has limited not only appreciation of the unusual events out of which the books arose but perhaps even interest in the
books themselves, at least for those readers who might prefer the rawly emotional and
concrete earlier texts to the smoothly allusive Per Amica and the philosophical 1937 A
Vision, with their confident and sly narration and their impersonal tone.
Per Amica is often regarded as a kind of preface to A Vision, a simpler (and, many
claim, superior) version of the ideas fleshed out more elaborately in the later book.
The opening paragraphs of Yeats’s introduction to the 1937 A Vision endorse such an
attitude, and Per Amica is indeed the jumping-off point for the first two numbered
questions in the automatic script, one by Yeats and one by George as if the newlyweds
had discussed before the session began the idea of organizing the rather formless script
to carry further the ideas sketched out in that book (AVB 8 & YVP1 65). Broadly considered, the system explodes into multiplicities the duality of the 1917 monograph. For
example, four Faculties, then four Principles beyond them, replace the self and anti-self
of the earlier book; and the “two realities, the terrestrial and the condition of fire,” in
Per Amica shift to relative states in A Vision, dependent upon opposition and expressed
in expanding and contracting gyres, renamed Destiny and Fate (CW5 25; Myth 356 &
CW13 109; AVA 129).
Indeed, Per Amica is not only a predecessor but in some ways a prophecy. A Prologue
addressed pseudonymously to a woman whom Yeats would have married (“Maurice” or
Iseult Gonne) represents the book as arising from conversations between the two of them,
foreshadowing the birth of A Vision in the automatic script. The famous opening poem
of Per Amica, “Ego Dominus Tuus,” is set at the foot of Ballylee, the Norman tower in
Galway whose purchase as the Yeatses’ symbolic home would not be finalized until a year
and a half after the final draft of the poem was complete. The professed themes of the
monograph, the existence of Daemons (“Anima Hominis,” the title of the first of two
linked essays) and a supernatural source of common images (“Anima Mundi,” the parallel
title for the second essay), are an elaborate set of explanations for the messy mechanics of
direct encounters with a spiritual world; A Vision, similarly, draws the lines and curves of
its system over an obsessively researched and questioned direct encounter.31 The final sections of Per Amica mention the return of the self from the Daemonic realm as occurring in
the winding motion of gyres that do not appear until A Vision, even using the distinctively
Yeatsian word pern to describe it (CW5 31; Myth 364). As a whole, Per Amica shares in
the emotional stock-taking that is a prominent theme of the winters that Yeats spent with
Pound at Stone Cottage, feeling his age and the age of the world as it moved into war.
During this period Yeats wrote the first installment of his memoirs, the ghost play The
Dreaming of the Bones, the play The Hawk’s Well with its prominent conflict between youth
and age, and the poems of Responsibilities.32 Per Amica reads as “half a prayer or desperate
plea for some outward sign of regeneration,” as Lawrence Lipking has described it.33 It features a poet at midlife hoping for continued inspiration, a man used to his life and habits
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of thought longing for connection with history through a Great Memory and with what
is alien to his finite self through a Daemon, who “comes not as like to like but seeking its
own opposite, for man and Daemon feed the hunger in one another’s hearts” (CW5 11;
Myth 335). Read in the context of the automatic script, which began a few months after
publication, it is hard not to feel that Yeats’s prayer was answered.
However, if Per Amica is a prayer, it is more a public than a private one, the measured
convictions of a well-known poet in mid-career, not for many moments or very intensely
revelatory of personal loneliness or grief. The book is filled with a generalized subjectivity
even when the first person singular is used. The Daemon, the mysterious Other, is evoked
by conscious fabrication of a mask, but it is the mask, that famous Yeatsian aesthetic concept, and not the supersensual Other, which receives the emphasis. At times the Daemon
is sensed involuntarily in fleeting moments that are immediately appropriated by the man
into his own desires: “I am in the place where the Daemon is, but I do not think he is with
me until I begin to make a new personality, selecting among those images, seeking always
to satisfy a hunger grown out of conceit with daily diet” (CW5 31; Myth 365–66). Yeats
allows his readers few glimpses of another relation although he evokes it at key moments,
such as the present-tense admission near the end of the book that “yet as I write the words
‘I select,’ I am full of uncertainty, not knowing when I am the finger, when the clay” (CW5
32; Myth 366). Another such resonant moment occurs in a section when hero and mask,
two concepts that are Yeatsian trademarks, converge, and the hero, having donned the
mask, “knew another’s breath came and went within his breath upon the carven lips and
that his eyes were upon the instant fixed upon a visionary world: how else could the god
have come to us in the forest?” (CW5 11; Myth 335).
Even so, the rhetorical question gives away the public nature of this discourse. Richard Ellmann is correct in characterizing Per Amica as an evasive maneuver, a way of presenting a supernatural theory as “an extended and elaborate metaphor” to forestall objections to its metaphysical qualities. According to Ellmann, Yeats in Per Amica “seems not
so much to convince the reader as to take him in.”34 The monograph does work to incline
that reader to agreement through lush, imagistic prose, using anecdotes and quotations
from poets or Henry More in lieu of declarative linearity. In an early unpublished draft of
Per Amica Yeats complained of his early style “where there was little actual circumstance,
nothing natural, but always an artificial splendour,” but it is hard to see that this prose
has traveled far from the elaboration of a work like “Rosa Alchemica” or, for that matter,
“Magic.”35 Yeats, the old conjuror, is up to his old tricks. Probably the most famous statement in Per Amica is the assertion that “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric,
but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry” (CW5 8; Myth 331). Yeats did make poetry
out of quarrels with himself, but his prose was not generally so lucky. Certainly Per Amica
is not, for all its sensuous beauty. Even when Yeats endorses doubt and the sacrifice of
pleasant self-deception in the paragraph that follows the quotable sentence above, the
argument is couched in impersonal terms: “We must not make a false faith by hiding
from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest achievement of the human
intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and therefore it must be offered in sincerity”
(CW5 9; Myth 332).
Compare the preceding sentence with the following passage from the “Leo Africanus” manuscript from which the former was derived:36
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280
Even the wisdom that we send you, but deepens your bewilderment, for when
the wisest of your troop of shades wrote you through the ignorant hand of a
friend “Why do you think that faith excludes intellect. It is the highest achievement of the human intellect, & it is the only gift that man can offer to god. That
is why we must leave all the winds of time to beat upon it[,]” you but sought
the more keenly to meet not your own difficulties but the difficulties of others.
Entangled in error, you are but a public man, yet once you would put vague
intuition into verse, & that insufficient though it was might have led you to the
path the eye of the eagle has not seen. (“Leo,” 28)
Not only is the passage vivid with imagery, figuring “the winds of time” beating upon
human faith, Yeats as “entangled in error,” and the road he has not taken being “the path
the eye of the eagle has not seen”; it is also self-revealing in ways that Yeats would use to
great effect later.
The authorial voice is direct, castigating and demanding to be heard. Yet the authority upon which the voice draws seems at first glance to rest upon the slimmest of supposition. The author is identified with the source of disembodied vocal messages given
during a series of séances, which may or may not be from a spirit, who may or may not
be who he claims to be, written through the conscious intention of Yeats, who may or
may not believe that he is ventriloquizing. The spirit is ostensibly that of Leo Africanus,
the sixteenth-century travel writer and adventurer Al-Hassan ibn-Mohammed al-Wezar
al-Fasi, who was summoned mediumistically in séances beginning in 1912 (after a false
start in 1909) and who developed into a figure that Yeats conceived as a kind of alter ego,
a symbolic opposite.37 By late 1916, when the private essay was written, Yeats was sufficiently convinced of the value of Leo as a guide to engage in an experiment with highly
significant ramifications for his later work: to suspend authorial control and write as if
through the personality and agency of another.38
The essay is in the form of two letters, one from Yeats to Leo and the other from
Leo to Yeats, written at Leo’s suggestion “as from him to me,” as Yeats remembered the
request. “He would control me if he could in that reply so that it would be really from
him” (“Leo,” 13). The canceled words are significant, as is a canceled passage from the
opening section of the essay: “If I would write out my difficulties in a letter addressed to
you as though you were still living in the east & then wrote another letter in your hand
you would see to it that the second letter was but in seeming mine. I should be overshadowed in my turn” (“Leo,” 21). The process of writing the letters would put Yeats in the
borderland between traditional Western authorship, presided over by the strong myth of
the stable self, and the uncharted territory of writerly mediumship, with its resonances of
femininity, darkness, the irrational, and the non-Western.
The words are still Yeats’s, of course, for all of his attempt to free them from his
own governance. The dream of freedom from self occurs only within the framework and
volition of that self; the Other exists as such only because of the subject that places it in
an imagined location outside that identified with the subject. Yeats remained skeptical
of his own efforts to replace conscious with anti-self as he wrote. The essay is full of his
doubts: “I think probable I am not convinced that in this letter there is one sentence that
has come from beyond my own imagination but I will not use a stronger phrase…there
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281
is no thought that has not occurred to me in some form or other for many years” (“Leo,”
38–39). Nonetheless, the essay is distinctly bold and direct in comparison with Yeatsian
public prose, a tonal quality which (paradoxically, given that two personages speak) derives from a less multiple authorial self than a work like Per Amica. In splitting himself
for the two parts of the essay, the persona who writes each part is less multiple than the
chameleon Yeats of the later work, who drifts into danger when he focuses on sincerity,
from which he has escaped hitherto only by the “theatrical, consciously dramatic” donning of a mask.
The increased separation of Yeats from Leo ironically accompanies more rhetorical
engagement than these other experiments. In dialogue with a (perhaps) independently
existing anti-self rather than declaration through an invented mask, Yeats speaks from
a more engaged, less distanced location; his overt splitting of psychic and spiritual self
results in less fragmentation of authorial self. The knowledge of Anima Mundi and the
influence of spirit “secondary personalities,” the major themes of the “Leo Africanus”
essay, are written into the authorial subject.39 As Leo puts it, for the spirits as well as for
Yeats, “our message [is], as it were built in the whole structure of our body & our mind”
(“Leo,” 29). In this regard, “Leo,” and not Per Amica, is the most significant predecessor
of A Vision as well as Yeats’s later work in its shadow, because the unpublished letters and
not the more commonly known text lay the groundwork for the great experiment, to use
the phrase from the monograph, in “quarreling,” in which it is a question not so much of
whether one holds a position against others or argues internally but of whether a position
that is not one’s own is entertained. Leo’s ambiguous status as neither demonstrably self
nor Other adds to his value, for he, like George’s communicators and perhaps George
herself, cannot be pigeon-holed as friend or frustrator, bringer of agreement and ease or
the shock of the new and unassimilable.40
Almost all criticism of A Vision refers to the second edition, a state of affairs that is
probably appropriate given Yeats’s patent endorsement of that text rather than the earlier
version. His 1937 introduction confesses as much:
The first version of this book, A Vision, except the section on the twenty-eight
phases, and that called “Dove or Swan” which I repeat without change, fills me
with shame. I had misinterpreted the geometry, and in my ignorance of philosophy failed to understand distinctions upon which the coherence of the whole
depended, and as my wife was unwilling that her share should be known and I to
seem sole author, I had invented an unnatural story of an Arabian traveller which
I must amend and find a place for some day because I was fool enough to write
half a dozen poems that are unintelligible without it. (AVB 19).
It is quite appropriate to be wary of Yeats’s confessions in this essay—I would not
want to accept without hesitation, for example, the assertion that his only reason for
continuing and in fact adding to the outlandishness of the fantastic story of Michael
Robartes, the mysterious Arab tribe, and all its other trappings was so that readers could
understand a few poems more easily. Nevertheless, years of revision and plans to include
the second edition in the collected works projects of his late years, as well as numerous
letters suggesting that the first edition was unfinished, all encourage readers to focus on
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that book rather than the much rougher earlier work.41 So does the 1925 A Vision: in the
dedication Yeats admits, “I could daresay make the book richer, perhaps immeasurably
so, if I were to keep it by me for another year, and I have not dealt with the whole of my
subject, perhaps not even with what is most important” (CW13 lv; AVA xiii) and hints
that more is to come: “Doubtless I must someday complete what I have begun” (CW13
lvi; AVA xiii). Moreover, the first version was “horribly expensive,” suitable for a piece of
drawing-room–tabletop art but hardly for a widely read book.42
Furthermore, in some respects the 1937 A Vision seems to reveal more of the spiritualistic collaboration that lies behind the book than the 1925 edition, which hides the
fact of George’s automatic writing behind an elaborate and transparently false story of
old books, chance discoveries, and a strange nomadic sect from the Arabian desert. By
1937, Yeats had added new prefatory material including an introduction telling the story
of the automatism as well as a long tale, “Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends: An
Extract from a Record Made by his Pupils,” which subsumes the hoax material of 1925
into a seemingly allegorical if highly unusual fictional experiment.43 The “Stories,” about
“a group of strange disorderly people on whom Michael Robartes confers the wisdom of
the east,” as Yeats described it to Dorothy Wellesley (L 859), have baffled critics both of
A Vision and of Yeats’s fiction ever since. The introduction is not without its ambiguities,
either. The story of the automatic script and other experiments is told years after the fact,
with the luxury of recollection and the concomitant blurring of fact into the fabrications
of memory. Yeats has had time to make sense of his “incredible experience,” to put it in
a larger context than he could have done in 1925. To some extent, distance may provide
clarity, but the essay also tells more about Yeats in the 1930s than necessarily re-creates the
events of 1917 and beyond with a high degree of accuracy. The 1937 introduction, like
the book in general, is a public repackaging of material that was much closer to the private
experiences of the Yeatses in the first edition.
The journey from “Leo Africanus” to Per Amica includes a movement away from
emotional engagement with an Other and toward the appropriation of that otherness
into an authorial self whose multifaceted nature contributes to its assertions of power. The
distance from the 1925 to the 1937 version of A Vision covers similar ground. In 1925 the
discourse contains within it traces of someone else, mediated though that presence is by
a number of factors. In other words, George’s active participation is still traceable there,
and so are the voices of the various controls and guides of the automatic script. By 1937
the text has been reworked into a book whose author contains vacillations and variations
within himself, whose analysis of history uses its own historical moment as part of its
authority, and the very form of whose book also illustrates the ideas of interlacing cones
and alternating movements.44
The change results in a more masterful presentation: in 1925 the authority for the
system is hidden, and Yeats presents himself as responding to initiatives that he does not
explain except through obvious fictions. The book is riddled with omissions, statements
without contexts (including unattributed quotations, usually from the script), and abrupt
shifts of subject. Generally speaking, the focus in 1925 is more personal, sexual, and
psychological than philosophical, social or historical.45 The book is also more lyrical, by
which I mean that it is more dependent upon image than explanation and more likely
to follow associative than logical progression, although the 1937 book is more literary, in
Reflected Voices, Double Visions
283
that it is aimed at Yeats’s literary public and not a small coterie of fellow occultists. Significantly, the 1925 book is dedicated to “Vestigia,” the Golden Dawn motto of Moina (Mrs.
MacGregor) Mathers, the widow of the founding Chief of the Order; in 1937 the book
is prefaced by an emotive essay about and a public letter to Ezra Pound.46 In 1937 the
authority for the system is not the now freely mentioned communicators but the motions
of the gyres, a more impersonal source. The system is situated smoothly in a long history
of ideas, buttressed by statements from the numerous philosophers Yeats read in the years
between the two editions, and organized more clearly thanks to the years of refinement
since the first edition. In 1937 the spirits no longer play the role of the hidden teachers;
they too take their place in the wheels upon wheels, which become not only the subjectmatter but processes that affect all things: ideas, author, the times in which the book was
composed, and the times to come.
Moreover, and crucially, Yeats accrues power to himself by setting the wheels in motion formally and intellectually. He is again the mage, the knower, and even the mover of
those gyres, in the important sense that it is he through whom their creative representations have come. The gyres not only foreordain but also depend on Yeats’s knowledge,
creative expression, and interpretative exposition. The 1937 A Vision knows that it will be
read as part of the oeuvre of a major literary figure. It anticipates being read and analyzed;
it expects to be influential; it looks to contribute to the posthumous assessment of Yeats as
the book of his life and work becomes a historical document.
Appropriately, its final words are magisterial.47 The three parts of the conclusion
contain a summing up of Yeats’s age and the turbulence of the times, a transcendence into
knowledge by means of a mysterious Thirteenth Cone beyond the unceasing cones of the
intelligible system, and final, very Yeatsian rhetorical question: “Shall we follow the image
of Heracles that walks through the darkness bow in hand, or mount to that other Heracles, man, not image, he that has for his bride Hebe, ‘The daughter of Zeus the mighty
and Hera shod with gold’?” (AVB 302). “Then I understand,” Yeats comments; “I have
already said all that can be said,” and now what “shall we” choose, man or image? The only
authority above this wise man, who knows what questions to ask to send readers on their
way, is that Thirteenth Cone. It “can do all things and knows all things,” but “has kept the
secret” of the consequences of its freedom (AVB 302). Nonetheless, it is Yeats who knows
of it and who informs us of its secrecy. The secret is less powerful for being available as a
subject of his discourse, just as the communicators and George Yeats are also diminished
by their change in status from 1925 to 1937, from concealed sources of truth to characters
in a story by Yeats about the beginnings of his book.
Two of the most commonly quoted passages from the 1937 edition both contribute
to the hegemony of the impersonal gyres as a vehicle for their poet-expositor in this version of A Vision: the statement that Yeats makes at the beginning of the tell-all introduction that the communicators came to give him “metaphors for poetry” and a passage from
the end purporting to answer the question of “whether I believe in the actual existence of
my circuits of sun and moon”:
To such a question I can but answer that if sometimes, overwhelmed by miracle
as all men must be when in the midst of it, I have taken such periods literally,
my reason has soon recovered; and now that the system stands out clearly in my
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
284
imagination I regard them as stylistic arrangements of experience comparable to
the cubes in the drawing of Wyndham Lewis or to the ovoids in the sculpture
of Brancusi. They have helped me to hold in a single thought reality and justice.
(AVB 25)
Both “metaphors for poetry” and “stylistic arrangements of experience” are rhetorical pauses for effect and also convenient ways to deflect a question about occult truth
into the safer territory of art.48 Interestingly, the automatic script from which the first
phrase derives was not located among the rest of the manuscripts, and it has long been
assumed that Yeats invented the words, putting them in quotation marks as if quoting
the instructors but instead reporting from faulty memory, wishful thinking, or imperious
afterthought. Such an action is compatible with the 1937 A Vision, but the truth is slightly
more complex. In the original context, Yeats appears not as powerful bard but as humbled
student. The script from which the phrase was taken was filed, or misplaced, among the
manuscript pages of the Packet for Ezra Pound, for which it has been used. In this record
of an early session, the unnamed instructor(s?) tells Yeats that the “mystical work” is filled
with images and their meanings, but the spirits “will not do your work for you you must
think things out for yourself.” Although “they are anxious to get through,” the messages
would come, “but never clearly always in images not understood till later.” Yeats was
clearly told that it would be “good” “if you don’t set up as a philosopher,” that it would
“be the end of it & her” if he did not use the script “for art only.” To an unrecorded question, George wrote “NO” in large letters, followed by the genesis of Yeats’s famous remark
in his introduction written a decade later: “I give you philosophy to give you new images
you ought not to use it as philosophy.” The next words complete the thought: “and it is
not only given for you yes.”49
Virginia Moore records a conversation with George Yeats that corroborates the distancing from the original context of the “images” or “metaphors” remark, although neither Moore nor her informant take the further step, implied in much Yeats criticism, of
appropriating both images and forms for the poet alone:
Though shying a little from the subject—understandably, for she has been
hounded—she told me in 1952 that, whereas, in the beginning, Yeats (and
presumably herself ) did think the messages spirit-sent, and therefore proof of
communion between the living and the dead, he saw them later as a dramatized
“apprehension of the truth.” If not from the dead, from whom, from what, this
“truth”? From their own higher selves.50
Such claims that the system is useful for metaphor or image and stylization or dramatization are to some degree counterbalanced, for example, by strange stories in other sections of the 1937 introduction (which are not cited nearly as often) of sounds, smells, and
such materializations, and by the presence in both editions of A Vision of direct quotations
from the script, which imply volitional speech by the presence of the punctuation itself.
Nevertheless, just as the difference between “Leo” and Per Amica is the contrast between
direct encounter and suggestive essay, the two versions of A Vision are also distinct in kind
as well as in level of polish. The one is closer to reportage, an account by an author who
Reflected Voices, Double Visions
285
later remembered being “overwhelmed by miracle”; the other presents much of the same
material but at a distance from its feathered glory, as the measured thoughts of an old man
turning the symbols over in his mind while readying himself for posterity.
The 1925 A Vision is not written for a crowd. In comparison with the ending of the
1937 book, the last two numbered sections of the first edition, a short paragraph called
“The Herring Fishers” and a final statement entitled “Mythology,” are as modest a conclusion as Yeats ever wrote. “The Herring Fishers” contains almost an apology and a hesitant
question:
Much of this book is abstract, because it has not yet been lived, for no man can
dip into life more than a moiety of any system. When a child, I went out with
herring fishers one dark night, and the dropping of their nets into the luminous
sea and the drawing of them up has remained with me as a dominant image.
Have I found a good net for a herring fisher? (CW13 206; AVA 251)
The final paragraph is a statement of purpose that ends with a sentence in which Yeats’s
will is literally buried in the modal verb, in a play on the older, strong meaning of willan
and blurring of a distinction between subjunctive and optative moods in English: “That
we may believe that all men possess the supernatural faculties I would restore to the philosopher his mythology” (CW13 207; AVA 252). Does this would indicate tentative hope,
slight inclination, urgent wish, or active intention? The amount of choice that Yeats has
in the matter is left obscure.
Perhaps the submerging of the authorial will in language that casts not so much a
spell as a net, with the intent less to control than to discover, is appropriate for the quirky
1925 A Vision, imperfect and disjunctive, present as if it claims to be a revelation of
preternatural truth but also countering that claim in a number of ways, such as citing as
authority for its information an obviously fictional and oddly humorous story or suggesting that its author is inadequate to his task (“Having the concrete mind of the poet, I am
unhappy when I find myself among abstract things” [CW13 104; AVA 129]). Yeats ends
this book which he knew was unfinished by depicting himself hoping to catch something
in the luminous sea and relying not on his own well-defined mask but on herring fishers who are as indefinable as the skilled adults he went out with as a child. The fishers
have some of the defamiliarized, and therefore desired, “cold and passionate” quality of
the central figure in the poem “The Fisherman.” The fish may partake of the magic of
longing that characterizes the fish-become-glimmering-girl in “The Song of Wandering
Aengus.” As it often does in Yeats’s work, the sea, along with pools, wells, and watery
depths, symbolizes the unfathomable as well as the Anima Mundi, that store of collective
memory and knowledge that is often described as a reservoir. Yeats plays the child in the
automatic script more than once, and both husband and wife are like children at different moments in the thinly disguised autobiographical poem “Desert Geometry or the
Gift of Harun Al-Raschid” that opens Book II of the 1925 book. In rhetoric and in images, the first A Vision registers the uncertainty of a book without the kind of authorship
to which its famous author was accustomed. It may even be a book that argues against
the authorship of its writer. At the very least, it complicates the idea of individual, willed
creativity as well as suggests that the magisterial Yeats, for all his decades of spiritual and
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
286
aesthetic explorations and all his experience in writing out of that experience, could not
control his material.
This lack of control is far from merely a weakness in the book. Indeed, the earlier
A Vision, like the “Leo Africanus” letters, has as both a defining quality and an abiding
theme the unsettled relationship between authority and authorship, and the equally dynamic relationship between creativity and externally originating truths. The book is shot
through with structural and topical issues that might be described, using its terms, as the
relative positions of Will and Mask (that is, authority and the fictive construct “author”),
Creative Genius and Body of Fate (that is, invention and discovery), on the Great Wheel.
These conjunctions and oppositions are best understood by directing attention to the
complex genesis of the text, since the reception/creation of the automatic script and other
documents was an embodiment or dramatization of them.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
This essay, Parts I and II, is adapted from the “Introduction: ‘She finds the words’” and “First Interlude:
Double Visions: Two Manuscripts and Two Books” of my book Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual and Literary
Collaboration of George and W.B. Yeats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); hereafter WOT in text.
See Elizabeth Heine, “‘W. B. Yeats’ map in his own hand,’” Biography 1, no. 3 (1978): 37–50 at 48.
The author is presumably William Morris, an authority on the value of life-affirming work, speaking
through the medium May Hughes. His practical advice from beyond the grave continues: “Those who are
weak, or unfit, will find themselves much depleted after an hour of writing and will, in time, become sick
and ill. Do not allow a friend from the spirit side to use you for this form of communication for more than
fifteen minutes at a time, and never when the vitality is impaired by sickness, or ill health of any kind,”
[May Hughes], From Heavenly Spheres: A Book Written by Inspiration from William Morris; Poet, Socialist
and Idealist Who Passed on—October 3rd, 1896 (London: Rider, [1936]), 73.
The first scripts had been assumed to be lost. However, I suspect they are the ten sheets of manuscript filed
amid drafts of the introduction to the second edition of A Vision (in which Yeats misquotes the phrase “to
give you new images” in his famous version of the story), NLI MS 36,260/4; see also CVA notes 3. The
Introduction, part of “A Packet for Ezra Pound,” recalls:
On the afternoon of October 24th 1917, four days after my marriage, my wife surprised me by
attempting automatic writing. What came in disjointed sentences, in almost illegible writing,
was so exciting, sometimes so profound, that I persuaded her to give an hour or two day after
day to the unknown writer, and after some half-dozen such hours offered to spend what remained of life explaining and piecing together those scattered sentences. “No,” was the answer,
“we have come to give you metaphors for poetry.” (AVB 8)
The clearest changes in handwriting coincide with the change in her title from “medium” to “interpreter”
after Anne was born in February 1919. The automatic script for the first session after the birth, 20 March
1919, opens with free comments, including: “No longer the medium…different name / Interpreter”
(YVP2 200), and by June she was no longer running words together on the page and also started to record
the questions; see WOT 137–39.
The state seemed like sleep in this realm but waking in the other, the Yeatses learned in one of many messages that suggest the complicated levels of consciousness as well as relationship and authority that were
presumably at play. On 1 July 1920, according to an entry in George’s hand (but Yeats’s voice) from the
notebook of “sleeps” which they were keeping, the message was cut short because, according to the control
Ameritus, the “Interpreter went to sleep. Meaning of course that he found her asleep, instead of merely
sleeping to me, waking to him. He then explained that when she turned away from me she could no longer
hear him. This was because she associated him with me. I asked if he came more through me than her. He
said no” (YVP3 28).
Ann Saddlemyer’s Becoming George: The Life of Mrs. W. B. Yeats appeared in 2002 from Oxford University
Press.
Aside from the voluminous automatic script, relatively few autographs of George Yeats have been published, but witness the letters to her friends Dorothy Shakespear and Ezra Pound (Ann Saddlemyer,
Reflected Voices, Double Visions
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
287
“George, Ezra, Dorothy and Friends: Twenty-Six Letters, 1918–59,” in YA7 [1990] 4–28), as well as the
record contained in the Pound-Shakespear correspondence: ed. Omar Pound and A. Walton Litz, Ezra
Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters 1909–1914 (New York: New Directions, 1984).
This situation has been changing in the last couple of decades. Besides Saddlemyer, see Terence Brown, The
Life of W. B. Yeats: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999); Brenda Maddox, George’s Ghosts: A New
Life of W. B. Yeats (London: Picador-Macmillan, 1999), published in the USA as Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret
Life of W. B. Yeats (New York: HarperCollins, 1999); and David Pierce, Yeats’s Worlds: Ireland, England,
and the Poetic Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995). See also Bette London, Writing Double: Women’s Literary Partnerships (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 179–209;
and Frances Wilson, Literary Seductions: Compulsive Writers and Diverted Readers (London: Faber, 1999),
219–26. My own “The Medium as Creator: George Yeats’s Role in the Automatic Script,” in YAACTS6
(1989) 49–71, and “The Message is the Medium: Identity in the Automatic Script,” in YAACTS9 (1991)
35–54, also argue for George Yeats’s importance as collaborator of the system and its assumptions.
Brown, Life, 261.
See Saddlemyer, Becoming George Chapter 21, “Seekers and Friends,” for a discussion of George Yeats’s role
in the first generation of Yeats scholarship following the poet’s death in 1939.
Before the publication of the Vision papers, the most careful attempt to go through the holographs and
typescripts was made by Curtis Bradford (he recounts his experience in the essay “George Yeats: Poet’s
Wife,” Sewanee Review 77 [1969]). Stacks of manila envelopes representing attempts at sorting fell into
disarray from years of handling and duplication. Before papers were donated to the National Library of
Ireland in 2000, the envelopes comprised a sort of textual-archeological site, with strata deposited by
various scholars who had studied the manuscripts inside them. Along with the handwriting of Yeats and
George appeared that of Bradford, Richard Ellmann, Kathleen Raine, and George Harper, among others. See Connie K. Hood, “A Search for Authority: Prolegomena to a Definitive Critical Edition of W. B.
Yeats’s A Vision (1937)” (Ph. D. dissertation, University of Tennessee, 1983; UMI 8319325).
The 1925 edition was actually sent to subscribers on 15 January 1926, although the colophon is dated
1925 (Wade 149).
In 2005, a search under Spiritualism in the British Library catalogue resulted in 685 hits for books and
journals printed before 1975. A number of these are guides to the practice, and they routinely offer advice
similar to that of E. W. and M. H. Wallis, A Guide to Mediumship, and Psychical Unfoldment (London:
Friars Printing Association, [1903]). Part 2 of the guide, “How to Develop Mediumship,” is firm on the
topic of passivity, asserting that a medium should “intelligently cooperate with, rather than render blind
obedience to, the spirits”:
We unhesitatingly affirm that it is not necessary that mediums should regard themselves as
mere “conduits” through which the spirits are to pour just whatever they choose. Nay, we
go further, and claim that if mediumship is to be lifted above the plane of mere sensationalism, mediums must study their own powers, and learn to provide the conditions requisite for
their own unfoldment, so as to exercise a determining influence over the results and share the
responsibilities as well as the pleasures and spiritual benefits accruing from the co-operative
association. (p. 111)
Yeats stresses the importance of the magical convocation in his ill-fated essay “Is the Order of R. R. & A.
C. to remain a Magical Order?” written to prevent the fragmentation of the Golden Dawn in 1901 (YGD
259–268). Prominent among the examples of an occult marriage were the fourteenth-century couple
Nicholas Flamel and his wife Pernella, whose alchemical successes had witnessed a revival of attention,
especially in France, since the eighteenth century. Yeats used their story (sometimes confusing it with the
romantic legends associated with the thirteenth-century Raymond Lully) as a symbol for the relationship
he hoped for between Maud Gonne and himself, in the Cuala Press edition of The Green Helmet and Other
Poems (1910; VP 253); see YGD 161 n55. Moina and MacGregor Mathers were another example, and it
is perhaps significant that Yeats dedicated AVA to her. See references SB 163 and Mem 49–50.
The instructors were most often of these two types. Controls have more or less human names (like Thomas
or Ameritus), which often evoke various etymologies, though they are seldom self-explanatory. The communicators are almost always male (except for two brief visits from Epilamia, who presided over automatic
script after the sleeps had begun [YVP3 44–45]). Controls seem to wield more authority than the less
articulate guides, which, like Shakespearean fairies, have names taken from nature (the four that regularly
appear, Apple, Fish, Leaf, and Rose, also, as Saddlemyer notes, are “notably reminiscent of Willy’s early
poetry,” BG 112). A notebook entry in George’s hand from 1920 defines the difference between guides
288
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
and controls: “Guides are called by such names as leaf Rose etc while spirits who have been men are given
such names as Thomas Dionertes etc—” (YVP3 19).
Actually, by this time the Yeatses’ “joint life” included a third person, their infant daughter Anne, as the
communicators noted: “The system is not preexistent—it is developed & created by us by you two or three
now from a preexisting psychology.” For more on the Third Daimon, associated with Anne Yeats, see WOT
Chapter 5.
See also a guide’s description of the “wisdom from 2 people” (YVP1 185).
William Blake, Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 825.
Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 213. Chapter 11 of this study examines An Adventure, the well-known account of an apparition of Marie Antoinette seen in 1911 by Charlotte Anne Moberley and Eleanor Jourdain.
An Adventure excited a number of energetic rebuttals. The Yeatses were fascinated by the book, which is
mentioned several times in the automatic script, to the extent of corresponding with and meeting the authors
while in Oxford; see MYV1 78–79, 224–25; MYV2 67–68, 424 n29. A Vision B invokes the work to explain
aspects of the afterlife and haunting: “See An Adventure (Faber & Faber). This anonymous book was the
work of two women, one the Head of St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, the other her predecessor. It describes with
minute detail a vision of Marie Antoinette and her Court, and of the gardens of the Petit Trianon as they
were before the Revolution, and the research that proved the vision’s accuracy. The two ladies walking in the
garden of the Petit Trianon shared the same vision. I have confirmed, as far as the meagre records permitted,
a similar vision in my own family, and Sligo pilots and Galway farmers have told me of visions that seem to
reproduce the costumes of past times” (AVB 227n). See also CW13 286–87 n126.
Remarks delivered to the Ghost Club, 7 June 1911 (BL Add. MS 52264).
William James, William James on Psychical Research, ed. Gardner Murphy and Robert O. Ballou (New
York: Viking, 1960), 312 & 322.
See the Preface to Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature
(London: Palgrave, 2002), ix–xiv.
I am borrowing the formulation of Marjorie Garber, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday
Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
8 September [1935], Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, ed. Dorothy Wellesley (London:
Oxford University Press, 1940), 24.
Graham Hough would disagree: he begins his analysis of the book with its genre, since it is “the end
we understand most easily.” According to Hough, A Vision is an apocalypse (The Mystery Religion of
W. B. Yeats [Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984], 89–90). Harold Bloom agrees, calling it an apocalypse
or a “Gnostic scripture” (Yeats [Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1970], 270). Northrop
Frye retained a serious interest in the book in terms of the genre he called an anatomy (“Yeats and the
Language of Symbolism,” in Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology [New York: Harcourt Brace
and World, 1963], 218–237; “The Rising of the Moon,” in Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth
and Society [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976], 245–274). Frye’s approach has been elaborated on by Hazard Adams, “Symbolism and Yeats’s A Vision,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 22
(1964): 431 and The Book of Yeats’s Vision: Romantic Modernism and Antithetical Tradition (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1995), 3; and Steven Helmling, The Esoteric Comedies of Carlyle, Newman
and Yeats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Other critics of Frye’s generation tend to
treat A Vision as a sort of strange reader’s guide, useful for explaining otherwise opaque references in the
poems, a “system of references” (Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1939], 176) or a “symbology” (Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats [New
York: Macmillan, 1954], 163). Other studies stress its use as a guide to Yeats’s aesthetics more generally,
a “visual pattern…transformed into a philosophical or metaphysical system” (Giorgio Melchiori, The
Whole Mystery of Art [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960], 3), a myth or an allegory about poetics. See e.g., M. I. Seiden, William Butler Yeats: The Poet as Mythmaker (East Lansing: Michigan State
University Press, 1962), 13, and Helen Vendler, Yeats’s “Vision” and the Later Plays (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1963), 29. Michael J. Sidnell stresses the phantasmagoric, calling the book a
“vast imaginative construction” unifying Yeats’s poetry, fiction, and philosophy (Yeats’s Poetry and Poetics
[London: Macmillan, 1966], 108).
Laurie was not sure that the intended print run of 500 would sell, although he wrote to Yeats on 18 August
that he did not mind that some orders were being canceled. Yeats wrote back to assure him that “Your letter
was not unexpected. I think however that you will sell the 500” (22 September 1924, CL Intelex 4650). As
Reflected Voices, Double Visions
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
289
it happened, Laurie did increase the run to 600, and the copies sold out, but the response to the book was
(predictably) minimal.
Unpublished letter to H. Watt of A. P. Watt & Son, 31 December 1934. BL Add. MS 55003. Quoted in
Finneran, “On Editing Yeats: The Text of A Vision (1937),” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 19, no.
1 (1977): 119–134, at120–21.
Mary M. Colum, “Life and Literature: The Individual vs. Society,” review of A Vision, Forum and Century
99 (1938): 214–15.
The situation is changing for A Vision, at least, with the publication of the two versions in Scribner’s Collected Works series, edited by Catherine E. Paul and myself. In fact, until A Vision B (Volume 14 of the Collected Works) appears, A Vision A (Volume 13 of the Collected Works, which appeared in 2008) is probably
the more readily available version.
“Daemon,” the spelling of the first edition (Wade 120; USA, Wade 121) and Essays, volume 4 of the Collected
Edition (London: Macmillan, 1924 [Wade 141]), adopted by William H. O’Donnell as the copy text for
CW5, was subsequently changed to “Daimon,” the spelling used in both versions of A Vision, where the word is
also usually italicized. I retain Daemon, without italicization, to refer to the figure of Per Amica Silentia Lunae.
See the accounts of 1913 and 1914 in Foster, Life1 502–531. For the best account of the creative outcome
of the time spent with Pound, see James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988) and, specifically with respect to A Vision, Catherine E. Paul’s essay “A Vision of Ezra Pound” in this volume, 252–262.
Lawrence Lipking, The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 49.
Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 199.
Quoted in Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats, 305.
Steve L. Adams and George Mills Harper, “The Manuscript of ‘Leo Africanus,’” YA1 (1982) 3–47. Hereafter referred to as “Leo” in the text.
See Foster, Life1 464–67, and the introduction and notes in “Leo” for accounts of the relationship between
Yeats and Leo.
The composition is dated by Foster, Life2 72.
On the concept of Anima Mundi in Yeats, see Christopher Blake, “The Supreme Enchanter: W. B. Yeats
and the Soul of the World” (Ph.D. dissertation, Georgia State University, 1997 [UMI 9813105]). The
term, deeply associated with Per Amica and Yeats’s life before his marriage, seldom appears in the script. In
December 1917, Yeats approached the topic, asking if his ideas about life after death were correct, but was
told that “Anima mundi is too vague” (YVP1 153). On another occasion Thomas objected after Yeats used
the phrase in a question, replying “I hate that term” (YVP1 234).
Leo is the name given to the chief “frustrator” of the automatic script; see WOT Chapter 5.
For textual histories of the revision, including its intended place in the two abortive editions of Yeats’s
complete works, Macmillan’s Edition De Luxe and the edition proposed by Charles Scribner’s Sons of New
York, see Finneran, “On Editing Yeats,” and especially Hood “A Search for Authority” and “The Remaking
of A Vision,” YAACTS1 (1983) 33–67. See also letters to Olivia Shakespear (L 695), Edmund Dulac (L
699–700), and Frank Pearce Sturm (FPS 93).
Foster cites a letter to “an importunate correspondent” from Yeats lamenting the “horribly expensive”
price (£3.3.0) and also its unfinished status: “It is only a first draft of a book & intended for students of
Plotinus, the Hermetic fragments & unpopular literature of that kind” (letter to Ignatius MacHugh, 28
May [1926], cited Life2 313).
In reality, the way for the 1937 edition had been paved in the public mind (or at least that portion of it
purchasing art press books) by the publication of the new framing material separately. A Packet for Ezra
Pound was published by the Cuala Press in 1929, the Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends in 1931.
However, 1937 marked the widely distributed Macmillan edition of the book as a whole.
On the fictional author “Yeats” and the form of his book, see Adams, The Book of Yeats’s Vision.
On the differences between the two versions, see especially Barbara L. Croft, “Stylistic Arrangements”: A
Study of William Butler Yeats’s “A Vision” (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1987), and Seiden,
William Butler Yeats: The Poet as Mythmaker.
For this and other points of comparison between the two versions, see Alan S. Marzilli, “Masking of Truth
in W. B. Yeats’s A Vision: A Comparison of the Two Editions in Relation to the Original Automatic Experience” (MA thesis, Emory University, 1993).
This magisterial quality is paralleled by the archly conservative political stance that Yeats often took in his
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last years. A Vision B recalls the fascism of the 1930s, as Stephen Spender was the first to notice. The 1925
book is as different in this regard as 1920s fascism was from later embodiments (Spender, review of A Vision, The Criterion 17 [1938]: 536–37). See the introduction to CW13, especially xliv–xlv, and Claire V.
Nally’s essay “The Political Occult: Revisiting Fascism, Yeats and A Vision” in this volume, 329–343.
48. George Yeats told Donald Pearce that her husband’s posturing was meant to be read ironically: that the
reference to Brancusi, whose work did not impress Yeats (“all those ovoids…seemed to put him off”),
“is made with a certain amount of humor, you see—which you earnest Americans never seem to catch!”
(Donald Pearce, “Hours with the Domestic Sibyl: Remembering George Yeats,” Southern Review 28
[1992]: 494).
49. NLI MS 36,260/4; see above, note 4.
50. Virginia Moore, The Unicorn: W. B. Yeats’ Search for Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 277–78. Chapter 6 of Anne Saddlemyer’s biography, Becoming George, is the most informed and well-reasoned account
of the experience and what each of the recipients believed to be happening (BG 105–133).
YEATS’S VISION AND THE FEMININE
by Janis Haswell
W
. B. Yeats insisted that “the mystical life is the centre of all that I do & all that I
think & all that I write” (CL1 303).1 This essay will explore what that mystical
life entails, in terms of Yeats’s beliefs, values, and attitudes, as they pertain to
issues of gender, and more specifically, Yeats’s valorization of the feminine. I have argued
elsewhere that A Vision (1937) diminishes the importance of gender compared to its antecedents: the automatic script and A Vision (1925), a position also argued by Margaret
Mills Harper and Elizabeth Butler Cullingford.2 With that diminution in mind, we can
ask the following questions: given that Yeats’s perception of “a universal masculine &
feminine in soul” (YVP1 109) shaped the core of his theosophy, what did his occlusion of
gender accomplish (or attempt to accomplish) in the second edition of A Vision? Are his
more strategic representations and uses of gender true to his vision of the feminine, and
more fundamentally, how is gender infused into his symbolic system?
Yeats’s View of the Feminine
In the years before his marriage, Yeats associated the female with magic and mystery, since
he believed that women were naturally in harmony with nature and her secrets—closer to
the body, a privileged position indeed since Yeats believed that “all power is from the body,”
at least in Western culture, and that “religion and magic insist on power and therefore on
body” (CW3 356; Au 481). Moreover, the body of a woman is like the words of a poet: “subtle…complex…full of mysterious life” (“The Symbolism of Poetry,” CW4 120; E&I 164).
Yeats claimed women are also sensitive to the bond between natural and supernatural,
which “are knit together” (CW5 210; E&I 518). In fact, Yeats envies the way women are in
tune with the presence of spirits. When it comes to embracing and understanding ancient
lore, “women come more easily than men to that wisdom,” Yeats laments (“The Queen and
the Fool,” Myth 115; M2005 77). There is a kind of madness to such wisdom, he goes on
to acknowledge. Fools may have it, but women “do get of a certainty” an intuitive kind of
insight about ultimate reality: “glimpses of much that sanctity finds at the end of its painful
journey” (Myth 115; M2005 77). Through his experience in the Theosophical Society and
the Golden Dawn, along with his study of Irish folklore and his friendships with country
folk who were in tune with spirits, Yeats came to envy a woman’s supposed intuitive insight, “as if the darkness had been cut with a knife.” Such insight into the metaphysical is a
miracle that is “mostly a woman’s privilege” (CW3 161; Au 185).3 Women ostensibly recognize the mystical life and command it, none better than Yeats’s own wife, who gathered
up an “entire web of influences” in her automatic writing (CW3 355; Au 481).
A woman’s connection to the supernatural means that she cannot be the mere personification of body and its limitations. In Yeats’s philosophy, women are symbols of two
realms meeting: the soul descending and the body ascending. For Yeats, the feminine
transcends mere physical beauty and cannot be mastered, even by the poet who conjures
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its essence. Yeats rejects the assumption that beauty emerges only under the artist’s gaze.
Beauty is objective; it is intimately and perpetually bound to divinity. It is a mask that
reveals, as Yeats summarized in his study of William Blake, the “unveiled eyes of eternity”
(“William Blake and His Illustrations to the Divine Comedy,” CW4 103; E&I 139).
What happens, then, when feminine and masculine meet? The feminine brings to
sexual relations natural strengths that the masculine could achieve only through much
labor. Completion requires the Other. But differences between the two undoubtedly and
unavoidably create conflict. When a man listens, he meets another’s thoughts “with a rival
thought” unlike a woman “taking up what one said and changing [it], giving it as it were
flesh and bone” (Mem 87). A man desires a woman, but a woman desires the desire of a
man (VP 807; CW1 601).4 In a sexual relationship, a man and woman cannot achieve perfect friendship (“a placid country where Consolation has her dwelling”). Rather, sexual love
is a battlefield “where shadows war beside the combatants” (“John Sherman,” CW12 17).
Gender in the Automatic Script
Even this short gloss reveals principles that are deepened and clarified during the years of
automatic writing in the first years of the Yeatses’ marriage. It is no accident that gender is
one of the most dominant subjects in the script, since George Yeats was determined to help
shape her husband’s understanding of his stormy history with Maud Gonne and gradually
accept the suitability of his marriage to George. The amount of text in the automatic script
dedicated to unraveling the psychological, mystical, and sexual course of W. B. Yeats’s life
is formidable, and only partly attributable to Yeats’s obsession with Maud Gonne. As the
script unfolds, it is clear that George Yeats is leading him, not merely placating him.
Obviously, it was in George Yeats’s best interest to affirm the validity of their legal
marriage, since it was not the first marriage of W. B. Yeats’s life: he had committed himself
to Gonne in a spiritual union years before.5 In the automatic writing process, the guides
reveal that his union with George Hyde-Lees is unique and proper precisely because it is
sexual. Thus, rather than minimize her husband’s brooding inquiries into his previous relationships, George Yeats fuels his interest by exploring both the role of those relationships in
his life and their contrast to his present marriage, a marriage that plays into the hands of a
spiritual and sexual design not of the poet’s making.
There are literally hundreds of pages in the automatic script (particularly in materials
from 5 June 1918 to 20 March 1920, found in YVP2) that explore the importance of sexual
relations—between man and Daimon, man and sweetheart—in this life, in discarnate stages,
and in subsequent incarnations. Early on in the writing sessions, W. B. Yeats sought that
primordial knowledge of the origins of male and female. On 12 January 1918 he asked: “Can
you tell me what makes a soul incarnate as man or woman?” (YVP1 250). The spirits refused
to answer. Yeats persisted on 19 January: “Can you go into what decides sex.” The spirits replied: “No | Much further on” (YVP1 271). On February 6 the spirit guide “Rose” was sent to
describe the origin of sex (YVP1 338), but it is more than a year later when the issue is finally
explored. On 6 April 1919 Yeats asked a simple question and received an even simpler answer:
Is daimon of opposite sex to ego.
Yes. (YVP2 235)
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293
The guides further reveal that a man’s Daimon uses all the faculties (senses) of the body,
but particularly the sixth sense, which is sexual (YVP2 243). Through the sixth sense, W.
B. Yeats’s Daimon collects ideas from George Yeats’s (and vice versa) in ordinary sex relations “in accordance with the unity & harmony of the moment” (YVP2 249). The connection of Daimon to sexuality is absolute: “Have we no consciousness of daimon apart
from sex?” “None,” the guide replies (YVP2 259).
While men and women become conscious of the Daimon only in sexual relations, their
lives are manipulated by the Daimon during Initiatory and Critical Moments.6 Daimons use
these moments for their own purposes, with Initiatory Moments functioning as overtures leading up to the Critical Moments when a man’s life or a woman’s life is significantly changed.
During Initiatory Moments the Daimon shocks the self, “luring” it through a sequence of
events from inaction and abstract dreaming to objective emotion and action (YVP3 194).
The lure to a man is always a woman, for the Daimon must entice another Daimon to itself in
order to be sexually activated. That is, because Daimons have no senses of their own, they can
be sexual with other Daimons only through contact with their human hosts (YVP2 245). In
this way, the sexual life (the sequence of Initiatory Moments before a Critical Moment) “is a
perpetual drama, which has for its real theme the nature of the unborn child, for whom the
daimons have laid their plans” (YVP3 115). The drama of temporal life is thereby composed of
sexual experiences involving a man, a woman, and their Daimons.
Thus the marriage of W. B. and George Yeats had been orchestrated by the design of
their Daimons, for their Daimons’ own sake. Equally significant is the fact that the Yeatses’
union had made possible the revelation of Daimonic activity. Several months into the automatic script sessions, W. B. Yeats asked the spirits about the source of their knowledge
(whether to placate his doubts about the entire process or validate the universality of the
information). The spirits were clear that the solar/lunar system is not “preexistent”:
it is developed and created by us & by you two or you three now from a preexisting psychology – all the bones are in the world – we only select & our selection
is subordinate to you both – therefore we are dependent on you & you influence
our ability to develop & create by every small detail of your joint life. (YVP2 240)
For W. B. Yeats, this explanation clarified why other philosophers and poets had not happened upon the same answers in their search for ultimate truth. Their own lives determined
the structure of the symbolic system, the images employed, and the pattern of oppositional
configurations. The lunar/solar system springs from two individuals, united by their common occult interests, now tied to each other in matrimony, and with a child in the womb.
Thus while Maud Gonne spoke of “that lovely world which we so seldom see but that
must be for some future time” (G-YL 62), George Yeats was creating with W. B. Yeats a metaphysical system that emphasizes the here and now and opens up human spiritual consciousness through sexuality. Here Yeats develops (or corrects) his earlier sense of man and Daimon
offered in Per Amica Silentia Lunae, where he describes the love/hate relation of man with
Daimon as analogous to sexual love: “Then my imagination runs from Daemon to sweetheart, and I divine an analogy that evades the intellect.…[A]nd I even wonder if there may
not be some secret communion, some whispering in the dark between Daemon and sweetheart” (CW5 11–12; Myth 336). Analogy gives way to ontology in the contra-sexual Daimon.
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Indeed, new wisdom is generated only when there is an “equal balance” of contraries
(instinct and emotion, male and female; YVP2 289), and there is “equal balance in sexual intercourse” (YVP2 289). Occult and personal desires are fulfilled simultaneously. The
Daimon cannot function outside of the sexual faculty, performs most fully in the act of sexual intercourse (is “fed,” as the guides express it) and is recognized only in sexual relations. It
is no accident that poems written during the years of automatic scripting sessions (especially
“Solomon to Sheba” and “Solomon and the Witch”) dramatize the union of the sacred and
the sexual, joined to generate a condition of emotional completion and philosophic wisdom.
The critical revelation that emerges from the automatic script materials concerns the
contra-sexual Daimon, which makes “universal masculine & feminine” first and foremost
principles of the human psyche, where the male or female host wars with the female or
male Daimon, who is the arch-enemy and yet “part of me” (YVP2 211). To the extent that
the relationship between a man and a woman is passionate, it “reproduces the relation of
man and Daimon,” who “face each other in a perpetual conflict or embrace. This relation
(the Daimon being of the opposite sex to that of man) may create a passion like that of
sexual love” (CW13 25; AVA 27).
The script materials deepen and affirm Yeats’s sense of the feminine. In fact we might
argue that within Yeats’s theosophy there is a consistent emphasis on the need of masculine for feminine: “It is the purely instinctive & cosmic quality in man which seeks
completion in its opposite” (YVP1 65), the spirits instructed Yeats. But developed in far
more detail is the unitive power of sexual relations: “two complete opposites never unite
except in man & woman” (YVP1 68). Note that while Yeats uses terms like “antithesis”
and “opposition,” his meaning is more precisely captured by Blake’s notion of “contrary.”
Life “is the contact of contrasts,” the spirits insist (YVP1 406),7 and “contraries are positive” because they involve an interconnection or “correspondence” (YVP2 292).8
Sexual union also symbolizes the harmony that comes when antithetical man (between
Phases 12 and 18) permits the Daimonic mind “to flow through the events of his life” (CW13
26; AVA 28), resulting in a state Yeats called Unity of Being, when contraries are united and
antinomies are balanced in “Complete harmony between physical body intellect & spiritual
desire” (YVP2 41). Yeats summarizes: “I see in it [the natural union of man and woman] a symbol of that eternal instant where the antinomy is resolved. It is not the resolution itself” (AVB
214, cf. AVB 52). Indeed, only angels enjoy a “conflagration of the whole being” (L 805).9
In terms of human experience, feminine and masculine relate to each other in asymmetrical complementarity, and here Yeats connects his view of gender with his exploration
of the four Faculties and twenty-eight phases of the moon. In the temporal order, gender is
known only through its phasal manifestations, which for Yeats meant ever-shifting ratios
of masculine and feminine principles coexisting in the same personality. As masculine (or
sun) waxes, feminine (or moon) wanes, there is “a narrowing and a widening”—making
the critical feature the presence and interchange between the two rather than the constant
state of either one. The twenty-eight phases signify the interaction of masculine/feminine
both in personality types and in historical periods, thus illustrating how masculine and
feminine are continually in action, ultimately identifiable only in terms of their relational
opposition to the other in a union that remains fluid and ever-changing.
Because conflict promises completion (YVP1 65) and unity (YVP1 68), Yeats came
to regard evil not as a straining of opposites (as he did in Per Amica Silentia Lunae) but as
Yeat’s Vision and the Feminine
295
the cessation of conflict in a permanent state of calcifying asymmetry. When man seeks his
own consciousness (the light) to the point of suppressing the dark of his Daimon, she will
“seek to quench that light in what is to man wholly darkness” (CW13 25–26; AVA 28).
Yeats clarifies the evil of permanent imbalance later in the text: “In our system also it is a
cardinal principle that anything separated from its opposite—and victory is separation—
‘consumes itself away.’ The existence of the one depends upon the existence of the other”
(CW13 108; AVA 134). Without the feminine, Yeats would be left only with the harsh
sun, the timid sun.10 But in fact the feminine has driven him from his “self made prison”
(YVP3 194) to experience freedom (YVP2 19) and unity (YVP1 68).
The Degendering of A Vision
Even before the automatic script sessions ceased, Yeats began the tedious process of synthesizing his mystical revelations in an essay published in a limited edition as A Vision (1925).
In his dedication to Moina Bergson Mathers (“Vestigia”) of the 1925 edition of A Vision,
Yeats confesses that he has not “dealt with the whole of my subject, perhaps not even with
what is most important, writing nothing about the Beatific Vision, little of sexual love…”
(CW13 lv; AVA xii). Even so, Yeats’s sense of gender dynamics in A Vision A are substantive. The masculine/feminine relational opposition is not simply one in a series; it is the
foundation upon which all other oppositions, both real and symbolic, are generated:
I see the Lunar and Solar cones first, before they start their whirling movement,
as two worlds lying one within another—nothing exterior, nothing interior, Sun
in Moon and Moon in Sun—a single being like man and woman in Plato’s
Myth, and then a separation and a whirling for countless ages, and I see man and
woman as reflecting the greater movement. (CW13 121; AVA 149)
Almost immediately after publication of this limited edition, however, Yeats lamented what
he recognized as its flaws: “I see now that section XII Book IV in A Vision [“The Spirits at
Fifteen and at One”] should have been the most important in the book & it is the slightest
& worst. It must be reworked and the whole system ‘symbolized in a study of the relation of man and woman.’”11 It is clear from the second edition of A Vision (1937) that
his critical reaction to the 1925 edition is even more negative. Yeats laments that the first
version “fills me with shame”; he had misinterpreted the geometry and “in my ignorance
of philosophy failed to understand distinctions upon which the coherence of the whole
depended” (AVB 19). Subsequently, Yeats would systematically eliminate from A Vision
B sections wholly dedicated to either biographical allusions (as in “The Gift of Harun AlRaschid”12) or to the sexual dynamic between man and Daimon (“The Daimon, the Sexes,
Unity of Being, Natural and Supernatural Unity”).13 Altered, too, are the multiple sections
involving the fictional characters of Owen Aherne and Michael Robartes (“Introduction”
and “The Dance of the Four Royal Persons”).14 These deletions suggest that Yeats might
have been chagrined by the personal/sexual focus of the 1925 edition. After a decade of
marriage and healthy distance between himself and the agon he experienced with Maud
and Iseult Gonne, he had reached a personal and poetic maturity. His need for A Vision
had changed to a more philosophical/historical meaning instead of a sexual/personal focus.
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Even so, A Vision B reflects those same fundamental convictions about the feminine
that are found in the automatic script. The ultimate reality “falls in human consciousness…into a series of antinomies” (AVB 187). Concord (or love) and discord (the principle of separation or difference) are the principal pairs, but so too are objective and
subjective, masculine and feminine, male and female. These antinomies are “‘Dying each
other’s life, living each other’s death’” (AVB 68). Whatever a man gains originates “from
conflict with the opposite of his true being” (AVB 13). Indeed, sexual love is the most
important event in life, “for the opposite sex is nature chosen and fated” (AVB 88). The
symbols in the Great Wheel (itself “an expression of alternations of passion” [AVB 211])
“can be thought of as the symbols of the relations of men and women and of the birth of
children” (AVB 211). As in earlier materials, the marriage bed is still “the symbol of the
solved antinomy” (AVB 52; cf. AVB 214), but not the resolution itself, which is Unity
of Being (AVB 89). Thus for Yeats the sexual union of man and woman “has a kind of
sacredness” (AVB 214).
A Vision Reframed
Yeats explained his frame for A Vision A, with stories involving Owen Aherne and Michael
Robartes, in this way: “I had invented an unnatural story of an Arabian traveller which
I must amend and find a place for some day because I was fool enough to write half a
dozen poems that are unintelligible without it” (AVB 19). This invention was the result
of a conspiracy between W. B. Yeats and George, because “my wife was unwilling that her
share should be known, and I to seem sole author” (AVB 19).15 Paradoxically, in A Vision
B Yeats retains both the story and the characters, but for a different purpose. His introduction—two initial sections of A Vision B—addresses Ezra Pound and attempts to situate the
symbolic system philosophically. The third section of A Vision B, the “Stories of Michael
Robartes and His Friends: An Extract from a Record Made by His Pupils,” situates the
symbolic system aesthetically by reframing his Vision with the specter of Leda.
Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne were old friends of Yeats. Years earlier, the poet
had used them as personae embodying oppositional tendencies from his own psyche and
would continue to use them as contrary figures in his “phantasmagoria.”16 As a man of
action and a Christian believer, whose faith looked to an authority outside (rather than
within) himself, Aherne is by nature primary/objective, a follower and disciple rather than
a visionary. He is comfortable with abstractions and the written word.17 Robartes is placed
at Phase Eighteen (along with George Yeats; YVP1 149); he is antithetical or subjective,
a man not of faith but of imagination,18 not of thought but of contemplation.19 The
relationship between Aherne and Robartes serves as an explicit enactment of contraries.
Aherne, as primary man, cannot see himself from within, but “as if he were somebody
else” (VP 824; CW1 659). Robartes, as antithetical man, sees “all reflected within himself ”
(VP 824; CW1 659, note to Michael Robartes and the Dancer). One is pulled outside
himself through his objective faith, the other grounded in his personal fulfillment in (alternately) pleasure and aesthetics. These life-long friends could be at times bitter enemies
and function apart most of their lives. Even so, they are inseparable by complementarity
and fate. Their alliances and estrangements form a sort of gyre—a cycle of the interactions
of objective and subjective men, and by extension, of the Tinctures themselves.
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297
In A Vision B, Robartes and Aherne appear in “Stories of Michael Robartes and His
Friends.” As we will see, the Aherne/Robartes frame allows Yeats to dramatize the complementary relationship of Tinctures and phases apart from references to male and female.
Thus the frame is emblematic of the overall degendering of A Vision B, an observation that
does not, however, diminish the function of this section. In “Stories of Michael Robartes
and His Friends,” Yeats deploys his full arsenal of parody, humor, and irony. He spoofs his
own fictional explanation for the script in A Vision A.20 More importantly, he enacts the
choices and roles of the two women in his life—Maud Gonne and George Yeats—and
through them condenses in a series of narratives a representation of how primary and
antithetical, man and woman, dance their inevitable dance.
“Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends” are narrated by one John Duddon
(an artist), who gathers with his friends Denise de L’Isle Adam (lover of first Duddon,
then Huddon) and Peter Huddon (a soldier and Duddon’s patron) in Regents Park. They
are joined by Daniel O’Leary, Robartes’s chauffeur (to whom they tell their stories), and
later by Aherne and Robartes. Duddon describes Aherne as “stout and sedentary-looking,
bearded and dull of eye,” but Robartes he finds “lank, brown, muscular, clean-shaven,
with an alert, ironical eye” (AVB 37).
Some critics pronounce “Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends” a failure. For
instance, William O’Donnell comments that the volume has no merit despite its “extravagant characters and emotions.”21 Others bypass it for meatier sections of A Vision B,
finding it “a witty and somewhat cryptic phantasy.”22 I suggest that Yeats used “Stories” to
embody in the relationships of these characters the very symbolic system he describes in
the main text of A Vision B. That is to say, “Stories” holds the key to understanding Yeats’s
view of human personalities and history and therefore serves as the epitome of his view of
how gendered beings—as well as self and Daimon—operate and relate to each other. Seeing these patterns is difficult since Yeats tells a series of interlocking stories. These narratives seem disconnected and isolated, yet in the end they are inextricably bound together.
Let us start with the inner, core story told by Robartes himself. Reminiscent of his
account in A Vision A, Robartes tells his companions of a turbulent love affair with a
ballet-dancer in Vienna. He speaks of “‘her coldness and cruelty’” that became “‘in the
transfiguration of the body an inhuman majesty’” (AVB 38). He tried to change her, but
in the end they shared only mutual enmity. Leaving her, he cohabited with an “ignorant
girl” in the same city, who found Giraldus’s 1594 Speculum Angelorum et Hominum in a
cupboard left there by an unfrocked priest who disappeared with a troop of gypsies. A
surprising chain of events, to say the least. This mistress, too, left him, causing Robartes to
reflect ruefully on his past loves: “‘I have always known that love should be changeless and
yet my loves drank their oil and died—there has been no ever-burning lamp’” (AVB 40).
Caught up in the “irrational bitterness” of love, Robartes left Europe to pray at the Holy
Sepulcher, but found no solace there. This, too, proves a fortuitous choice. In Jerusalem
an old Arab came to him and identified the drawings in Speculum as the doctrine of his
tribe: the Judwalis or Diagrammatists (AVB 41). Robartes joined the tribe, seeking their
secret knowledge. What he discovered is yet to be revealed, both in the following pages of
A Vision and to his pupils.
Like a series of concentric cycles, the four disciples have their own stories to tell,23 each
one involving Aherne and Robartes. The first story is told by Daniel O’Leary, who had
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literally run into the rescuing arms of Aherne as he fled a theater, having thrown his boots
at the actors in a production of Romeo and Juliet (he missed). What must seem to readers as
an impulsive, inconsequential act is a watershed event for O’Leary, who seeks the courage
(defined as “self-possession in an unforeseen situation”) to evoke moments of intensity in
his life (AVB 34–35). As Duddon tells his story, it becomes evident that he, too, committed
an impulsive act—using his walking stick to strike the head of a man that he believed to be
Huddon, his rival. Rather than doing something “magnificent,” as he thought at the time,
Duddon realizes he has wounded an innocent old man—Aherne, it turns out, who asks his
assailant to join him that evening with his friends (AVB 36). The sub-text for both these
stories is that Aherne had been sent by Robartes to meet them at these critical, passionate
moments. O’Leary explains that Robartes “‘sees what is going to happen, between sleeping
and waking at night, or in the morning before they bring him his early cup of tea’” (AVB 35).
Denise then explains that she assumed her name after reading the play Axel, by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, a decadent-symbolist depiction of the love between Axel and Sara,
who commit suicide so that their love will never fade (AVB 42). Nestled within this story
is another narrative about her relationship with Duddon. While he has no problems consummating affairs with Huddon’s castoffs, he is impotent (“a coward”) with Denise even
though she has invited him to her bed. She tells him: “‘I love you because you would not
be shy if you had not so great respect for me’” (AVB 43). The point, Denise insists, is not
that she is Huddon’s mistress, but that Duddon is the love of her life (AVB 44).
As if on cue, Robartes then introduces the pupils to John Bond and Mary Bell, whose
narratives form an outer circle around the stories told by Duddon, O’Leary, and Denise.
Their story, like the others, involves long years of connections and coincidences. Mary Bell
had married an older man retired from the Foreign Office and master of a wealthy family
estate. They were happy but childless. After some nine years of marriage, she met John
Bond (an expert in migratory birds) in the south of France. After fleeing from each other
through several cities, ironically encountering each other in every location, they accepted
their fate. Mary conceived Bond’s child but returned to her wealthy husband, since her
lover was penniless. When Mr. Bell was near death, he asked to consult with Bond (as a
curator at the Dublin Museum) on cuckoos—his life’s work. He had many in cages, but
had tried to no avail to “persuade them to make nests” (AVB 48). The birth of his son
gave Bond new hope. But even the cleverest of the cuckoos would make no structure out
of matches, twigs and moss. Mr. Bell asks Bond if he will carry on his work. But at that
moment Mrs. Bell announces that a cuckoo has indeed built a nest—she has just found
it on the grounds. Her husband cries, “‘Now let Thy servant depart in peace’” (AVB 49).
Indeed, he dies that night and at the funeral Mary meets Aherne, sent by Robartes who
had dreamed of the intimate events between herself and Bond.
Robartes convinces her to take on a new task, and Bond will care for the estate and
their son until her return. And the task? Mary Bell takes from an ivory box a blue egg
the size of a swan’s, the lost egg of Leda that had come to Robartes in the Far East. She
is chosen “by divine wisdom for its guardian and bearer” (AVB 51). Denise argues that
she should have been asked to guard the egg, “‘for I am taller, and my training as a model
would have helped’” (AVB 53). But her objection is ignored, for “only the visionary” has
the right to deal with this divinely generated egg.24 Duddon’s account of the event ends
with a summary of Giraldus’s wisdom and Robartes’s reflections on love and death.
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What does this ensemble of characters represent, and how does their meeting connect
to Yeats’s description of the Great Wheel that follows? William O’Donnell sees Denise as
a Helen of Troy figure and draws a parallel between Mary Bell and Maud Gonne, and by
extension, Mr. Bell and Gonne’s lover Lucien Millevoye, all based on Gonne’s real-life love
of birds.25 His interpretation is strengthened by the fact that Iseult Gonne’s symbol was
a bird.26 I would counterargue, however, that Denise is a thinly veiled figure for Maud
Gonne, who took up with other lovers even though Yeats (like Duddon) was her spiritual
spouse.27 Though statuesque and theatrically trained, Maud is not selected as the mother
of the new age. Instead, the married woman, George Yeats / Mary Bell, is chosen.28 Even
here, in this “cryptic phantasy,” are allusions to Yeats’s private life and love relations, packaged publicly in these displaced representations.
The presence of birds and emphasis on nests is puzzling at first. In the automatic
script there were numerous references to birds, often three in number, that signified the
women in Yeats’s life: Maud and Iseult Gonne, and George Yeats (YVP1 32).29 Cuckoos
might be important simply because they are brood parasites, laying their eggs in the nests
of other birds, which then raise the fledgling cuckoos. However, I believe that Yeats is
suggesting a broader possibility: that Mary Bell provides the answer that her husband
has sought his whole life. She discovers a cuckoo’s nest and delivers the blessed news, or
pretends to. Just as George Yeats was the medium for wisdom beyond the physical world,
thus realizing the poet’s life’s work, so too Mary Bell speaks the words that allow her husband both to be at peace with his marriage and to pass from this world in peace.
We can also recognize the principles of human sexual relations (as developed in the
automatic script) emerging in the individual narratives of these characters. The love relationships here are conflicted, without a doubt. Denise loves Duddon but sleeps with Huddon, Mary Bell raises John Bond’s child but stays with her elderly husband through his
final days. Robartes speaks of the final animosity between himself and the ballet-dancer.
Men and women seem to be like oil and water, yet they are not antinomies (as they appear
to Robartes) but contraries like human and Daimon.
The random and coincidental events that shape the lives and fortunes of these characters show the Body of Fate at work. The intimate rendezvous between John Bond and
Mary Bell is seen by Robartes, and their future is fated. Yet the Will is also at work: Daniel
O’Leary and John Duddon take action in their search for moments of passionate intensity. While the pupils as types are two-dimensional (Huddon as the blunt man of action,
Duddon as the cowardly artist, Denise as the femme fatale), note that when Robartes asks
each of them what they want to talk about, they all seek something other than their professions (or natures). Denise will not speak of Love, nor Duddon of Art, nor Huddon of
War. They each need a contrary (a Mask) to become what they ought to be. Yeats defines
personality as the Will analyzed in relation to the Mask (CW13 19; AVA 20; cf. AVB 86).
Personality, he insists, “no matter how habitual, is a constantly renewed choice” (CW13
18; AVA 18; cf. AVB 84). The fruit of contrary strife and interaction can be seen in the
relationship of Aherne and Robartes. While Robartes accuses Aherne of remaining the
same—imprisoned in his Christian beliefs—Aherne is tempted by the other man’s mystical wisdom and savors being “but a free man for a moment” (CW13 lxiii; AVA xxii). 30
Finally, Yeats allows a glimpse of the “Moments of Crisis” to break through in the
narrative of Denise de L’Isle Adam. She remembers the exact moment of the precise day:
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“between twelve and one on the 2nd June last year,” “because on that night I met the one
man I shall always love” even though Duddon is not able to consummate sexual union
(AVB 42). This is a life-altering event, a Critical Moment when Denise learns “that admiration is not necessary to love” (YVP2 330). Duddon, for his part in this first of his critical
encounters, desires to be chosen (YVP2 330).
Whether they be concord and discord, primary and antithetical, objective and subjective, solar and lunar, or male and female, Yeats’s contraries in A Vision B operate consistently in terms of the automatic script and A Vision A. They are complementary, Blakean
contraries, not binary negatives. They need each other for completion. They need each
other for their function and identity. They are bound by attraction and by strife, but only
together do they experience what Yeats calls the power of the terrestrial condition where
(and where alone) “the extreme of choice [is] possible, full freedom” (CW5 25; Myth 356).
Perhaps tongue in cheek, or even enjoying a private joke, Yeats draws this remarkable
group of characters at the same moment to the same place, Robartes’s home, now the hub
and center of a potentially history-altering event. Robartes has lived years as a solitary but
hosts in his temporary “nest” a momentary family that will allow Mary Bell to mother
another’s egg (a swan egg, significantly). Thus the “Stories of Michael Robartes and His
Friends” are not intended to camouflage the origins of the symbolic system but to connect
to “Leda” in the closing sections of A Vision B.
Leda and Her Egg
Love relationships, passionate acts, prophetic dreams and isolated individuals are all
brought together under Robartes’s roof—the man who calls the universe “a great egg
that turns inside-out perpetually without breaking its shell” (AVB 33; cf. CW13 lxiv &
142; AVA xxiii & 175). In the Platonic tradition, the egg serves two purposes. First, as a
sphere it symbolizes eternity and infinity as well as life and rebirth. The egg also serves as
an image of the original unity of male and female, when (according to Plato) they enjoyed
the wholeness that men and women seek to regain over the course of their earthly lives.31
But just as sexual union is the symbol of the “solved antinomy” but not the solution itself
(AVB 52), the egg is a symbol of ultimate reality that, in itself, cannot be known.32 There
may be times, however, when such unity is felt, as described in “Among School Children,”
when the speaker (Yeats at sixty) remembers a tale told by Maud Gonne (his Helen, that
“daughter of the swan” with “a Ledaean body”) about a tragedy from her childhood:
…and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell. (VP 443; CW1 220)
“Among School Children,” which follows “Leda and the Swan” in The Tower (separated by
a single poem), creates an image of “both nuns and mothers” who foster children without
being able to foresee their future or fate. The speaker is now “a comfortable kind of old
scarecrow”—unimaginable to the mother who held him on her lap. But “even daughters
of the swan can share / Something of every paddler’s heritage” (VP 444; CW1 220). Infant
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301
to scarecrow, paddler to swan, bole to blossom of the chestnut tree: all are stages in the
continuum of terrestrial existence.
In the same way, Mary Bell cannot foresee the future of this unhatched egg nor the
fate unleashed upon the world when the new “paddler” emerges. Not so with Leda’s first
two eggs and her offspring that shaped history: Helen (“The broken wall, the burning roof
and tower”) and Clytemnestra (“Agamemnon dead”).33 In Yeats’s words, “Love and War
came from the eggs of Leda” (AVB 67). Leda’s third egg, like the cuckoo’s, will be hatched
by another, having come into the nest of Michael Robartes. And just as the other two eggs
worked to the destruction of the classical age, this new hatchling will emerge to advance
the coming subjective age—the antinomy of the Christian epoch. It is entirely fitting,
therefore, that “Leda” opens the section of A Vision B entitled “Dove or Swan.”
Written seven years before “Stories of Michael Robartes,” the “Leda” poem marks the
fruition of the Robartes preamble. Joined by the image of the egg, “Stories” and “Leda”
bookend Yeats’s extensive explanation of the workings of Tinctures and phases. Much like
“Stories,” “Leda” represents how the Tinctures operate (male and female, objective and
subjective) but on a historical level—when civilizations come to an end. But “Leda” (like
the characters in “Stories”) personalizes the oppositional dynamic of the Great Wheel. The
“brute” has a name, the victim a face. Ages and cultures rise and fall—not from mechanistic forces, but from selfish desires (Zeus) or personal choices (Mary Bell). The supernatural
world, Yeats insists, “can only express itself in personal form, because it has no epitome
but man” (CW3 201; Au 248).
In depicting the mythic story, Yeats opts for the version of Leda as an unwilling
victim. Zeus’s rape of Leda enacts a condition of disproportion: the divine brutalizes the
human, the masculine/primary dominates the feminine/antithetical to the point of diminishing her will and her dignity. There is no “equal balance” of contraries that should
characterize sexual intercourse (YVP2 289). I have argued elsewhere that Leda is victimized both by Zeus and the narrator/seer, who is unable to transcend his solar/objective
nature and understand Leda’s feminine/subjective experience.34 As seer, the narrator foresees the consequences of this event: “The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And
Agamemnon dead” (AVB 267). He registers the physical violence and the perverted design
of the swan. Yet in the face of such horror, the seer is confounded by Leda herself. How
can her “terrified vague fingers” push the swan away, the narrator wonders. Certainly she
must “feel the strange heart beating where it lies.”35 Is this only a moment of violence, or
is it a moment of illumination for the woman? In one sense, the question is possible only
because the seer remains on the outside of Leda’s experience, objective and detached. His
very objectivity pulls a veil across the woman’s experience.
Here we understand why Yeats depicts rape and what he means in doing so. The seer
needs Leda’s perspective; he needs to be in touch with the antithetical principle in order
to achieve complete understanding of the past, present, and future.
Recall now O’Leary’s description of Robartes, the man who “‘sees what is going to
happen, between sleeping and waking at night, or in the morning before they bring him
his early cup of tea’” (AVB 35). In his role as seer, Robartes functions as a counterpoint
to the narrator in “Leda.” He has a vision of Mary Bell and John Bond in their romantic
rendezvous. That is, he knows they have coupled (like this narrator knows Zeus and Leda
were conjugally engaged). He then “sees” Mary’s future (chosen “by divine wisdom”) in
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terms of her role in mothering Leda’s egg. As antithetical man, the danger is that Robartes
might see “all reflected in himself ” (VP 824; CW1 659) and so reduce Mary Bell’s life to
his own purpose. But there is no evidence of violation here. She (like George Yeats) freely
embraces this historic task.
There is, of course, a more important parallel. Yeats, too, is a seer, particularly in the
“Dove or Swan” section of A Vision B. He seeks to read the present in order to foresee the
future. When he looks at contemporary events, he sees exactly what the narrator in “Leda”
sees: brutal violence and powerless victims. As he ponders the ruin of his own age, Yeats
recognizes a familiar story from the classical world:
In practical life one expects the same technical inspiration, the doing of this or
that not because one would, or should, but because one can, consequent licence,
and with those “out of phase” anarchic violence with no sanction in general
principles (CW13 175; AVA 212; deleted in AVB).
But there is a difference in how (or what) they see. The “Leda” narrator will not access
the feminine because he is too objective, too solar. As an antithetical poet, Yeats is not so
limited because he transcends his own time, with its materialistic “murderousness”—an
age when men “own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts” (VP 370; CW1 163; CW5
3; Myth 324). Yeats escapes from such a “self made prison” by being open to the feminine
(YVP3 194). Or more precisely, he embraces the feminine, both as a real, eminent feature
of temporal reality and as the fabric of his own bi-gendered psyche. Although Yeats is not
“of Ledaean kind” (VP 444; CW1 220), he can still empathize with the feminine, enjoying a “blent” perspective impossible for the seer in “Leda” to attain. Underscored is the
importance of wholeness, of complete vision that comes only when masculine and feminine are open to each other and free to function as complements. Yeats also demonstrates
the consequences when objectivity and masculinity are unleashed and unrestrained, and
gender relations are reduced to irresolvable enmity.
In his essay “Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places,” Yeats draws attention
to Plutarch’s vision of daimons (“souls of enlightened men”) returning to the earth as
“schoolmasters of the living” (CW5 65; Ex 59). W. B. and George Yeats are thus among
school children in their quest in the automatic script for mystical wisdom. So schooled,
gender interaction became the bedrock of Yeats’s marriage, of his symbolic system, of his
vision of the human experience, and of A Vision B.
What might his view of gender offer to contemporary feminist perspectives? Yeats
advances a bold kind of feminism for this day. Yeats does not see masculine and feminine
as separate subjectivities, nor are they static, essentialist attributes. Instead, masculine and
feminine are described as complementary actions performed in relation to each other—
inseparable, fluid, adamant in their bond.36 Because of the dynamic quality of these contraries, the human being is not trapped in a monolithic experience, a single-sexed mind,
a static state of being. The self, Yeats argued, is a constantly renewed choice, a choice
exercised culturally, spiritually, rhetorically, that works toward freedom and completion.
These are heady purposes for any poet’s lifework. But freedom and completion are possible
when men and women are open to their bi-gendered natures.
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303
The implications of a gendered Daimonology are profound. As a male, Yeats is an integrated and complex human being, reflective of that androgynous whole in the tradition
of Platonic and Hermetic lore. United to his Daimon, he is never solely male, for she engages him in passionate and ceaseless contact with the feminine embedded within his own
being. Yeats’s understanding of this union opened doors to a new kind of poetry, what I
have called his “double-voiced verse” (see especially the series “A Woman Young and Old”
and Crazy Jane) wherein he could, out of his own nature, speak in the voice of a woman.37
The presence of his contra-sexual Daimon gives him the authority to write as a woman,
a radical notion that spills over into fundamental issues of philosophy, metaphysics, psychology, and sociology.38 The function and identity of masculine and feminine cannot be
manifested or identified apart from the other. As contraries/complements, masculine and
feminine will experience conflict, true, but are the only path to harmony (e.g., Unity of
Being). Masculine and feminine are equal in value, although the subjective female can see
this more easily than the objective male.39
What I find increasingly compelling in Yeats’s worldview is affirmation of the self, his
unyielding sense of each individual as an “entire being” with his/her own unified identity.
“No human soul is like any other human soul,” he writes (Myth 68; M2005 46). No matter
which of the twenty-eight phases he lives,40 whether he returns as a man or a woman, Yeats
is still Yeats: “I am still I” (YVP2 330). Human beings are sites of tremendous truths: “The
wholeness of the supernatural world can only express itself in personal form, because it has
no epitome but man…” (CW3 201; Au 248). Just as individual human beings signify the
supernatural, the concrete other is the only legitimate subject of love (Ex 400; VPl 806; CW2
698).41 It is one’s lover who “divines the secret self of the other” and refuses “to believe in
the mere daily self” and so creates the Mask, the self one strives to be (CW3 343; Au 464).
Gender is central to Yeats’s world view. It comprises the “great movement” of the spheres
that shapes history and civilizations as well as relations between men and women, human host
and Daimon. The warring attraction between those great complements—“universal masculine & feminine in soul”—evokes the paradoxical tensions and creative energies of temporal
existence. “For the first time I understand human life,” Yeats wrote as he worked through his
drafts of A Vision (L 644). Such understanding was, for Yeats, grounded in gender.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
In a letter to John O’Leary in July of 1892.
Janis Tedesco Haswell, “The Sexual Dynamic of Yeats’s Vision,” YAACTS12 (1994) 102–118; Margaret
Mills Harper, Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual and Literary Collaboration of George and W. B. Yeats (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006); Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry
(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996).
In the particular instance that Yeats narrates, his own contemplation of a symbol yielded mental images he
could not control. But his thoughts “came slowly” (CW3 161; Au 185).
This note to The Wind Among the Reeds is drawn from Coleridge’s Table Talk (23 July 1827): “The man’s
desire is for the woman; but the woman’s desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.” See Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk II, ed. Carl Woodring (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 70. The
idea was used by W. B. Yeats in various places, such as in his essay “Discoveries”: “…deliberate beauty is like
a woman always desiring man’s desire” (CW4 198; E&I 271, “The Tree of Life”). Also cited WWB1 281.
Their spiritual union dated back to 1898. In a letter to Yeats on 26 July 1908, Gonne described her dream
of that union: “We melted into one another till we formed only one being, a being greater than ourselves who
felt all & knew all with double intensity.…” She rejected Yeats’s view that their spiritual marriage would
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increase physical desire: “This troubles me a little—for there was nothing physical in that union—Material
union is but a pale shadowed compared to it…” (G-YL 257). On 12 November 1909 she reminded him:
“the love whose physical realization we deny here will unite us in another life” (G-YL 282).
6.
From March to June 1919 the bulk of the automatic script dialogues was dedicated to exploring the Moments of Crisis. Initiatory and Critical Moments are “the expression of the [Great] Wheel in the life of
sexual passion” (YVP3 111). Individuals experience several Initiatory Moments (originally called Impregnating Moments), whereby they are freed from deception (YVP2 350). The two Critical Moments of life
complete the “moral rescue” (YVP2 329) that begins with the Initiatory Moments. The function of Critical
Moments is to eliminate cruelty and deception from relations of passion (YVP3 113) and can culminate
in what Yeats called the Beatific Vision (CW13 140; AVA 172). Moments of Crisis occur by necessity with
no apparent means of escape. They describe intense and most often painful experiences (what Yeats calls
“shock”) that serve the hidden purpose of the Daimons and force the individual to undergo a process of
self-illumination. Because the object of the Moments of Crisis is spiritual revelation, sexual relations might
be unhappy, but they are not “permanently tragic” (YVP2 317).
7.
Yeats is instructed that by “contrasts” the spirits mean “contraries” (YVP1 406).
8. Having studied Swedenborg, Yeats was familiar with his sense of complementarity, as explained in The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love (1768) tr. A. H. Searle (London: Swedenborg Society, 1891
[WBGYL 2050; YL 2038]), section 56; Pastor Becker quotes a passage from this in Seraphita as a part of a
lengthy digest of Swedenborg’s doctrines, see Honoré de Balzac, tr. Clara Bell, Seraphita (London: J. M. Dent,
1897 [cf. WBGYL 106; YL 106]), 64: “The Lord took the beauty and the grace of man’s life and infused them
into woman. When man is disunited from this beauty and elegance of life, he is austere, sad, or savage; when
he is reunited to them, he is happy, he is complete.” In gender theory, the closest approximation of Yeats’s
vision of gendered interdependence is Ivan Illich’s concept of “ambiguous complementarity” wherein male
and female “fit” each other like left and right hands, although they see through different eyes, think, speak,
and love in disparate ways. See Ivan Illich, Gender (New York: Pantheon Books 1982), 76. See also Wayne
Chapman, “Authors in Eternity: Some Sources of Yeats’s Creative Mysticism,” YA15 (2002) 288–312.
9.
Written to Olivia Shakespear, 21 February 1933. See Yeats’s “Supernatural Songs” for Ribh’s vision of spirits who do not touch, “but whole is joined to whole; / For the intercourse of angels is a light / Where for
its moment both seem lost, consumed” (VP 555; CW1 290). Yeats borrows from Swedenborg’s philosophy,
which describes the marriages of angels, which produce no children but unite the understanding of the
man with the will of the woman. They become one flesh on earth and one spirit in heaven. See Swedenborg, Conjugial Love, sections 44 (“Second Memorable Relation”) and 19; Balzac, Seraphita, 64–65.
10. Curtis Bradford, Yeats at Work (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 6.
11. Cit. Connie K. Hood, “The Remaking of A Vision,” YAACTS1 (1983) 37.
12. The poem opens Book II in A Vision A. It encapsulates the very purpose of A Vision A by posing the question: what is the source and nature of absolute truth sought for centuries by the greatest philosophers? The
poem narrates Kusta ben Luka’s insight, one discovered with the help of his new bride: the highest truths and
deepest mysteries of reason and faith are contained in and expressed through the lover’s body. Wisdom of the
body (in this case, the female body specifically) transcends mere book-wisdom because it does not vanish like
words traced in the sand. Nor does it petrify from neglect like the manuscripts of Parmenides nor slip from
the hands of indifferent, lovelorn youths who consult the love songs of Sappho. The wisdom of the body
withstands the shifting sands of a changing world, as the subsequent section of A Vision A suggests. In the
opening pages of A Vision B, Yeats retells the story of his wife’s experience in “A Packet for Ezra Pound” in a
way that seems to elide George’s contribution to the philosophic system Yeats is about to unveil.
13. In the section of the 1925 edition entitled “The Gates of Pluto,” Yeats extends this interaction between
male and female into his description of the afterlife. Yeats describes the correlation between the four Faculties and the four Principles of the departed soul (Husk, Passionate Body, Spirit and Celestial Body) interacting
as the soul works its way through its six stages. Yeats spends a great deal of time describing how men and
women must revisit their loves in the process he calls Shiftings. The purpose of Shiftings is a moral one—
to “exhaust good and evil themselves,” which can only be done by separating what truly belongs to the
primary or antithetical self “from that which seems to” (CW13 190; AVA 230). The stage brings back the
total spectrum of sexual relationships, from light loves that involved only passing experiences of pleasure
or pain, to strong loves that encompassed happy or tragic circumstances (CW13 190; AVA 231). As the
soul grapples with these past loves, it enters into a state of intellectual ecstasy wherein truth turns the “most
horrible tragedy” into “a figure in a dance” (CW13 190; AVA 231). Men and women are thereby vehicles
of each other’s advancement into a more integrated, spiritualized state that is signified by Yeats’s favorite
Yeat’s Vision and the Feminine
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
305
image of wholeness, the dance itself. In the 1937 edition, Yeats again describes the stages of afterlife but
does not mention the importance of interaction between the sexes during Shiftings. It remains a stage of
moral purification but is not tied directly to coming to terms with past lovers.
“The Gates of Pluto,” which follows “Dove or Swan” in A Vision A (a section retitled “The Soul in Judgment” and repositioned before “Dove or Swan” in A Vision B), contained intrusions or corrections to
Yeats’s text attributed to Aherne. These were also deleted or recast as notes.
In her biography of George Yeats, Ann Saddlemyer argues that George, by nature a reserved person, did
not want to be regarded by the public as a freak if the truth of the origins of the system became widely
known (BG 406). Minimizing her role might deceptively position W. B. Yeats as sole author, but it successfully veils the script experiments and thereby avoids an explicit defense of the spirit guides and mystical
experience (405).
See Paul and Harper’s detailing of the background of these characters that Yeats defined “‘more as principles of mind than as actual personages’” (VP 803, note to The Wind Among the Reeds [1899]; cit. CW13
221–22 n31). Aherne may have been based on Lionel Johnson, Robartes on MacGregor Mathers (CW13
221–22 n31 and 222–23 n36) or on George Russell (CL2 60 n3). Yeats himself says that the names
Robartes and Aherne came from two friends, one of whom was recently returned from Mesopotamia
(VP 821, notes to Later Poems [1922]). He remembers reading the name “John Aherne” in a list of men
involved in a disturbance at the staging of Playboy of the Western World (VP 825). The name “John” here is
confusing, but Yeats noted that “John Aherne is either the original Owen Aherne or some near relation of
the man that was” (VP 821). The phase of Robartes is also debated. See n30.
Hazard Adams, The Book of Yeats’s Poems (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1990), 128.
In the notes for The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), Yeats called Robartes “the pride of the imagination
brooding upon the greatness of its possessions” (VP 803).
Adams, The Book of Yeats’s Poems, 127.
Yeats both extends and renounces the deception in the closing pages of “Stories” by concluding the chapter
with a letter addressed to Yeats himself from John Aherne, Owen’s brother. This Aherne has preserved his
brother’s diaries along with the record made by Robartes’s pupils and Duddon’s narrative. He also possesses
Yeats’s own unpublished book on the symbol system based on the automatic script. Aherne explains the
automatic writing experiment as “as process of remembering” (AVB 54).
William O’Donnell. A Guide to the Prose Fiction of W. B. Yeats (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983),
139, quoting Yeats’s 1930 diary (Ex 333).
Morton Irving Seiden, William Butler Yeats: The Poet as a Mythmaker 1865–1939 (New York: Cooper
Square Publishers, 1975), 108.
Huddon, whose life’s work is war, is virtually silent and does not offer his own narrative.
F. A. C. Wilson, “Patterns in Yeats’s Imagery: The Herne’s Egg,” Modern Philology (August 1957), 48.
A Guide to the Prose Fiction of W. B. Yeats, 140, 141.
In a letter to Olivia Shakespear, W. B. Yeats made the symbolism clear: “[George] got a piece of paper, and
talking to me all the while so that her thoughts would not affect what she wrote, wrote these words (which
she did not understand) ‘with the bird’ (Iseult) ‘all is well at heart’…” (L 633).
Matthew DeForrest notes that just as Denise selects Huddon (the warrior) as her lover, Maud Gonne married MacBride rather than the artistic Yeats. See “Stories of Michael Robartes,” Canadian Journal of Irish
Studies 18: 2 (1992), 53.
This “task” commissioned by Robartes points back to the messages of the spirit-guides in the automatic
script, foretelling that the new Messiah will come somewhere between the years 2000 and 2100. According
to the spirits, the avatar would have a father and a mother and would be physically born, like Christ himself (YVP1 483). The avatar would be from the “fifth generation” of a family associated with the mountain
of Ben Bulben. This is significant—Yeats himself being from the “fourth” generation of such a family. Yeats
struggles to clarify their message:
You mean that a spiritual being is about to manifest not necessarily through one two or 3
people, perhaps through many, & that the completion of this philosophy through self & medium [W. B. and George Yeats] is part of this beings work. (YVP2 70).
The spirits answer: “Yes.” That is, the dialogues conducted between W. B. and George Yeats and the spirit
guides, as well as the subsequent system discovered by this inquiry, will prepare the way for the new avatar.
Moreover, this new Messiah will be their physical child, a son born to them, marking the fifth generation
of W. B. Yeats’s family to have grown up near the mountain of Ben Bulben (YVP3 83, 338).
Alternately, the third might be Lady Gregory, Olivia Shakespear, or Florence Farr rather than George
306
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
(YVP1 525–26 n112). Since these are cuckoos and not water birds, they would generally be associated
with emotion in one instance, in another intellectual love (YVP1 251). In the script, the speckled bird
symbolizes the Daimon of Maud Gonne (YVP2 280), the white swan, daughter Anne Yeats’s Daimon, the
black eagle, son Michael Yeats’s Daimon (YVP1 48, YVP2 386). Which is to say, birds are pervasive and
far-ranging in their significance.
Matthew DeForrest offers a compelling argument about these characters embodying aspects of the Great
Wheel. In terms of Faculties, there is O’Leary functioning as Will at Phase 20, Denise as Mask at Phase 6,
Duddon as Creative Mind at Phase 10, and Huddon as Body of Fate at Phase 24. Counter to them is the
other set of characters who function as Principles: Robartes as the Spirit at Phase 10, Aherne as the Husk at
Phase 20, Bond as the Celestial Body at Phase 24, and Bell as the Passionate Body at Phase 6. See “Stories of
Michael Robartes,” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 18:50–54.
Plato, Symposium, Collected Works of Plato, 4th Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 520.
James Olney, “Sex and the Dead: Daimones of Yeats and Jung.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 14.1 (1981), 56.
Many versions of the myth depict Leda as lying with her husband (King Tyndareus of Sparta) the same
night that Zeus impregnated her. The result: two eggs, each hatching twins. The mortal children were
Clytemnestra and Castor, the divine offspring Helen and Pollux.
For a more detailed version of my discussion of “Leda” see Chapter 7 in Pressed Against Divinity (Dekalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 1997).
In the second edition, Yeats changes this line from an assertion, ending in a semi-colon, as in A Vision A, to a question: “…And how can body, laid in that white rush, / But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? (AVB 267).
I use “performed” here with Judith Butler in mind. Butler argues that gender is manifested or performed
via a repetition of acts that are socially/culturally inscribed. Such scripts allow gender to be manifested
through performity (and it alone). To some extent, Yeats anticipates Butler’s sense of gender performity
since men and women operate in oppositional behavior, perhaps most clearly seen in the Initiatory and
Critical Moments but also captured in (for instance) the image of the dance (“Crazy Jane Grown Old
Looks at the Dancers”). Butler would not share Yeats’s sense of masculine and feminine as Tinctures or
substantive identities, however. See Judith Butler, Gender Troubles: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(New York: Routledge, 1990). Perhaps more accommodating to Yeats’s position is Seyla Benhabib’s notion
of soft or interactive universalizablity, wherein the self is a rational agent operating in a network of relationships and dependencies. See Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in
Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992).
Note how different Yeats’s justification is in contrast to other approaches. In Thaïs E. Morgan’s edited
collection of essays discussing what occurs when a man writes in the voice of a woman, each contributor
appeals to a different theory of gender. The act itself receives a wide variety of labels: Morgan calls it an
“imagined perspective” (1) and “female impersonation” (193); Deborah Rubin labels it “ventriloquistic
illusion” (14); Peter F. Murphy refers to it as “feminine discourse” (83); Beatrice Durand equates crossgendered verse with the sociological term “cross-dressing” but regards this as an act of deception, when a
man assumes “the false identity of a woman” (90). Christopher Benfey speaks of “bisexual poetry,” but he
sees this as ambiguously gender-marked text rather than an explicitly gendered act (125, 128). The common thread in these essays is an assumption of fictionalization laced with the suspicion of duplicity. That
is, cross-gendered verse is a rhetorical sleight of hand belying the truth of the writer’s gender identity. See
Thaïs E. Morgan, ed., Men Writing the Feminine: Literature, Theory, and the Question of Genders (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1994).
This suggests a sort of hybridity as defined by Homi Bhabha, that is, identity that crosses cultural boundaries insofar as no man is entirely or purely masculine, no woman entirely or purely feminine. See Homi K.
Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
Hazard Adams, The Book of Yeats’s Poems, 30.
Sexual union also pertains to incarnations at Phases 1 and 15, e.g., “If the Spirit at 15 be a man he must
give the ‘Kiss of Death’ to some woman,” (CW13 199; AVA 242).
“Concrete other” is Seyla Benhabib’s term for a unique individual with a distinct life-history. To treat
another as “concrete” rather than “generalized” means to relate in terms of the “norms of equity and
complementary reciprocity.” See Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism
in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), 159.
ESOTERICISM AND ESCAPE
by C. Nicholas Serra
M
agicians do exist,” declared Marcel Mauss in 1902, and Yeats certainly agreed.1
However, as Mauss also notes, magical rites “are always considered unauthorized, abnormal and, at the very least, not highly estimable,” and this assertion
has certainly proved true within the community of Yeatsians.2 Historically, the study of
Yeats’s occultism has been, to use a deliberate pejorative, the ill-favored stepchild in an
otherwise completely canonical and academically orthodox field. Outright mockery of
all that “mumbo-jumbo” has not been out of bounds.3 Perhaps this was the natural reaction of rational academics faced with texts whose complex esoteric metaphors require “a
Rose or secret explanation,”4 for as Kathleen Raine asserts: “The merely academic study of
magical symbolism may be likened to the analysis of musical scores by a student who does
not know that the documents he meticulously annotates are merely indications for the
evocation of music from instruments of whose very existence he is ignorant.”5
What, then, can be said about that Everest of the Yeatsian canon, A Vision and its
horrible occult system of gyres within phases within cycles? It is clearly an esoteric document, in every sense of the word “a book for specialists only” (L 700): composed by two
Golden Dawn adepts, dedicated to Golden Dawn adepts, and reserved for their pragmatic
use (CW13 lv; AVA xii).6
For example, one of key cabalistic tropes behind the foundational 1925 edition, the
archer who shows the way of the soul between sun and moon, appeared to Yeats—in
August 1896, not November 1917—after a nine-day evocation of the “lunar power,” and
Yeats elucidated this vision using the Order’s cabalistic symbolism, based on information
obtained from Wynn Westcott, one of the Golden Dawn’s three founders (CW3 280ff &
485; Au 372ff & 576; Mem 100ff).
Moreover, Yeats’s original expositor for the system, Michael Robartes, is presented
as the only true knower of its secrets, and he is certainly Yeats’s mask of an idealized
8°=3▫ Golden Dawn adept “resurrected” from “Rosa Alchemica.”7 Yet without the
shared curricular knowledge of every Golden Dawn adept that Yeats broadly enumerates in Section XIII of “A Packet for Ezra Pound,” the symbolism of his metaphysical
algebra is seemingly arbitrary, harsh, and difficult, easily confused with that distasteful
“popular spiritualism” that “clings to all that is vague and obvious in popular Christianity” (AVB 23–24).
Indeed, Christina Stoddart, one of the later Chiefs of the Golden Dawn’s Amoun
Temple, apparently had no trouble recognizing esoteric elements in the drafts of Yeats’s
“philosophy” (YGD 144). In fact, Yeats corresponded with members of the Golden
Dawn’s Hermes Temple in Bristol about A Vision’s symbolism at least through 1931
(YGD 154). The Vision Papers themselves are littered with passing references to the
Order and its teachings. Finally, and perhaps most telling of all, in 1925 Yeats revised
“The Two Trees” (VP 134–36; CW1 44–45), his early didactic verse depicting the cabalistic Tree of Life, such that his own system of gyres and phases is clearly represented
“
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
as existing within this framework: the schematic diagram depicting the entire cabalistic
universe, and the unifying glyph of the Golden Dawn magical system.8
None of this is news. Yeats explicitly apologized to those readers who came to the
1925 edition “through some interest in my poetry and in that alone,” although this apology does nothing to elucidate his pragmatic esoteric subtext in se (CW13 lv; AVA xii).
Similarly, in the original dialogic introduction, Owen Aherne begs for an explanation of
the system’s “general spiritual purpose” that is never provided (YVP4 26–27). Without
it, academic critics have likewise been stymied, lost like Aherne in the complexity of the
system’s detail, stonewalled by unassailable passive constructions.9 Typically, Yeats himself
steadfastly refuses to explain,10 and his remarks in “The End of the Cycle” (and “Vacillation”) suggest not only that he could not explain, but that, in the end, he himself failed to
achieve some unstated, pragmatic task (AVB 301).
Clearly the cabalistic and esoteric teachings of the Hermetic Order of the Golden
Dawn—transmitted by the initiated for the initiated—must in some way underpin the
system and provide a context for its hypothetical utility that is distinct from mere “metaphors for poetry” (AVB 8). How, then, is the uninitiated academic to read it in an initiated
context? Why has no esoteric methodology for reading yet been proposed, despite the
best efforts of those formidable scholars of the last generation who opened up the study of
Yeats’s Golden Dawn activities in relation to his poetic paradigm—George Mills Harper,
Kathleen Raine, Richard Finneran, John Kelly, Warwick Gould, Walter Kelly Hood, William Murphy et al?
Furthermore, it is clear that this implied esotericism must in some way explain a new
understanding of the body that is unique to Yeats alone, as A Vision is the fruit of original
research, however esoteric, and the system’s exclusive focus on the soul is at odds with
Yeats’s treatment of the body-soul dilemma throughout the poetic corpus. In particular,
it fails to address how “the soul’s ultimate, particular freedom, and the soul’s disappearance in God” mesh with Yeats’s other stated aim of “restoring” the body, for according to
Michael Robartes, the antinomies are not resolved by death (AVB 52).11 And where, in the
end, is the magic—the initiated processes that undermine ordinary causality?
What follows is not, unfortunately, the complete outline of an esoteric methodology
for reading Yeats’s occult symbolism based on the Golden Dawn’s Cabala. Space constraints alone preclude such an undertaking. Instead, what I hope to provide is a brief
summary of those suppositions in the primary criticism that have prevented one from
being developed previously, a critique of the flaws in the most commonly used source
materials, a prospectus of the materials that are potentially available to remedy those flaws
and, in the end, an interpolation of the Robartesian “escape” within the context of Yeats’s
tasks as an Exempt Adept 7°=4▫ of the Golden Dawn’s Inner Order.
Obviously, before one can ask the question, “How does Yeats’s system fit within the
broader context of the Golden Dawn’s ‘magical’ system?” one first has to understand what
the Golden Dawn was, in itself, as an esoteric or occult organization.
Although the history of the Order has been retold variously and at length, the definitive version has yet to be written, and there exists a great deal of confusion about the
“Golden Dawn” and its broader objectives as both have been described in innumerable
thumbnail sketches and conflicting accounts. George Harper and most other critics of the
1970s leaned heavily upon Ellic Howe’s Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary
Esotericism and Escape
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History of a Magical Order, 1887–1923, Francis King’s Ritual Magic In England, Israel Regardie’s My Rosicrucian Adventure, and some extremely dubious sources that include A.E.
Waite’s Shadows of Life and Thought and Christina Mary Stoddart’s Light-Bearers of Darkness.12 None of these is either free from inherent biases or 100% reliable, and thus all of the
assumptions about the Golden Dawn in the primary scholarship need to be reexamined.
Fortunately, the comparative material available on the Golden Dawn as a whole has
multiplied exponentially in the last three decades. Ritual documents from A. E. Waite’s
schismatic, Christianized Holy Order of the Golden Dawn have seen publication, likewise
certain papers from Robert Felkin’s Smaragdum Thalasses Temple No. 49 (New Zealand),
as well as a miscellany of early Order lectures and documents by J. W. Brodie-Innes, Florence Farr, and MacGregor Mathers, many published by Darcy Kuntz in Holmes’s Golden
Dawn Studies Series. Ithell Colquhoun’s biography Sword of Wisdom: MacGregor Mathers
and the Golden Dawn appeared in 1975, and further biographical material—some brief,
some compendious—is more generally available on the major figures surrounding the
Order. In Yeats studies, of course, this includes not only Mary Greer’s Women of the Golden
Dawn, but also R. A. Gilbert’s A. E. Waite: Magician of Many Parts, Alan Richardson’s
Priestess: The Life and Magic of Dion Fortune, to say nothing of the available but as yet unpublished material from the Golden Dawn’s parent organization, the Societas Rosicruciana
in Anglia, held in the Yorke Collection at the Warburg Institute, and the not inconsiderable collection of the United Grand Lodge of England Library.13
In order to avoid retelling the complex history of the Order, its sister organizations
and schismatic factions about which even exemplary scholars have made mistakes14—
caught up in preconceptions, non-germane speculation about the origin and authenticity
of the foundational documents, sidetracked by the farcical presentation of the so-called
Revolt of the Adepti in 1900, outré magical duels, seemingly outrageous goings-on—I
confine this discussion to a spare recitation of what the Order was and was not, generally.
For those coming to the material for the first time, I would recommend beginning further
reading with Mary Greer and Darcy Kuntz’s slim The Chronology of the Golden Dawn, and
progressing cautiously afterward into the more detailed histories.15
At base, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was an initiatory body whose
esoteric curriculum and rituals—its entire body of teaching—were structured around an
adaptation of the cabalistic system of mystical Judaism. The Order’s ten (or twelve) grades
were, with two exceptions, directly linked to sephiroth on the Tree of Life (see Figure 1).
Members were promised occult knowledge in theory and practice. They were taught what
amounts to a form of yoga, as well as other seemingly disjointed fragments of occult trivia
and ritual gleaned from a variety of historical sources. The Cabala provided a symbol
system, a paradigm for cross-referencing symbols, and several methods of esoteric exegesis
that were applied to an otherwise objective curriculum of fairly exoteric material that was
largely assessed through conventional examinations. However, we know from Yeats that it
was more than “a mere society for experiment and research” (YGD 264). The ultimate aim
of every adept was gnosis and eventual, perhaps literal, union with God. Most of what is
overtly discussed in the surviving Order documents, however, is not gnosis but mere episteme, and it is unwise to mistake the object of meditation with either praxis or its result.
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Specifically, the Golden Dawn was (somehow) chartered in 1888 by three Master
Masons: Dr William Robert Woodman (who died in 1891), Dr William Wynn Westcott,
and Samuel Liddell “MacGregor” Mathers. All three of these men were high-ranking
members of the Societas Rosicruciana In Anglia, as well as other contemporary Masonic
and fringe-Masonic bodies. A. E. Waite, Golden Dawn adept and sensationally ponderous
occult journalist, described Westcott in particular as “a man whom you may ask by chance
concerning some almost nameless Rite and it proves very shortly that he is either its British custodian or the holder of some high if inoperative office therein.”16
However, despite the Masonic affiliations of its founders, the Golden Dawn was in
no way a Masonic body. It was not sex-segregated, and did not pretend to confer degrees
that were equivalent to those of orthodox Craft Masonry; nor was extra-order involvement in Freemasonry either expected or required. Tellingly, Westcott himself was of the
opinion that “The secrets of Occultism are…to some extent the secrets that Freemasonry
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has lost.”17 Further, it is clear that there were a number of Masons in the otherwise orthodox S.R.I.A. who were keenly interested in the practical side of alchemy, ritual magic,
and astrology, as evidenced by F. L. Gardner’s Catalogue Raisonné of Works on the Occult
Sciences, F. G. Irwin’s manuscript copy of The Grimoire of Pope Honorius, and Frederick
Hockley’s alchemical A Manual of a Rosicrucian Philos[ophus].18
Likewise, notwithstanding the assertions of such seminal Yeats scholars as Virginia
Moore and George Mills Harper, the Golden Dawn was in no way a specifically Christian
organization. True, the S.R.I.A. admitted only “Christian” Master Masons, at least nominally, and therefore the three founders of the Golden Dawn must have been Christian in
some way, shape, or form. On the other hand, Westcott noted that while “the members
of all true Rosicrucian Colleges have always been Christians,” these were not always of an
“orthodox type” and tended to display an affinity for “Gnostic ideals.” His further claim
that Rosicrucian societies can expose a “broader scheme of Christian teaching” also casts
doubt upon any claim to doctrinal orthodoxy.19
Certainly the Golden Dawn’s Inner Order rituals dramatized the myth of “Christian”
Rosenkreutz and the symbol of the Red Rose and Gold Cross. However, these were supported by the Hermetic foundation of the Outer Order rather than the reverse. Christian
symbolism was admixed with and subsumed within a larger syncretistic context that was
Hermetic, Gnostic, and pagan. In Flying Roll XV, “Man and God,” Westcott observes with
tolerance that “Every shade of unorthodoxy is represented among us.”20 Beyond Yeats’s later
protestations that he was no “Christian man” (VP 503; CW1 256), I take as the final word
Colquhoun’s statement that applications to the Matherses’ post-1900 “A ... O ... Lodge of the
G.D. in the Outer,” to which Yeats considered sending students (see YGD 145–46), specified that applicants “must believe in the Gods, or at least in a Supreme Being.”21
This claim of a Christian foundation for the Order has gone hand in hand with the
historical embarrassment of academics regarding the nature of Yeats’s “religion.” I would
point out that trying to describe the Order as “Christian” simply introduces a questionbegging red herring into any argument, a rhetorical strategy that has historically been used
by those critics who wished to somehow normalize Yeats’s beliefs—in spite of the fact that
no Christian denomination sanctions the practice of magic. Indeed, Yeats pointedly disavowed that short-lived, Christianized Golden Dawn faction led by A. E. Waite.22
Furthermore, although Yeats revolted against his one-time mentor and Order founder MacGregor Mathers in 1900, this was not because he and the London adepti discounted either Mathers’s magical teachings or his purported magical standing. Rather,
they rebelled against his autocratic administration. Yeats speaks positively about Mathers’s
magical system, if not always about Mathers himself, throughout his autobiographies and
letters. I am in complete accord with Ithell Colquhoun who, in her analysis of the schismatic Golden Dawn factions, ultimately excludes Yeats’s from the truly dissident schismatic orders because he seems “so indelibly stamped with the GD sigil” that he is placed,
in her account, “where he began, under Mathers’s aegis in Isis-Urania.”23
Beyond Mathers’s administrative foibles that led Yeats to put him “out of the Kaballa” in 1900 (CL2 514; cf. L 339), the most pressing questions for Yeats and the other
members, both before and after 1900, seem to return always to the nature of the Golden
Dawn’s highest adepts, its anonymous Secret Chiefs. Yeats’s answers to these questions,
insofar as they can be divined, are particularly important to any reading of A Vision.
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Were these highest adepts human individuals who had attained what the Bhagavad
Gita calls brahma-nirvana (5:24–26), who would be free from the cycle of rebirth at
death, their consciousness merging with the Infinite? Were they the discarnate souls of
deceased initiates, such as the Egyptian adept “contacted” by Florence Farr’s Sphere Group
from a fragment of cartonnage in the British Museum? Were they living adepts somehow accessing the knowledge of past incarnations? Were they just frauds, like the Horos
couple who deceived Mathers and involved the Order in a sensational sex scandal? Were
they individuals whose daimons had governed their souls so well that “through sacerdotal
theurgy” they had yielded to a god?24
In short, were the three highest grades of the Golden Dawn’s hierarchy attainable to
a mortal being, and how, and did one have to die first? Nobody knew, although the opinions of Helena Blavatsky and Karl von Eckartshausen seem to have swayed many.25 What
can be said is that, despite all these uncertainties, Yeats strove to master the highest grades
available, and even after he resigned from active participation in the Order “amid quarrels
caused by men,” still maintained, [italics mine] “I am confident from internal evidence
that the rituals, as I knew them, were in substance ancient though never so in language
unless some ancient text was incorporated” (CW3 454 n117; Au 579).
Lacking a mission statement couched in terms less vague than “seeking the light” or
“initiation” or “apotheosis,” one can only say that generally the task of initiates seems to
have been elevation into ever higher grades that were symbolically associated with cabalistic teachings about the makeup of the soul (cf. CW13 liv–lv; AVA xi).
On the other hand, Yeats’s system, as presented in A Vision, is not like anything, specifically, in the Order’s rituals or Knowledge Lectures as most Yeatsians understand them,
and in large part this is indicative of major flaws in the primary exegetical source used by
the majority of scholars: Israel Regardie’s The Golden Dawn in its many editions.
Regardie joined the Hermes Temple of the Stella Matutina (Bristol) in 1933. He resigned in December of 1934, following his initiation into the highest of the sub-grades
of the Adeptus Minor 5°=6▫. Between 1937 and 1940 he published his Order papers in a
four-volume edition, which has been expanded and revised many times since.26 Yeats clearly
had had misgivings about the Bristol group as early as 1919, albeit via his paranoid colleague
Christina Stoddart (YGD 134–36), and Regardie was obviously allowed to rush through the
grades. By his own account in My Rosicrucian Adventure (later What You Should Know about
the Golden Dawn), the Order as Regardie knew it was in a state of extreme decadence. Moreover, he never attempted the two higher graders of the Inner Order (achieved by Yeats on 16
October 1914 and 24 April 1916), and frankly boasts of his ignorance: “I know absolutely
nothing of this grade of Adeptus Major. And care less.”27 Regardie’s texts in their various editions are clearly not coeval with Yeats. Furthermore, not only do they lack any instruction for
the higher grades of the Inner Order, but they are incomplete in terms of the Order’s minor
or unofficial curriculum, the “Flying Rolls” (although these are available in the later editions
of Francis King’s Astral Projection, Ritual Magic and Alchemy and R. A. Gilbert’s The Sorcerer
and His Apprentice). Like A Vision itself, Regardie’s stated audience is limited to practicing
occultists who are expected to make sense of the system he presents through ritual practice.28
Further, in order to present “the whole system” he conflated his original texts, especially in the later editions, with materials from several bend-sinister branches of the
Order, and adulterated all editions with his own essays inserted under his magical motto,
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Ad Majorem Adonai Gloriam, as if they were original Order documents.29 Likewise, the
later Falcon Press editions include modern explanatory papers written by his friends and
students. Worse, Regardie’s text was compiled from what he admits to have been corrupt
sources that he edited to suit his own late-breaking understanding of Order practices,
heavily influenced by Reichian psychology. The grade rituals as he reproduces them have
been, he says, “tampered with, in some cases unintelligently.” In the course of his revisions
he compounded this tampering, abbreviating and deleting “whole paragraphs”; sentences
were “made more clear, the redundant use of many words eliminated” even “completely
rewritten to render them more coherent.”30 Regardie summarily expunged papers that
he judged antiquated or offensive, such as one on the symbolism of the twelve tribes of
Israel. To pick just one other example, the instructions on clairvoyance are headed by
the note, “this paper is compiled from several unofficial documents which were not sufficiently interesting to publish in unabridged form by themselves. Also several pieces of
oral instruction are here included.”31 Finally, although Regardie’s knowledge of Hebrew
was undoubtedly superior to that of many of the founding Chiefs, numerous minor errors
in the Hebrew orthography occur, especially in the paperback editions.
In short, Regardie’s Golden Dawn is not designed for academic study, nor was it
composed with Yeats scholars in mind. It cannot be said to represent the rituals as Yeats
knew them, and it is a singular source. Of course, the only other early published sources
for these documents—themselves far from perfect—are to be found in the volumes of
Aleister Crowley’s Equinox, and no reputable Yeatsian would reference them.32
Critics desperately require a text that does not yet exist: an edition of the Golden
Dawn manuscripts as Yeats knew them, both complete and hopefully drawn exclusively
from the manuscripts available in the Yeats Collection at the National Library of Ireland.
Happily, the holdings of Yeats’s occult papers include not only Yeats’s own Order notebooks, but also the more legible copybooks of George Pollexfen, as well as typescripts
made by George Yeats (who studied in the later Stella Matutina) and several other adepti.
There seem to be some lacunae in the collection—I have not yet discovered a copy of the
Adeptus Major grade ritual, for example.33 However, in the main the majority of the documents seem to be present, many in multiple copies. Furthermore, in at least some cases,
revisions that were made to the rituals over time—Yeats and Horniman jointly made some
emendations in 1902—were written interlineally and as marginalia in copies from the
1890s, allowing scholars to study the Order teachings as they evolved, not simply as an
artificially created monolith.
However, even assuming easy access to primary texts, Regardie’s comment to his
bastardized paper on clairvoyance points to another major deficiency that is less easy to
remedy. No matter whose documents are used, the oral component of the Order’s teaching—the pragmatic explanations of the otherwise recondite and rather opaque occult
metaphors—is almost entirely lacking. How can this ever be recovered? And where, for
the purposes of comparative context, are the records of experiments carried out by the
early adepts along Golden Dawn principles? Only a handful have survived among the
Flying Rolls. How can the materials contained in the Vision Papers be judged within the
context of experiments carried out by Golden Dawn adepts without such materials?34
What is wanting is a teacher or, failing that, a reader’s guide by an initiated author—
with some very particular qualifications. Ideally, this individual should possess at least
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Yeats’s own magical standing (Adeptus Exemptus 7°=4▫ by the time of his marriage),
preferably have been instructed by MacGregor Mathers himself or, at the very least, his
wife Moina. Functionally, beyond being nearly 100 years old, he or she would have to be
willing to divulge esoteric information—the Golden Dawn’s overall system and objectives, its method of arranging symbols, its rules of esoteric grammar as it were—explained
academically in violation of the Neophyte’s oath of secrecy, and further be able to demonstrate that information as used in practice for comparison’s sake.
Yeats himself is a terrible teacher. To return for a moment to Mauss, “Where religious
rites are performed openly, in full public view, magical rites are carried out in secret.…
And even if the magician has to work in public he makes an attempt to dissemble: his
gestures become furtive and his words indistinct.”35 In short, as every Yeatsian must recognize, Yeats lies. He deceives, inveigles, and obfuscates. One has to remember his oath
of secrecy about the particulars of the esoteric secrets of the manipulation of symbols he
learned from Mathers. One recalls his statements in “Magic” that even that bland recitation revealed “more of the ancient secret” than many among his fellow students thought
it right to tell, and that he expunged whole paragraphs that seemed to speak of “hidden
things” (CW4 40; E&I 51).
George Harper laments that “One could wish that [Miss Stoddart, as a Golden Dawn
adept, however unstable] had commented further on the occult symbolism and philosophy she apparently recognised in Four Plays for Dancers, The Wild Swans at Coole, Michael
Robartes and the Dancer, and Four Years”—to say nothing of “The Phases of the Moon”
and the germs of Yeats’s “philosophy” as expressed in the “Robartes Papers” (YGD 144).
Of course, Stoddart didn’t have to comment further; both she and Yeats were initiates.
They had been taught a common system for arranging and studying the correspondence
of symbols. They had a shared understanding that both had sworn to keep secret.
Fortunately, there is actually one source who fits the bill in every way: an adept coeval
with Yeats, like Yeats also Mathers’s protégé, who (unlike Yeats) kept meticulous records
of his experiments and took pains to explain, explain, explain. Unfortunately, that one
person is also the infamous Aleister Crowley.
In the critical canon Crowley is portrayed almost without exception as the renegade
and oath-breaker who caused many of the Order’s problems during the schism of 1900,
but in 1900 it was Yeats, not Crowley, who was the renegade.36 Crowley certainly broke
his oath of secrecy—in 1909, which does not account for Yeats’s antipathy in 1900, nor
explain the continuing denunciation of academics, most of whom paradoxically thank
Regardie for publishing his Golden Dawn papers.
What could have engendered such lasting antipathy in Yeats, a man who claimed to
“understand people easily, easily sympathise with all kinds of character, easily forgive all
kinds of defects. Apart from opinions which I judge too sternly, I scarcely judge people
at all, am altogether lax in my attitude towards conduct” (CW3 320; Au 432).37 And was
Yeats’s antipathy based on anything that would preclude using Crowley’s Golden Dawn
documents and commentaries to fill in the practical gaps in A Vision—much as Marcus
Blackden used knowledge from the Golden Dawn to facilitate his “translation” of the
Ritual of the Mystery of the Judgment of the Soul?38
Doubtless there was little love lost between Yeats and Crowley, but as an occult teacher whose fundamental methodology is that version of the Cabala taught by MacGregor
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Mathers, Crowley seems a spokesman for uninformed readers, the uninitiated. For example, though Crowley, as a Golden Dawn adept, undoubtedly understood Yeats’s implied
symbol patterns, he nevertheless complains in a review of Shadowy Waters of Yeats’s taciturnity. “You [Yeats] peer into the darkly splendid world, the abyss of light—for it is light,
to the seer—and you see [or at least show] but ‘unintelligible images, unluminous, formless, and void.’ Then you return and pose as one who has trodden the eternal snows.…
Better abandon mysticism outright than this.” He might also have said (as did he say to A.
E. Waite), “Drop your eternal hinting, hinting, hinting, ‘Oh what an exalted grade I have,
if you poor dull uninitiated people would only perceive it!’”39
It is not my intention to attempt to rehabilitate Aleister Crowley’s public reputation.
However, it is certainly demonstrable that most of what Yeatsians “think” they know
about Crowley is often distorted at best, and completely fabricated at worst. Beyond
Crowley’s status as Mathers’s “favorite” at a time when Mathers was being ousted as chief
of his own Order, Yeats’s attitude stemmed from the fact that they were completely antithetical men in almost every respect—save perhaps in that both were “young, vain, selfrighteous,” and bent on proving themselves men of action (CW3 334; Au 454). Yeats,
too, began by playing “at being a sage, a magician or a poet” and similarly chose Shelley’s
Alastor as his model (CW3 80; Au 64).40 By all accounts, in 1900 the young Crowley was
well on his way to out-Wildeing Wilde.41 He was the stereotype, if not the epitome of the
1890s decadent.
One can well imagine what the struggling, sexually frustrated Yeats thought of Crowley in 1900. At 23, the younger man was funded by an allowance, and fresh from his
sojourn at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had violently shaken free of his strict
Plymouth Brethren upbringing: reading forbidden English literature, indulging his admittedly multifaceted sexual appetites, rock climbing on holidays, and not bothering to
sit for a degree. He is an odd mix of Shelley and Huysmans, a writer of tolerable technical
verse if not good poetry, with an impressive memory and a formidable knowledge of both
the biblical and classical canons.
Crowley spent lavishly for sumptuous, privately printed editions of his poetry and
gemstone-encrusted ritual objects. He was keen to prove that “the Christianity of hypocrisy and cruelty was not true Christianity,” or, as he also explains it, “I did not hate God
or Christ, but merely the God and Christ of the people whom I hated.”42 Once in the
Golden Dawn, he passed through the Outer Order’s examinations and initiations with
only the minimum time in-grade, and shared rooms with a member of the Inner Order
from whom he certainly received advanced training beyond his standing. Crowley is often
summarily dismissed as a “black Magician,” but it is worth noting that this epithet was
commonly used in belle epoque occult circles for anyone with a different mystical ideology.43 In short, the young Crowley was everything that Yeats was not, including a brilliant
student of magic. He was not Mathers’s favorite for nothing.
As an example, one gets an interesting view of Crowley from the post-schismatic
“Statement Issued to Adepti by the Majority of the Council Feb 1901,” perhaps the only
Golden Dawn document where Crowley is mentioned in a complimentary way, albeit
left-handedly, without the dignity of his Order motto, and only in passing. The main
points addressed by the committee concerned examinations, secret sub-groups within the
Order, and a certain laxity toward seniority that Mathers and Farr had tolerated but which
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irked the senior adepts. The relevant passage begins: “A colour scheme of the 4 scales was
given by the late chief in Paris to Jeh Aur [Allan Bennett] to Volo Noscere [George Cecil
Jones] and to Crowley (all juniors). Sapientia [Florence Farr] had known it and had kept
it secret for many years. Jeh Aur told her he had been told it was received in vision by
Vestigia [Moina Mathers]” (YGD 252).
The account tends to confirm that significant portions of the knowledge available to
the Inner Order adepti came from the Matherses’ experiments (arguably foreshadowing
Yeats’s own later occult work). Also, the fact that Florence Farr had received such knowledge without passing it on is in keeping with criticisms on her administrative shortfalls
that helped set the stage for the revolt. The only negative about Crowley here is that he
was a “junior” in the Order at the time he received the information. “Junior,” however,
also apparently refers to seniority within the Inner Order, as Allan Bennett was certainly
an Adeptus Minor at the time.
The scribe then continues with the wholly remarkable statements: “Sapientia showed
it last spring to a few seniors who agreed in thinking it incorrect and took no further interest in it. V. H. Fra. M.W.T. (hereafter called Mawahanu) [Marcus Blackden] was present
at the time when Crowley was freely discussing these scales, and he came to the conclusion
that a correct version could be constructed with some perseverance from the materials
given, and we are working it out on scientific lines.”
There is obvious resentment here that Crowley, a junior, was expounding on restricted knowledge in front of all and sundry, regardless of the fact that the senior adepti
had discarded these unofficial papers. Of more interest is the fact that the senior adepti
subsequently decided that the information was not worthless after all, obviously based
on Crowley’s exposition. As anyone who has read Crowley’s technical articles on Qabalah
would agree, he had a formidable capacity for occult theory.
This is in stark contrast to “The case of V H Fra DEDI [Yeats]” presented several
paragraphs later: “This frater did you all great service during the Revolution as you know
from your printed documents. Since then he has attended the Council meetings at intervals and we all bear him witness that he has talked at greater length than all the other
members put together. His position among us is due to his long connection with the Order, the originality of his views on Occult subjects and the ability with which he expresses
them rather than the thoroughness of his knowledge of Order work and methods which
is somewhat scant” (YGD 253).
Indeed, Crowley kept meticulous records of his cabalistic and magical experiments,
much more detailed than anything in the Vision Papers, with commentary. He also produced a large body of literary works—poetry, drama, essays, and fiction—most of which
are blatantly didactic. This is not to say that much of it is “good” poetry or that his
technical essays are easily understood, merely that they are instructive by design. As John
Symonds opined, “He was not a great poet, although he wrote a few good poems,” since
“In most of his verse there are rarely found those strains which result from a surrender to
the poetic moment; instead, he mainly harnessed his talent to his occult interests…which
are unsuitable for poetry.”44 Still, these same sentiments from 1951 are also recognizable in
the Yeats criticism of the period, and A. E. Waite’s poetry was considerably worse.
Crowley does not leave out critical bits (unlike Waite), although he often disperses
information widely. He does not hint: he directs or explains outright. He does not, as
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Yeats does on more than one occasion, ingenuously reveal that he has expunged whole
paragraphs so as to leave readers wondering. Like Regardie, Crowley writes for an audience of practicing occultists, but unlike The Golden Dawn, Crowley’s texts always elucidate the material with lengthy, first-order explanations that are as academically objective
as the subject matter allows.
Moreover, Crowley imposes a hypertextual mode of reading on his audience through
endless internal references to other works—many of them his own. Crowley maintained
that his method of reading,
going from each author to those whom he quoted had a great advantage. It
established a rational consecution in my research; and as soon as I reached a
certain point the curves became re-entrant, so that my knowledge acquired a
comprehensiveness which could never have been so satisfactorily attained by any
arbitrary curriculum. I began to understand the real relation of one subject to
another.45
His is certainly not an arbitrary curriculum, and it forces a cabalistic associational dialogue
by constantly shifting ground and recontextualizing.46
Nevertheless, Crowley escapes being a dictator, imposing a strictly Crowleian outlook
on his readers, by emphasizing the distinction between specific particulars and the general
cabalistic organizational system behind his commentary. As he told one student, “Never
let your mind wander from the fact that your Qabalah is not my Qabalah; a good many
of the things which I have noted may be useful to you, but you must construct your own
system so that it is a living weapon in your hand,”47 and another: “The gods that you quote
are not at all those given in Liber Resh and I do not see why you should depart from the
text, but if for some reason you find them more suited to your peculiar style of beauty, go
ahead and heaven prosper you!”48
Crowley’s subject in his lectures, essays, and didactic poetry is, at base, the same
Golden Dawn system that informed Yeats, the same system that both learned directly
from Macgregor Mathers and the Inner Order adepti of the 1890s, the shared context
of Yeats and the dedicatees of A Vision. In later life, both Yeats and Crowley did go on to
create (or attempt to create) personal, spin-off magical orders, in all cases founded upon
and more or less working within their shared Golden Dawn first principles. Just as Yeats
overtly brackets the 1937 edition of A Vision with references to the Golden Dawn, Timothy d’Arch Smith, a bibliographer of Crowley, notes: “Rail against it though he might
(and did), [The Golden Dawn] was the magical order [Crowley] had joined as a young
man of twenty-three.…[It] exerted, throughout his life, the very strongest influence; and
it is in the light of that Order’s teaching that we must study [him].”49
Most of what the academic community “knows” about Crowley is derived from a
number of highly dubious sources. George Mills Harper points readers directly to one: the
sensationalist biographies by John Symonds, whose texts simply rehash and expand the protracted smear campaign against Crowley in the 1920s tabloids (YGD 182–83 n19).50 Fortunately, there have been a number of better biographies published in the intervening years.51
In Yeats’s letters, a fair portion of the acrimony aimed at Crowley has to do with
Mathers’s summary reversal of the decision by the senior adepti in London not to admit
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Crowley to the Inner Order, which was nevertheless only one impetus for the subsequent
“Battle of Blythe Road.” Crowley’s major fault seems to have been that he was “a person of
unspeakable life” (CL2 518; L 342). He certainly boasted in wholly adolescent ways about
flouting Victorian sexual conventions and, as he was admittedly both bisexual and a roué,
it is unsurprising that his colleagues accused him of “unnatural vice.”52
Furthermore, it seems highly probable that Crowley was, even at this early date,
mixing sex and magic: two inflammable topics that become explosive when one adds the
possibility of homoeroticism to the mix. While Yeats may have forgiven Wilde “that sin
which, more than any other possible to man, would turn all those people against him”
(CW3 223; Au 285), apparently this tolerance did not extend to someone who, as an Inner Order adept, would be authorized to create daughter organizations under the aegis
of the Golden Dawn. What Yeats ultimately feared, as he reported to Lady Gregory, was
that this mad person would gain “the means to carry on a mystical society which will
give him control of the consciences of many” (CL2 518; L 342). But are these Victorian
qualms about Crowley’s sexuality any reason to therefore discard his technical exegesis of
the original Golden Dawn material?
I would note, in passing, that it was not the idea of “sex-magic” per se that Yeats was
set against. Despite Regardie’s protests that “the subject of sex is nowhere dealt with” in
the Golden Dawn’s system,53 Dion Fortune claims that Moina Mathers nearly turned
her out of the Order for publishing “inner teachings” in The Esoteric Philosophy of Love
and Marriage.54 Francis King sees clear links between Rudolf Steiner’s ideas, which influenced the reconstitution of the Stella Matutina, and the curriculum of the German
fringe-Masonic Ordo Templi Orientis that did indeed teach sex magic in some form (and
which Crowley headed in Britain and Ireland from 1912 onward). Likewise, King points
out that Robert Felkin, Yeats’s Chief in the Stella Matutina, was in fact a member of the
British section of the O.T.O. headed by Crowley.55 Wynn Westcott, too—that inveterate accumulator of obscure rites and honors—was corresponding with Theodore Reuss,
the Head of the O.T.O. worldwide.56 These connections would certainly help explain a
number of Yeats’s curious, otherwise unaccountable uses of obscure and esoteric sexual
symbolism in the later poetry. And Yeats and George certainly were doing something both
sexual and magical to conceive the Irish avatar.
Crowley did, later, adopt the magical motto To Mega Therion—The Great Beast—
but he frequently resorted to such exaggerated rhetoric and hyperbole under the mistaken
assumption that its very extremity would force uninitiated readers to think about and
question their preconceptions, and perhaps seek for a “rose” or esoteric rationale. This
strategy backfired in many cases, for obvious reasons.57 Yet Yeats, too, certainly consecrated a talisman to The Great Beast: the sun (whose kamea, or magic-square talisman,
contains the whole integers from one to thirty-six arranged in a square such that each row
adds to 111, but whose total sum is 666). And again, whatever Yeats might have thought
of Crowley personally, he did earn his knowledge from Mathers.
In Yeats criticism, the overt anti-Crowley trend began with Ellmann, who seized upon
Crowley as the ideal straw man, and subsequent criticism followed suit. Yeats and Crowley
obviously disliked each other, and if Yeats could be set against Crowley specifically, rather
than Mathers, and against everything that the public associated with Crowley, then Yeats’s
questionable actions as a renegade adept and his potential framing as a Satanist or “black
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magician” could be minimized. Thus, in his “Black Magic Against White,” Ellmann skews
the time-line of Crowley’s life in order to lead readers to the conclusion that Yeats (in 1900)
was responding directly to a persona Crowley did not adopt until 1919.58 In this way Yeats
became the so-called “white magician” of the Golden Dawn and Crowley the “black.”
Admittedly, in attempting to deal impartially with Yeats’s involvement in occultism
and the Golden Dawn, Ellmann faced formidable challenges: diffusing as much as possible those contemporaries who saw Yeats’s “hobby” as an irrational embarrassment, and
distancing the Nobel laureate from potential allegations of Satanism or “black magic.”
Indeed, Crowley was still alive, and infamous, when Ellmann was gathering data for The
Man and the Masks, likewise Crowley’s reputation as created by Lord Beaverbrook.59 The
upshot is that today, despite the potential utility of his technical papers, Crowley himself
is almost universally and unquestioningly vilified and his work summarily rejected by
association even in the primary editions of Yeats’s works. A prime example: in the notes
to volume 2 of the Collected Letters, Kelly, Gould, and Toomey have no trouble asserting
that “Crowley’s mistresses were typically subjected to beatings, drugs, and ‘sex magic,’”
and report that Yeats described Crowley to fellow initiate Arthur Machen (as recorded in
Things Near and Far) as “a fiend in human form…a man who hung up naked women in
cupboards by hooks which pierced the flesh of their arms” (CL2 523–24 n10). They fail to
inform readers that Crowley published a substantially different although perhaps no less
implausible account of this incident in “At the Fork of the Roads.”60 They do not reveal
that the location where the incident purportedly occurred was being shared at the time by
Allan Bennett, whom Yeats invokes without rancor in his introduction to A Vision (1925).
Nor do they feel it necessary to note that Machen himself says, “I can by no means go bail
for the actuality of any of the misdeeds charged against him.”61
In light of the above: What can the extant Golden Dawn documents and Aleister
Crowley’s exegetical work on the same subjects tell readers about A Vision, its system,
and its esoteric context that is not already evident from the dazzling panoply of detail
provided by Yeats himself? How can the esoteric components or doctrines that probably
mean nothing to the reader (but still speak of “hidden things” [CW4 40; E&I 51]) be
interpolated, divined, or recognized as such—especially if they are unique to Yeats’s own
interpretation of the Golden Dawn’s Cabala?
Speaking generally, Crowley notes that an Adeptus Exemptus 7°=4▫ must “prepare
and publish a thesis setting forth His knowledge of the Universe, and his proposals for
its welfare and progress. He will thus be known as the leader of a school of thought.”62 A
Vision certainly fits this broad description. Furthermore, sounding very much like Yeats’s
assertions in “Is the Order of R.R. & A.C. to remain a Magical Order?” (YGD 267),
Crowley goes on to observe that “He will have attained all but the supreme summits of
meditation, and should be already prepared to perceive that the only possible course for
him is to devote himself utterly to helping his fellow creatures.” Moreover, in order to attain the next initiation into the 8°=3▫ “Grade of Magister Templi, he must perform Two
Tasks; the emancipation from Thought by putting each idea against its opposite, and
refusing to prefer either; and the consecration of himself as a pure vehicle for the influence
of the Order”—that is, the Golden Dawn’s Secret Chiefs—“to which he aspires.”63
Interestingly, Crowley also has something to say about Yeats’s composition of his memoirs, begun in 1914, and particularly A Vision’s direct antecedent Per Amica Silentia Lunae,
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Yeats’s “spiritual history” (AVB 9). “It is absolutely essential,” Crowley tells his students, “to
begin a magical diary, and keep it up daily. You begin by an account of your life, going back
even before your birth to your ancestry.…[Y]ou must find an answer to the question: ‘How
did I come to be in this place at this time, engaged in this particular work?’…[T]his will
start you on the discovery of who you really are, and eventually lead you to your recovering the memory of previous incarnations.”64 Logically, using this type of self-analysis (and
perhaps astrology) readers can place themselves within the system, much as Yeats claims
in Per Amica Silentia Lunae that “When I think of any great poetical writer of the past…I
comprehend, if I know the lineaments of his life, that the work is the man’s flight from his
entire horoscope, his blind struggle in the network of the stars” (CW5 6; Myth 328).
In Crowley’s terminology, this knowledge of “who you really are” is the True Will.
It is the adept’s task to discover and follow his or her True Will, clearly differentiating it
from the limitations imposed on the individual by nature and others. Although it does not
function exactly like Will in A Vision, Crowley’s concept nevertheless seems close to what
Owen Aherne calls the law of his being, which he could “only express or fail to express”
(M2005 198–99; Myth 305). Florence Farr, too, opines that “The Man who cannot ‘be
Himself ’ must be melted down in the casting-ladle of Phtha [Ptah]. The artist-craftsman
of the Gods will disperse the elemental material which in its present combination cannot, and will not, be regenerated; he bides his time for a happier moment of operation.”65
Clearly, there are similarities and curious resonances. If their specific magical ideologies
were different, their general cabalistic understanding and summary conclusions, unsurprisingly, seem almost identical.
The surviving quires of the Vision Papers, too, indicate that the Golden Dawn was
never far from Yeats’s mind, from start to finish. The automatic script and the Sleep and
Dream Notebooks are littered with allusions to the Order and its teachings—many indexed, although by no means all.66 Certainly some references are only incidental and
passing (YVP1 64; YVP2 194–95). Many are glaringly incomplete. For example, Yeats
seems not to have preserved notes of his follow-up actions regarding calling up spirits
and undertaking meditations (YVP1 119, 208). These lacunae might be explained by the
fact that Yeats and his wife shared a common esoteric understanding and did not need to
record specifics about their routine practices. Equally, this material may have been part
of the 25% of the primary documents that have gone missing over the years (YVP1 11).
However, it is clear that the Yeatsian system is merely a subset of the Golden Dawn’s
larger cabalistic matrix. From the very beginning Yeats attempted to elucidate the phasal
symbolism using the Order’s cabalistic symbolism. He diagramed the Phases as if they
were part of the Tree of Life, imposing the lightning flash signifying the divine influx onto
their circle (YVP1 205). Somewhat unsuccessfully, he attempted to correlate the germs
of the system with other “order attribution[s],” including the ten sephiroth and their implicit cross-correspondences (YVP1 280).67 On April 14, 1919, one finds references to an
“evocation of the higher self ” related to the Inner Order Rose Cross lamen (YVP2 247).
Currently, there is no other source other than Crowley’s texts that detail and explain these
particulars as they were understood by the original Golden Dawn adepts.68
One wishes that it were possible to compare the Vision Papers with the records of other, similar magical endeavors by Yeats’s fellow adepts, or even Yeats’s notes on the numerous experiments alluded to in technical articles such as “Invoking the Irish Fairies” (CW9
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182–84; UP1 245–47). One certainly could attempt a comparative methodological reading using some of Crowley’s records—particularly with an eye toward understanding the
typical cabalistic / Golden Dawn exegetical techniques that Crowley employed, as well as
the precautionary measures he took against potential “frustration” that Yeats seems to have
neglected. Detailed examples are found in Crowley’s Cairo Working of 1904, Amalantrah
Working of 1918, Bartzabel Working of 1910, Ab-ul-Diz Working of 1911, Paris Working of 1914, and the Enochian visions of 1900 and 1909 recorded in “The Vision and
the Voice.”69 In the last, particularly, Crowley’s explanation of the Call of the Fifth Aethyr
has several close connections with Yeats’s explanation of his Archer Vision. Unfortunately,
the original Golden Dawn records are apparently either lost or unavailable, and a detailed
exposition of the methodological development of Yeats’s system using Crowley’s comparative examples is beyond the scope of the current project. I would merely note that, except
perhaps in “The Phases of the Moon,” the phasal system as published in A Vision B—what
Yeats felt he could disclose to the public (L 916)—functions alike for all, initiate and layman. Thus, one can hardly call it “magical” or esoteric in se.
Curiously, although Yeats publically describes a system that seems to function entirely
for the eventual pleasure and liberation of the soul, I would point out that A Vision’s apparently exclusive focus on the soul is at odds with Yeats’s passing remarks in the introductory material, likewise his insistence on a resolution of the body-soul dilemma in the later
poetic corpus: particularly in “Dialogue of Self and Soul,” “Among School Children,” and
especially “Vacillation,” wherein the body is apparently wrong about the nature of death,
and the soul does not have to suffer “remorse,” literally “being chewed up again,” during
incarnation.
I would argue for two related concepts. This general purpose that Yeats fails to define
must be the main esoteric component of the text: its pragmatic use within the Golden
Dawn’s own largely unstated “magical” objectives, particular to the tasks of the Inner Order adepts who lacked practical instruction for the highest grades of the R.R. and A.C.,
and intelligible for anyone with a shared cabalistic understanding and degree of initiation.
Interestingly, the only part of the system that seems not to function “in so far as a man is
like all other men” (CW5 28; Myth 361) is what Graham Hough calls the system’s “joker”:
escape from the restrictions of the system itself.70 Furthermore, I interpolate that the nature of this escape is what is unique to Yeats’s understanding of the Cabala, his answer to
the question of whether an adept could attain initiation into the Third Order while still
in the body, a question that he raises but leaves unresolved in his 1901 pamphlet “Is the
Order R.R. & A.C. to remain a Magical Order?” (YGD 260, 261, 265).
In short, rather than a predestined process by which everyone must “gradually grow
better” through “innumerable lives” (VPl 935; CW2 725), the final escape of the Thirteenth Cone is available only to adepts at Phase 27 who have passed “very fully” through
at least the eight requisite phases—1, 4, 8, 12, 13, 15, 18, 19 (see YVP4 107)—and/
or otherwise managed to “exhaust their possible lives, to set, as it were, the hands of the
clock racing” (VPl 935; CW2 725). There, they can make the “final choice” to “pass from
the edge to the center” (YVP4 108 & 107) or, as Robartes puts it in “The Phases of the
Moon,” “Out of the up and down, the wagon-wheel” of antinomies (VP 377; CW1 168).
As for the average individual caught up in the winding path of nature, “No excellence of
life or latenes of cycle—unles there has been the final choice at 27—gives where there is no
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desire the emotion of good & evil” (YVP4 108). According to “The Phases of the Moon,”
“When all the dough has been so kneaded up / That it can take what form cook Nature
fancies / The first thin crescent is wheeled round once more (VP 377; CW1 168).
This willed movement seems equivalent to what a Golden Dawn adept would call initiation into the Third Order, a transition from the understanding of the sephirah Chesed
to Binah, across the abyss. It follows the cabalistic path from Yeats’s Archer Vision—the
straight (although reversed) spiritual inflow, shot from the “burning bow” Q-Sh-Th defined by paths 29, 31, and 32 on the Tree of Life. This inflow is described in Per Amica
Silentia Lunae as available only to saints or sages who are not caught up in the winding
path of nature and gradual perfection like other men and animals (CW5 28; Myth 361). It
is represented by the equilibrating Middle Pillar of the Tree of Life that directly connects
all three major levels of spiritual attainment. 71
What seems to be wholly unique to Yeats is not the idea that this final choice or
initiation leads to an ultimate Unity of Being of the individual and “God,” nor that it
represented a potential form of apotheosis. Most striking is that Yeats’s research and experiments clearly seem to have led him to the belief that this complete unity of being
would include the body, indeed could not exist “in separation from the body” (YVP2 41).
Yeats politely lies in his remarks on A Vision when he says that there was nothing in
the Cabala to help him (AVB 12). Certainly the germ of these historical gyres that mirror the spiritual evolution of individuals is to be found in Mathers’s assertion that “The
Life of Nations is like the Life of men” in Flying Roll X: “Concerning the Symbolism of
Self-Sacrifice and Crucifixion contained in the 5°=6▫ Grade.”72 Clearly adepts who wished
actually to use the system would first have to perform a sort of psychological introspection
in order to define their current phase of spiritual evolution, and this is in keeping with
the tenets of Moina Mathers’s Flying Roll XXI, “Know Thyself,” which explain how the
consciousness or soul of the adept from several levels on the Tree of Life are contacted and
combined as part of a necessary “development of the Man.”73
Further, we know that the Golden Dawn adepts, even the clergymen in J. W. BrodieInnes’s spin-off Cromlech Temple, espoused a belief in some sort of metempsychosis. It
is certain that Westcott borrowed some of his information from cabalistic sources that
claimed that no human soul would be redeemed until all souls had been purified and perfected. As he says in “An Introduction to The Study Of The Kabalah”: “when all the preexistent Souls who have been incarnated here have arrived at perfection, the Evil Angels
are also to be raised, and all lives will be merged into The Deity by the Kiss of Love from
the Mouth of the Holy One, and the Manifested Universe shall be no more, until again
vivified by the Divine FIAT.”74
Furthermore, we know that Yeats entered the Golden Dawn with the object of discovering the history of the soul (CW13 liv–lv; AVA xi). We know that the founders, drawing on many different schools of Cabala, taught that the spiritual constitution of a human
being was made up of at least four distinct principles: the Nephesh (the animating “animal
soul” of the passions and senses), the Ruach (or intellectual soul of one’s thoughts, mind,
and reason), the Neshamah (the truly immortal spiritual soul that connects an individual
in incarnation with the highest part of the divine spark, or Yechidah). All three of these
existed during incarnation within the Guph, or physical body, which Westcott nevertheless describes as a spiritual principle, however mortal. As in A Vision, the three spiritual
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components have a divided existence during life and the potential for continued separate
existence after death.
At death, “according to the Kabalah, the visible material body, the Guph, decays, and
the Animal aspect of the soul, the Nephesh, only gradually fades away from it: the Ruach,
the Human aspect, passes away from the Assiatic plane, and the Neshamah, the spiritual
soul, returns to the Treasury of Heaven, to the Gan Oidin, or of Paradise, perfected to a
Spiritual world beyond the plane of re-birth.” If the soul is condemned, it travels to “GaiHinnom, or hell, for a period of punishment before the next incarnation; if approved,
the Soul passes to an Oidin or Heaven. In the end of the present manifestation of the
Universe, all souls will have become perfected by suffering, have been blessed in Paradise,
and will be in reunion with the God from Whom they came forth.”75
It was the task of a Golden Dawn adept to bring the disparate parts of his or her soul
into perfect unity. One could certainly say that the degree of union hypothetically mirrors
the degree of initiation, the most important step being arguably the Adeptus Minor 5°=6▫
degree in which the aspirant swears: “I will from this day forward apply myself unto the
Great Work, which is so to purify and exalt my spiritual Nature that with the Divine Aid
I may at length attain to be more than human, and thus gradually rise and unite myself
to my higher and divine Genius.”76 This entity was equated to the Augoeides of Iamblichus, the Daemon of the Gnostics, and the Holy Guardian Angel from The Sacred Magic
of Abra-Melin the Mage.77 Florence Farr’s commentary indicates that the Augoeides was
actually treated as the sum of the various aspects of the soul equilibrated such that “the
whole being became a luminous Khou or Shining Body of super-human potency.” The
adept, in other words, “became in the eyes of the Egyptians, Osirified. That is to say, a
Microprosopus, or Perfect copy of the Macroprosopus.”78
On the other hand, the Golden Dawn did not seem to provide any formulaic method
for achieving this aim. Moina Mathers described the accomplishment of “real Initiation”
when
the You in [the quasi-sephirah] Daath (the seat of the Spiritual Consciousness)
[astride the cabalistic Abyss between Chesed and Binah] have allied yourself to
the You in [the sephirah] Tiphereth (the seat of the Human Consciousness) and
to the You in [the sephirah] Kether (the seat of the Divine Consciousness) and
from thence the Kether sending rays downwards; from it to the Daath, from
Daath to Tiphereth and from thence to [the sephirah] Yesod, which is the seat of
the Automatic Consciousness.
This combination must have taken place with the consent of the Lower Will
(in Tiphereth) as being the Human Will.79
Rather glibly, she recommends that every Adeptus Minor should “strive to begin the practice of such an operation.”80 Crowley would later maintain that “It is impossible to lay
down precise rules by which a man may attain to the knowledge and conversation of His
Holy Guardian Angel; for that is the particular secret of each one of us; a secret not to be
told or even divined by any other, whatever his grade.”81
One might say that the Golden Dawn documents focus on the product rather than
the process of initiation. The promised product, however, was certainly enough to keep
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
324
Yeats laboring for decades over the open book that Michael Robartes left: a glorified body
with the
apparent solidity of the ordinary body, and the faculties of the Spirit body. Because if you can once get the great force of the Highest [Yechidah] to send its
ray clean down through the Neschamah into the mind, and thence, into your
physical body, the Nephesch would be so transformed as to render you almost
like a God walking on this Earth.82
Another possibility, as explained in the lecture on “The Task undertaken by the Adeptus
Minor,” is that “the Higher Genius shall descend into the Kether of the Man, bringing
with him the tremendous illumination of his Angelic Nature; and the man shall become
what was said of Enoch: “And Chanokh made himself to walk for ever close with the essence of the Elohim, and he existed not apart, seeing that the Elohim took possession of
his being.”83
I think that Yeats took these esoteric assertions at face value. At least, I see no evidence
that he did not. As a child he may have believed in the possibility of a bodily resurrection
or assumption only at the emotional level. However, as an adult who spent decades practicing magic, this childhood belief was clearly transformed intellectually as the emotional
and intellectual “souls” were brought into harmony. Thus his unique system is merely
“now an interpretation, now an enlargement of the folk-lore of the villages” (CW13 liv;
AVA xi).
As evidenced in “Vacillation,” he came to accept, and adapt, “miracles of the saints”:
the body of Saint Teresa lying undecayed in the tomb, “bathed in miraculous oil” (VP
503; CW1 256), likewise the possibility of bodily immortality for modern adepts, modern
saints, like bodies of ancient priests and initiates, scooped out by Egyptian embalmers to
act as talismans, that sit down nightly in their tombs, their component souls reunited.
Elsewhere in “Vacillation” Yeats asks one of his hallmark rhetorical questions using the
persona of The Heart, the Ab, that in Egyptian mythology links the Ka soul with the
physical body: “What theme had Homer but original sin?” (VP 503; CW1 256). Any
classicist would answer without thinking, “Arete: human excellence, living up to one’s full
potential.” This, I judge, is related to the distinction that Yeats draws in the automatic
script between the “perfect man” being not only “complete” but also “perfected” (YVP1
280). Finally, in his introductory letter to Ezra Pound Yeats declares, “I send to you the
introduction to a book which will, when finished, proclaim a new divinity.” In substance,
Yeats relates this being to two opposing paradigms from previous ages: Oedipus, who sank
down into the earth, and Christ, who “went into the abstract sky”—in both cases, “soul
and body” (AVB 27).
To sum up: the above barely exposes the esoteric subtext of the System. Like Yeats,
I have hinted at but said very little about those parts of A Vision and the Vision Papers
that relate to sexual love and the creation of the Irish avatar. There remains the theological approach suggested by Yeats’s repeated references to a mythical Syriac original for his
doctrines, also the place of the escape within the context of The Resurrection. Certainly
there are innumerable methodological details to be followed up, countless technical details to be explored and accounted for. Hopefully, however, the above serves to elucidate
Esotericism and Escape
325
Robartes’s assertion that while the soul may disappear in God, death alone “cannot solve
the antinomy” (AVB 52) and points to a rose for Yeats’s metaphors that heretofore have
been restricted to “specialists only” (L 700).
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, trans. Robert Brain (London: Routledge, 2001), 32.
Ibid., 29. It is important to note that Yeats was not exactly the “white magician”—a term that is more from
the realm of pop culture than otherwise—depicted in much of the early secondary criticism. Compare
the accounts in Edith Young, Inside Out (London: Routledge, 1971), 7; “The Sorcerers” (M2005 24–26;
Myth 37–40); Deirdre Toomey, “Strange Experiences in Pembroke Road” (YA2 [1997] 303–318). See also
Gerald Yorke’s notes regarding Yeats’s admission of work with the sigils of the seventy-two goetic demons
in trans. S. L. MacGregor Mathers, ed. Aleister Crowley, The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King
(Clavicula Salomonis Regis) (Foyers: Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth, 1904), facsimile of
editor’s copy with marginalia reproduced ([Nottingham]: Hell Fire Club Books, [2009]), 51.
K. G. W. Cross, “The Fascination of What’s Difficult: A Survey of Yeats Criticism and Research,” in In Excited Reverie: A Centenary Tribute to William Butler Yeats, ed. A. Norman Jeffares and K. G. W. Cross (New
York: Macmillan, 1965), 327. Yeats’s most pointed response to his detractors is clearly stated in his 1892
letter to John O’Leary (CL1 302–4; L 210–11), resurfacing thematically much later in his 1934 poem, “A
Prayer for Old Age.”
W. Wynn Westcott, Rosicrucians, Past and Present, at Home and Abroad (privately printed, 1913; Kila, MT:
Kessinger, 1996), 6. This document is also available in ed. R. A. Gilbert, The Magical Mason: Forgotten
Hermetic Writings of William Wynn Westcott, Physician and Magus, (Wellingborough, Northamptonshire:
Aquarian Press, 1983); however, the source used by Gilbert lacks elements that appear in other offprints
(see also the Holmes 1989 unpaginated version, [6]), including that cited here, which closes what would
be the first (incomplete) paragraph on page 46 of Gilbert’s edition with the following: “The tenets of this
work are closely approximate to those of the earliest of the followers of Christian Rosencreuz, whose name
was probably a mystic title, motto or synonym, and not a family cognomen: ‘Christian’ referring to the
general theological tendency, and ‘Rosenkreuz’ to the Cross of Suffering whose explanation and key may
need a Rose or secret explanation.”
Kathleen Raine, “Yeats, the Tarot and the Golden Dawn,” in Yeats the Initiate (Savage, MD: Barnes and
Noble; Mountrath, Laois: Dolmen Press; London: George Allen & Unwin, 1986), 177.
Admittedly, George Yeats never belonged to the original, pre-1900 “Golden Dawn” proper. However, for
simplicity’s sake throughout this essay I use “Golden Dawn” as a general descriptive term defining a group of
temples and individuals, both before and after the schism of 1900, adhering to the cabalistic ideology, methods, and objectives originally propagated by founders Wynn Westcott and especially MacGregor Mathers.
Justification for this statement is found in the otherwise inexplicable appearance (during the initiation ceremony that leads to Robartes’s “death”) of the sephirah Binah personified as “an immortal august woman,
who had black lilies in her hair, and…a love like the love that breathed upon the waters” (M2005 190; Myth
289–90). See also Yeats’s cabalistic explication of Robartes in the notes to The Wind Among the Reeds (VP 803).
See C. Nicholas Serra, “Crowley, Continuity, and Qabalah: Yeats’s Over-System in ‘The Two Trees,’ 1892
and 1929,” Yeats Eliot Review 15, no. 3 (Summer 1998), 33–44.
For example: “I am told to give Phases 1, 8, 15, 22 a month apiece…” (AVB 196) or “My imagination was
for a time haunted…and it seemed to me…” (AVB 214).
As he commented to Edith Shackleton Heald in a letter of February 21, 1938: “I have always deliberately
left out this explaining” (L 906).
Cf. Yeats’s parallel treatment of the body in terms of the historical phases as well as the genesis of the “Supernatural Songs” (L 823–24).
Ellic Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical Order (1887–1923)
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972); Francis King, Ritual Magic In England (London: Neville Spearman, 1970); Israel Regardie, My Rosicrucian Adventure (Chicago: Aries Press, 1936); A. E. Waite, Shadows
of Life and Thought (London: Selwyn and Blount, 1938); Inquire Within [Christina Mary Stoddart], LightBearers of Darkness (London: Boswell, 1930).
A. E. Waite, Inner and Outer Order Initiations of the Holy Order of the Golden Dawn (Burnaby, BC: Ishtar,
2005); Pat Zalewski, Inner Order Teachings of the Golden Dawn (Loughborough, Leicestershire: Thoth,
326
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
2006); Ithell Colquhoun, Sword of Wisdom: MacGregor Mathers and the Golden Dawn (New York: G. P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1975); Mary K. Greer, Women of the Golden Dawn: Rebels and Priestesses (Rochester, VT:
Park Street Press, 1995); R. A. Gilbert, A. E. Waite: Magician of Many Parts (Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Aquarian, 1987); Alan Richardson, Priestess: The Life and Magic of Dion Fortune (Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Aquarian, 1987).
See, for example, King’s critique of Kathleen Raine’s assertions in S. L MacGregor Mathers et al., Astral
Projection, Ritual Magic and Alchemy, ed. Francis King (1971; Rochester, VT: Destiny, 1987), 195–196.
This book was reissued in 1997 by the same publishers under the title Ritual Magic of the Golden Dawn.
Mary K. Greer and Darcy Kuntz, The Chronology of the Golden Dawn: Being the Chronological History of a
Magical Order (Golden Dawn Studies No 11) (Edmonds, WA: Holmes Publishing, 1999).
A. E. Waite, Annus Mirabilis Redivivus (manuscript diary of 1902–03, 10 October), quoted by R. A.
Gilbert in “William Wynn Westcott and the Esoteric School of Masonic Research” at www.mastermason.
com/luxocculta/westcott.htm#_ftn7, retrieved 24 June, 2009.
William Wynn Westcott, An Introduction to the Study of the Kabalah (London: J. M. Watkins, 1910), 66;
also available at http://www.hermetics.org/pdf/Westcott.Kabalah.pdf.
F. L. Gardner, Catalogue Raisonné of Works on the Occult Sciences, 3 vols. (London: Privately Printed, 1903,
1911, 1912); F. G. Irwin, The Grimoire of Pope Honorius (n.p. : Society of Esoteric Endeavour, n.d.); Frederick Hockley, A Manual of a Rosicrucian Philos[ophus] (n.p. : Hell Fire Club, n.d.).
Westcott, Rosicrucians, Past and Present, at Home and Abroad, 4 & 6. Cf. ed. Gilbert, The Magical Mason,
43 & 46; as noted earlier (n4), Gilbert’s text omits elements found elsewhere, here the end of a sentence:
“…have always been Christians, but perhaps not of an orthodox type, for there has always been a tendency in
the teachings toward Gnostic ideals” (omitted text in italic).
S. L. MacGregor Mathers et al., Astral Projection, 125.
Ithell Colquhoun, Sword of Wisdom, 20.
This faction also included Reverend A. W. Ayton, Marcus Blackden, and in particular Evelyn Underhill,
whose spiritual advisor was Baron von Hügel, as referenced in “Vacillation.”
Ithell Colquhoun, Sword of Wisdom, 238.
Iamblichus, The Mysteries, as cited by Florence Farr, Egyptian Magic, (1896; Kila, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 1996), 16.
Karl Von Eckartshausen, The Cloud Upon The Sanctuary, trans. Isabelle de Steiger (London: William Rider
& Son, 1909). This edition also contains introductory material by Golden Dawn Adepts A. E. Waite and
J. W. Brodie-Innes. See Mem 281 for Yeats’s comments about Blavatsky’s “masters.”
Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn: An Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order
of the Golden Dawn, 4 vols. (Chicago: Aries Press, 1937–1940).
Israel Regardie, What You Should Know about the Golden Dawn (1936; Phoenix, AZ: New Falcon: 1983),
101 (1936 title: My Rosicrucian Adventure).
Israel Regardie, What You Should Know about the Golden Dawn, 120.
Israel Regardie, What You Should Know about the Golden Dawn, 41.
Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn 1:86–87; also The Golden Dawn [Revised and Enlarged], 4 vols. in 1 (St.
Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 1982), 44.
Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn, 4:11; also The Golden Dawn [Revised and Enlarged] 456.
Aleister Crowley, ed., The Equinox: The Review of Scientific Illuminism, Vol. 1, 10 nos. (London: Simpkin,
Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1909–1913).
As helpful as the NLI manuscript staff have been, they have politely declined access to those notebooks
incorporated into the long-running Yeats exhibit.
The surviving papers from Farr’s Sphere Group, which caused so much dissension, are now available in
Florence Farr, The Enochian Experiments of the Golden Dawn, ed. Darcy Kuntz (Edmonds, WA: Holmes
Publishing, 1996).
Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, 29.
Yeats calls Crowley “mad,” “bitter,” “violent,” and “absurd” because of his theatrical behavior toward the
London adepts. Crowley’s diaries reveal that Mathers (whom Yeats describes in regretful but glowing tones)
was the primary orchestrator of this symbolic drama. Indeed, the events were only slightly more outré than
any sanctioned Golden Dawn activity, notable only because they took place in the public road (L 340,
341–2; CL2 514–16, 518). For Crowley’s diaries, see Aleister Crowley, “Primary Sources: A. C. Inspects
the G ... D ... ,” Thelema Lodge Calendar (August 1993), n.p. but as 5–9; also available online at www.
billheidrick.com/tlc1993/tlc0893.htm#ps.
Esotericism and Escape
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
327
Cf. Jack Yeats’s description of Crowley, LTWBY2 309–10, and Yeats’s reply, L 590.
Ritual of the Mystery of the Judgment of the Soul, trans. Marcus Blackden (London: Bernard Quaritch for
the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, [1914].)
Aleister Crowley, Equinox 1, no. 3 (1910): 330 and 321.
Crowley’s legal name was Edward Alexander Crowley, which he informally changed to mirror Shelley.
See H. R. Wakefield, “He Cometh and He Passeth By” in They Return at Evening (New York: D. Appleton,
1928), 64–109. The Crowley-inspired magician Oscar Clinton is connected “with the nineties, raptures
and roses, absinthe and poses; and the other Oscar” (69).
Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography, ed. John Symonds and Kenneth
Grant (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 73.
Likewise, in Crowley’s 1917 roman à clef, Moonchild (published 1929), Yeats is lampooned as the “cadaverous Protestant-Irishman named Gates,” “highly skilled in black magic in his own way,” possessed of “real
original talent, with now and then a flash of insight which came close to genius”—but also neglected teeth
and “a habit of physical dirt.” Aleister Crowley, Moonchild (London: Mandrake Press, 1929), 152.
John Symonds, The Great Beast: The Life of Aleister Crowley (London: Rider and Company, 1951), 20.
Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, 114.
Compare Crowley’s recommendations for learning the Cabala in “Magick Without Tears [unabridged
digital typescript],” ed. Karl Germer (Ordo Templi Orientis: 13 November, 1988), Introduction: Letter F,
Aug. 20, 1943. References point to chapter titles so as to correspond to the greatest degree possible with
the heavily abridged but more readily available text: Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears, ed. Israel Regardie (St Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 1973), as well as the much rarer Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears,
ed. Karl Germer (Hampton, NJ: Thelema Publishing, 1954). E-text is available at http://hermetic.com/
crowley/magick-without-tears/ .
Aleister Crowley, “Magick Without Tears,” Introduction: Letter F, Aug. 20, 1943.
Aleister Crowley, “Crowley Classics [Letter to Grady McMurtry 10 April, 1946]” in Thelema Lodge Newsletter, May 1993, n.p. but as 2, available online at www.billheidrick.com/tlc1993/tlc0593.htm .
Timothy d’Arch Smith, The Books of the Beast: Essays on Aleister Crowley, Montague Summers and Others
(London: Crucible Press, 1987), 15.
This in spite of the fact that Symonds himself describes the newspaper accounts of Crowley as “too sensational to believe, and too discursive to remember,” John Symonds, The Magic of Aleister Crowley (London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1958), 13. See also www.lashtal.com/nuke/module-subjects-listpages-subid-1.
phtml for a large archive of newspaper references relating to Crowley.
Three of the more recent are Lawrence Sutin’s Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 2000), Martin Booth’s A Magick Life: the Biography of Aleister Crowley (London: Hodder &
Stoughton, 2000), and Richard Kaczynski’s Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley (Tempe, AZ: New Falcon Publications, 2002). Additionally, for those interested in the specifics of the above-mentioned smear
campaign, I would recommend the Helios edition of P. R. Stephensen’s The Legend of Aleister Crowley
(Enmore, NSW: Helios & O.T.O. [Australia], 2007), which contains not only the original text unedited
by Israel Regardie, but a wealth of supplementary material, including a reprint of Norman Mudd’s “An
Open Letter to Lord Beaverbrook” in Crowley’s defense.
Jean Overton Fuller, The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg (London: W. H. Allen, 1965), 184–85.
Israel Regardie, What You Should Know about the Golden Dawn, 30.
Alan Richardson, Priestess, 117. See Dion Fortune, The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage (London:
William Rider, 1924).
Francis King, ed., The Secret Rituals of the O. T. O. (London: C. W. Daniel, 1973), 27.
Reproduced in facsimile in Lady Queenborough (Edith Starr Miller), Occult Theocrasy, 2 vols (France:
Privately Printed, 1933), 2:720ff.
See as an example the parallel arguments he makes in Aleister Crowley, The Banned Lecture: Gilles de Rais,
to Have Been Delivered before the Oxford University Poetry Society by Aleister Crowley, on the Evening of Monday, February 3rd, 1930 (Cincinnati: Black Moon Publishing, 1985).
Richard Ellmann, “Black Magic Against White,” Partisan Review 15, no. 9 (September 1948): 1049–1051.
Notes of his interview with Crowley from 25–26 June 1947 are published in ed. Warwick Gould, “‘Gasping on the Strand’: Richard Ellmann’s W. B. Yeats Notebooks,” YA16 (2005) at 352–55.
For example, when Crowley’s physician died within days of him, the Daily Express trumpeted, “Magician
Put Curse on Him” (4 December, 1947).
Aleister Crowley, Equinox 1, no. 1 (1909): 101–8.
328
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Arthur Machen, Things Near and Far (London: Martin Secker, 1926), 148.
Albeit in his own adaptation of the Golden Dawn, but for which he published so many of the primary
Order documents in the Equinox. Aleister Crowley, “One Star in Sight” in Magick in Theory and Practice
(Paris: Lecram Press, 1929), 236.
Ibid., 236–37.
Aleister Crowley, “Magick Without Tears,” Introduction: Letter A.
Florence Farr, Egyptian Magic, 6.
For example, the editors do not recognize “abyss” as a cabalistic symbol for the divide between the uppermost three sephiroth, and the rest of the Tree of Life (YVP1 257). However, Crowley notes: “It should
never be forgotten for a single moment that the central and essential work of the Magician is the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. Once he has achieved this he must
of course be left entirely in the hands of that Angel, who can be invariably and inevitably relied upon to
lead him to the further great step—crossing of the Abyss and the attainment of the grade of Master of the
Temple” (Magick Without Tears, Ch. 83).
Compare Arthur Machen’s rather dismissive description in Things Near and Far, 154.
Yeats even asked his communicators for advice regarding the problems that Christina Stoddart was having
with the adepti of the Amoun temple in the summer and fall of 1919 (YVP2 295–97, 442).
See Aleister Crowley, Equinox of the Gods chaps. 6–7 (see http://hermetic.com/crowley/equinox-of-thegods/index.html); Equinox 4, no. 2: The Vision & the Voice with Commentary and Other Papers (York Beach,
ME: Weiser, 1998); and Equinox 1, no. 5 (1911): supplement.
Graham Hough, The Mystery Religion of W. B. Yeats (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1984), 117.
Crowley has this to say on the same topic: “The Single Supreme Ritual…is the raising of the complete man
in a vertical straight line. Any deviation from this line tends to become black magic.…If the magician needs
to perform any other operation than this, it is only lawful in so far as it is a necessary preliminary to That
One Work” (Magick in Theory and Practice, 190).
S. L. MacGregor Mathers et al., Astral Projection, 136.
S. L. MacGregor Mathers et al., Astral Projection, 151.
William Wynn Westcott, An Introduction to the Study of the Kabalah (London: J. M. Watkins, 1910),
32–33.
Westcott, An Introduction to the Study of the Kabalah, 64–65.
Aleister Crowley, Equinox 1, no. 3 (1910): 214. This obligation is reiterated in several other instructional
documents, particularly Flying Roll XIX: “The Aims and Means of Adeptship” (S. L. MacGregor Mathers
et al, Astral Projection, 115–121).
See S. L. MacGregor Mathers, trans., The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage (Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Aquarian, 1985). Both Mathers and Crowley were fond of the Abramelin
system, perhaps because it provided a more objective and ready-made set of procedures by which to obtain
knowledge of and conversation with one’s “Holy Guardian Angel” than the original Golden Dawn papers.
It also provided a compendium of magic squares and associated formulae by which a large body of demons
could be evoked and compelled to serve the adept.
Florence Farr, Egyptian Magic, 11.
S. L. MacGregor Mathers et al., Astral Projection, 151.
Ibid., 151.
Aleister Crowley, “One Star in Sight” in Magick in Theory and Practice, 239. Cf. CW5 19; Myth 347–48.
S. L. MacGregor Mathers et al., Astral Projection, 136.
Aleister Crowley, Equinox 1, no. 2 (1909): 321. Most, if not all, members would have been familiar with
this passage from Genesis 5:24 in the King James translation: “And Enoch walked with God: and he was
not; for God took him.”
THE POLITICAL OCCULT: REVISITING FASCISM, YEATS AND A VISION
by Claire V. Nally
T
he two versions of A Vision (1925 and 1937) rather neatly coincide with Yeats’s
interest in authoritarian and proto-fascist policy, emerging most fully in his brief
support of the Irish Blueshirts in 1933. In terms of Yeats’s work, such an idea was
posited by George Orwell in January 1943: “Those who dread the prospect of universal
suffrage, popular education, freedom of thought, emancipation of women, will start off
with a predilection towards secret cults. There is another link between Fascism and magic
in the profound hostility of both to the Christian ethical code.”1 In fact, a number of
commentaries on Yeats’s political liaison with right-wing fanaticism have emerged since
Conor Cruise O’Brien’s “Passion and Cunning” in 1965.2 Seamus Deane has commented
that “Yeats’s occult belief passes into his social and political beliefs.”3 Paul Scott Stansfield
describes A Vision as “a deplorable venture”4 whilst Stephen Spender has suggested: “In
the minds of writers who thought that their first obligation in their art was to keep open
lines of communication with the dead, Fascism represented order, a return to the past
tradition, opposition to Communism and social decadence.”5 Of course, Yeats’s ventures
into otherworldly study were frequent and remained a constant throughout his life. In
Blood Kindred, W. J. McCormack suggests “underlying these interests and sympathies [in
On the Boiler] was an occult philosophy that endorsed the irrational.”6 Theodor Adorno
has also observed that “The appeal of anti-Semitism to insiders is its status as the ‘secret’
which explains everything and is available only to initiates. Like occultism and astrology,
anti-Semitism is a paranoid projection of the ‘semi-erudite.’”7
The nation and the occult coincide in Nazism in a way that, on the surface at least,
recalls Yeats’s conception of civilization in A Vision: Anthony Smith notes how “totalitarian controls and an almost ‘magical’ archaic symbolism transform nazism into a pseudomilitary-religious order, far removed from earlier nationalisms,”8 while in A Vision B, Yeats
claims “A civilisation is a struggle to keep self-control.…The loss of control over thought
comes towards the end; first a sinking in upon the moral being, then the last surrender,
the irrational cry, revelation—the scream of Juno’s peacock” (AVB 268).
Despite these initial comments, an attraction to or application of the occult does not
necessarily imply odious political affiliation. In the main, Yeats’s knowledge of fascism was
drawn from the Italian model, and indeed, many occultists register an important corrective to such generalizations: “under the influence of Annie Besant (future president of the
Theosophical Society), the society became closely identified with the cause of Indian nationalism. Besant herself was to be interned in India for activities relating to her support of
Indian Home Rule, and in 1917 was elected president of the Indian National Congress.”9
In fact, much of the anxiety about secret and/or occult societies in the early part of the
twentieth century was generated by a suspicion of their radicalism: “It is unnecessary to
enlarge at length on Mrs. Besant’s connexion with the seditious elements in this country
and in India.…[I]ndeed Mrs. Besant in her lectures on Liberty, Equality, Fraternity at the
Queen’s Hall in October [1919]…clearly indicated Socialism as the system of the coming
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
New Era.”10 Equally AE (George Russell) “saw in his commitment to the spiritual life a
sacred resolve to renounce all lesser concerns for the sake of universal welfare.”11 AE is a
good example of the complexity of occult politics. He was an expert mystic and a Theosophist, and supported the Irish co-operative movement, whilst he worked for impoverished
farmers in the west of Ireland as part of his office in the Irish Agricultural Organization
Society (he also contributed to The Irish Homestead, organ of the IAOS, becoming editor
in 1905). However, despite his center-left credentials, he did engage with Italian extreme
politics in his contribution to Odon Por’s book, Fascism (1923): “While Russell is often
regarded as the secular saint of the Irish literary movement, and his journalism as a bastion
of liberal tolerance, he too can be found positively responding to the appeal of fascism”
(BK 10). Maud Gonne and her daughter, along with Iseult’s husband Francis Stuart,
consistently supported the Blueshirts in Ireland and fascism abroad: along with Arthur
Griffiths, Gonne openly expressed anti-Semitic tendencies, especially in her support of the
anti-Dreyfusard cause in France (by contrast Yeats was Dreyfusard). She and Iseult were
suspected of harboring a German Nazi spy, Hermann Görtz (BK 21).12 However, Maud
Gonne left the Golden Dawn, suspecting it of Freemasonry and thus of British imperial
politics.13
In the 1937 version of A Vision, Michael Robartes draws a clear opposition between
authoritarian and democratic modes of government (necessarily abjuring the latter) which
emerge with the rotation of the opposing gyres. He also couches his appraisal in a rhetoric
of violence: “After an age of necessity, truth, goodness, mechanism, science, democracy,
abstraction, peace, comes an age of freedom, fiction, evil, kindred, art, aristocracy, particularity, war.…Love war because of its horror, that belief may be changed, civilisation
renewed.…Belief is renewed continually in the ordeal of death” (AVB 52–54). As Adorno
identifies, the authoritarian personality is given to desire for violence: “At the hub of the
fascist, anti-Semitic propaganda ritual is the desire for ritual murder.…The idea of actual
shedding of blood is advocated as necessary.…Murder is invested with the halo of a sacrament.”14 This is of course, not exclusive to fascist agendas (the notion of blood sacrifice
was also prevalent in Pearse’s revolutionary ethos). However, there is also a moral judgment encoded in Robartes’s statement: he specifically states that the first democratic age
represents the “good,” whilst the second aristocratic age signifies “evil.” Of course, there
is always the possibility of Blakean inversion, but Aherne questions Robartes in reply that
“Even if the next divine influx be to kindreds why should war be necessary? Cannot they
develop their characteristics in some other way?” (AVB 53). Again, Yeats refuses to commit
to the fascist ideology in totality. At a later point in the main text of A Vision, a similar
formula is repeated: “A primary dispensation looking beyond itself towards a transcendent power is dogmatic, levelling, unifying, feminine, humane, peace its means and end;
an antithetical dispensation obeys imminent power, is expressive, hierarchical, multiple,
masculine, harsh, surgical” (AVB 263). Notably here, the judgment on the antithetical
dispensation is one of approval. The oppositional model with its approbation of violence
emerges in part from Yeats’s reading of ancient Greek philosophy, especially Empedocles:
“There is a double becoming of perishable things and a double passing away.…And these
things never cease, continually changing places, at one time all uniting in one through
Love, at another each borne in different directions by the repulsion of Strife.”15 Undoubtedly Yeats was urging in the antithetical dispensation with a scarcely suppressed sense of
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satisfaction: “when the new gyre begins to stir, I am filled with excitement” (AVB 300).
In fact, Yeats had been publicly advocating anti-democratic politics prior to the Blueshirt
episode in 1933. In 1924, before the publication of the first version of A Vision, he told
an interviewer: “Authoritarian government is certainly coming, if for no other reason than
that the modern State is so complex that it must find some kind of expert government—a
government firm enough, tyrannical enough, if you will, to spend years in carrying out
its plans” (“From Democracy to Authority,” UP2 435). He expressed open admiration of
Mussolini, citing him as “a great popular leader [who] has said to an applauding multitude
‘We will trample upon the decomposing body of the Goddess of Liberty.’”16 Again we see
the vacillation between two political polarities.
In A Vision B, Yeats has provided a number of references to fascist and proto-fascist
authors with whom he claimed an ideological kinship. The first of these is Oswald Spengler, about whose book, The Decline of the West (published in German in July 1918), Yeats
stated: “though founded upon a different philosophy, [it] gives the same years of crisis and
draws the same general conclusions” (AVB 11). He also claimed that “our thoughts run
together…I discovered for myself Spengler’s main source in Vico, and that half the revolutionary thoughts of Europe are a perversion of Vico’s philosophy” (AVB 260–1). What
Spengler and Vico share with Yeats is a cyclical philosophy. In The Decline of the West,
there is a persistent fixation on the degeneracy of Western culture, and the emergence of
an antithetical opposite:
A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the protospirituality…of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the
formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It
blooms on the soil of an exactly-definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound.…Every Culture stands in a deeply symbolical, almost in a mystical, relation to the Extended, the space, in which and through which it strives to
actualize itself. The aim once attained—the idea, the entire content of possibilities, fulfilled and made externally actual—the Culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes Civilization.…
This—the inward and outward fulfilment, the finality, that awaits every living
Culture—is the purport of all the historic “declines,” among them that decline
of the Classical which we know so well and fully, and another decline, entirely
comparable to it in course and duration, which will occupy the first centuries of
the coming millennium but is heralded already and sensible in and around us
to-day—the decline of the West.17
Indeed the historical cycle is heavily derivative of Vico, who claimed that there exists
“the ideal eternal history, through which the history of all nations must in time pass. For
whenever nations emerge from their savage, ferocious, and brutish ages, and are civilized
by religion, they begin, develop, and end in the same stages.”18 For Yeats and Spengler,
what marks the cyclical mode of thinking is a regressive and anti-Marxist vision of history
(though founded upon a different philosophy). Aligning the history of decay and renewal
with Spengler’s palingenesis reveals a common ground with the politics of Nazi Germany:
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
332
the myth of renewal, of rebirth. Etymologically, the term of “palingenesis,” deriving from palin (again, anew) and genesis (creation, birth) refers to the sense of
a new start or of regeneration after a phase of crisis or decline which can be associated just as much with mystical (for example the Second Coming) as secular
realities (for example the New Germany).…[It is] a generic term for the vision
of a radically new beginning which follows a period of destruction or perceived
dissolution.19
Of course Spengler’s philosophy, and especially his critical approach to liberalism, was coopted by the Nazis, and Spengler himself had voted for the National Socialists in the 1932
election (he had flown a swastika flag outside his house in Munich). After The Decline of
the West, he wrote The Hour of Decision in 1934, which, whilst criticizing National Socialist policy, also maintained a profoundly offensive approach to what he perceived to be
“the Coloured Peril” threatening modern Europe. W. J. McCormack suggests that Yeats’s
recognition of Spengler reveals his own thought to be “irrational, elitist, catastrophic and
occult” (BK 245). However, Spengler also disagreed with Nazi racial policy and anti-Semitism, for which he was eventually ostracized, whilst The Hour of Decision was proscribed
in Nazi Germany. Such comparisons between authors are never as simple as they appear.
In many ways Spengler is irredeemable, but like the Italian anti-fascist Benedetto Croce,
he is both implicated and distanced from the official regime.20 Croce was from a conservative and aristocratic background, greatly influenced by Vico. He initially welcomed Italian
fascism and problematically, he “includes Jewish culture in the camp of those cultures
incompatible with European ideas.”21 However, he mounted a vigorous campaign against
the far right in Italy in 1925 with the publication of his manifesto. This sought to counter Giovanni Gentile’s “Manifesto degli intellettuali del fascismo” (or “Manifesto of Fascist
Intellectuals”), which was written at the request of Mussolini and included Pirandello and
Marinetti among its signatories.22 Croce was also on the index of texts proscribed by the
Vatican, and endured fascist censorship. Yeats refers to him in A Vision in his refutation of
Hegel (AVB 72n; see also 82) and both share a rejection of the latter philosopher’s progressive idea of history.
An affirmation of cyclical history does not necessarily condemn Yeats to pro-fascist
politics. In fact, the anti-fascist Carlo Levi employed cyclical theories of history as a “bulwark against the dangerous sedimentation of thought that had, for example, taken over
Italian liberalism, and could, in the worst of hypotheses pave the way for a new form of
fascism.”23 Here the Viconian cycles are employed as a counter to fascism. Like Nietzsche,
cyclical philosophy can be appropriated for dangerous and racially motivated politics, but
it is also possible to mobilize such historical thought against the far right. Certainly in
the 1920s, Yeats’s occult thought is not committed to far-right propaganda. In “Sailing to
Byzantium” Yeats does not subscribe to the cult of youth which emerged in Hitler’s regime
during that time: “That is no country for old men” (VP 407; CW1 197). Whether “that” is
Ireland or Europe, Yeats flies from a culture which reveres youth, to Byzantium. Interestingly too, Hitler’s Germany would forbid secret societies, including the Golden Dawn:
“[the] German occultist movement…flourished underground between c. 1920 and its
eventual destruction by the Nazis after 1933.…The Hermetische Orden der Goldenen
Dämmerung, i.e. the G.D., was on the Gestapo’s list of proscribed occult organisations.
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Although the order never existed in Germany they were taking no chances.”24 As René
Alleau has claimed, “The National Socialist party did not tolerate secret societies, because
it was itself a secret society, with its grand master, its racist gnosis, its rites and initiations.”25 Although themselves implicated in secrecy, the Nazis nonetheless considered the
Golden Dawn a threat, a competitor, rather than a buttress to their own ideology. The
Nazi proscription was mirrored by the Irish Blueshirts, who asserted that “Members of
secret societies would not be eligible for membership.”26 With his occult connections and
interests, this edict placed Yeats in a very ironic and compromised position as regards the
Blueshirt movement. Equally, at each juncture in the text of A Vision, contextual material
provides little conclusion in terms of a clear affiliation between Yeatsian occultism and
fascist tendencies.
Where the theories of Spengler and Yeats cohere most alarmingly with extremist
politics is in the concept of the strong leader figure. In The Decline of the West, Spengler
details the rise of Caesarism which marks the beginning of a historical change. He explains
that “By the term ‘Caesarism’ I mean that kind of government which, irrespective of any
constitutional formulation that it may have, is in its inward self a return to thorough
formlessness.…Real importance centred in the wholly personal power exercised by the
Caesar, or by anybody else capable of exercising it in his place” (DW2 431). The phrase
“irrespective of any constitutional formulation” suspiciously points to a supremacy of
the ruler against the legitimate authority of the individual as enshrined in instruments of
government. Spengler continues that,
the chaos [of the old order] gives forth a new and overpowering factor that
penetrates to the very elementals of Becoming—the Caesar-men. Before them
the [omnipotence of ] money collapses. The Imperial Age, in every Culture alike,
signifies the end of the politics of mind and money. The powers of the blood, unbroken bodily forces, resume their ancient lordship. “Race” springs forth, pure
and irresistible—the strongest win and the residue is their spoil. They seize the
management of the world, and the realm of books and problems petrifies or
vanishes from memory.…Once the Imperial Age has arrived, there are no more
political problems.… (DW2 431–32)
Yeats’s own political thought provides a useful comparison to this extract: “If any Government or party undertake this work it will need force, marching men.…There is no
such government or party today; should either appear I offer it…what remains to me of
life.”27 It is this desire for strong leadership which in an occult formula, develops into the
role of the avatar (in Hinduism, this is the descent of a deity from heaven to earth, and
Theosophy continues with this tradition). Yeats claimed of himself that he was “a forerunner of that horde that will some day come down the mountains” (L 873), referring
to those mysterious figures which reappear throughout the Vision Papers. Yeats initially
connects the avatar with AE’s characters of the same name: “The word ‘avatar’ being taken
from an old vision of Russells [sic] of a child seen rising up above Ben Bulben” (YVP3
83). Characteristically peculiar, the Yeatses believed that the avatar would be incarnated
in their first-born child, pointing to an early union of eugenical breeding, the search for
aristocratic lineage, and the occult (YVP1 17 & 25). The Vision Papers cite, “The child the
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W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
avatar the mountain the work” (YVP3 337), which relates to the fact that Yeats believed
AE’s story pointed to his own ancestors (YVP3 83). Yeats as a “fourth” generation figure in
the script is merely a “forerunner”: his child or children, of the fifth generation, will bring
forth the new regime.
It is this context in which Purgatory should be read (it was first published with On
the Boiler in 1939). The play was written with the Peacock stage in mind, testifying to
Yeats’s desire for an elite performance space. That Yeats said of the play that he “put there
[his] own conviction about this world and the next” (L 913) again reiterates the conjunction between the otherworld and the mundane sphere of politics. This is an analogy he
also makes in On the Boiler, with his comparison of arcane pursuit and pseudo-scientific
methodology: “Eugenical and psychical research are the revolutionary movements with
that element of novelty and sensation which sooner or later stir men to action” (CW5
238; Ex 437). Purgatory provided the poet with yet another scandal: Yeats’s purgatorial
belief system seemed heterodox to some members of the Catholic clergy.28 It is his eugenic
fantasy, focusing on the mésalliance between an Anglo-Irish woman and her groom which
produced the Old Man. In murdering his own son, he claims justification because “had
he grown up / He would have struck a woman’s fancy, / Begot, and passed pollution on”
(VPl 1049; CW2 543).29 Providing a direct contrast with the occult selective breeding of
the Yeatses in their quest to produce the avatar, the Old Man’s son represents the degeneration of the Anglo-Irish race: “Since about 1900 the better stocks have not been replacing
their numbers, while the stupider and less healthy have been more than replacing theirs.
Unless there is a change in the public mind every rank above the lowest must degenerate,
and, as inferior men push up into its gaps, degenerate more and more quickly” (CW5
229; Ex 423). As a counter to the degeneration of the nation, Yeats posits the Irish avatar.
Most worrying is the proto-fascist political inflection which this occult figure provides. It
relates to a solitary, independent and implicitly despotic leader, one who emerges from the
masses but is not of them: “New avatar is a person…a person born in many.…It is not a
doctrine” (YVP1 482). For Yeats, it pointed to a violent annunciation in history, providing close comparison in the script with the Sphinx, and thus with the poem, “The Second Coming.” Yeats asked in a script produced in Dublin on November 5 1918: “What
characteristic coming & present arises from position of new avatar between Christ and
Budha [sic]” (YVP2 111). The capacity of the avatar to be a precursor of a new mode of
government is one of its most marked aspects:
Will influence of Avatar be chiefly spread by geographical East
Yes
Will influence bring war in physical sense
No it will bring tyranny
Will it impose on the world by tyranny
Yes
Will that tyranny have behind it the masses or be against the masses
the masses against themselves
Do you look on a movement like that in Russia as the opposite principle to the
avatar or a part of his principle
preparatory only (YVP2 536–37)
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Yeats’s fear of communist Russia emerges here, and will be discussed further in the context of the Blueshirt movement. More important at this juncture, however, is how the
avatar suggests the advent of authoritarianism, and can also mark a new civilization in
“revelation by shock” (YVP2 469). The parallels with the poem “The Second Coming”
are clear: here the “rough beast” famously issues in “some revelation” (VP 402; CW1
189). The announcement of the new dispensation through the agency of the avatar is
also outlined in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” where “There lurches past, his great
eyes without thought / Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks, / That insolent
fiend Robert Artisson” (VP 433; CW1 214). Artisson was an evil spirit pursued in the
fourteenth century in Kilkenny, who attached himself to Lady Kyteler as an incubus,
and is the source of one of Ireland’s most infamous witchcraft cases. As Yeats makes
clear in the poem, the spirit required the sacrifice of the nine red cocks. Artisson signals
the emergence of raw, inhuman violence, but as Michael Tratner has pointed out, “the
fiend’s name suggests that he is the ‘artist’s son,’ that he represents the artist’s or poet’s
success in giving birth to a new leader, a new age.”30 As a form of genetic heritage, a
“son” or creation of Yeats’s, the vulgar ferocity of Artisson is also implicated in the idea
of the avatar.
The coming of the avatar is marked by “Bitterness…it is impervious to pity & amenable to passion and thought” (YVP3 335). There is always the revelation of the avatar
before a change of cycle: “Avatar influx always before…because one begins a cycle the
other ends it” and “The antithesis begets the avatar” (YVP1 467 and 481). The avatar
also points to a suppression of individual agency: “We are now approaching the avatar
& the opportunity of choice is smallest possible” (YVP1 486). Equally worrying, and
partly demonstrated by the Yeatses’ fascination with their children as avatars, is the
potential for a racial discourse: “each nation must have its avatar in the time to come”
(YVP2 155). The national avatar is closely linked to the more general idea of eternal
recurrence: “nations also were sealed at birth with a character derived from the whole,
and had, like individuals, their periods of increase and decrease” (AVB 253).31 Such
ethnicity is also posited in AE’s novella “The Avatars” (dedicated to Yeats on its 1933
publication): he suggests the purpose of an avatar is “to reveal the spiritual character of
a race to itself ” (DOTG 542–43). In this way, Yeats’s occult nationalism can be related
to fascist racialism: “nationalism is the real driving force behind Nazism, as it is with
fascism in general. The precondition of the existence of a higher racial community is
not the state but the nation…nationalism is necessarily xenophobic—that is, xenophobia
is part of the logic of nationalism—and thus always remains an invitation to antiSemitism and racism.”32
However, the aggression and appraisal of secular power implicit in Yeats’s figure of
the avatar is somewhat absent from AE’s vision. He states “The wise ones assume excellent
forms in secret. Did an Avatar ever sit on a throne? Have they not always gone about the
world as vagrants?” (DOTG 582–83). The figure also ushers in a Utopian model of human
relations: “Our dream is coming true. All the things which seemed remote and fabulous,
tales of a golden age, of gods mingling with men, things sunken from belief on remote
horizons of time, now seem to rise to us, to be true once more” (DOTG 588). He also affirms individual choice: “he was an Avatar of freedom” (DOTG 600). In many ways, AE’s
avatar represents the coming of spirituality rather than despotism. By contrast, despite the
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
336
alignment in the Vision Papers with AE’s model, Yeats’s avatar corresponds more closely
to Spenglerian Caesarism:
Highest of all, however, is not action, but the ability to command.…[T]he statesman rises to something that in the Classical world would doubtless have been
called divinity. He becomes the creator of a new life, the spirit-ancestor of a
young race. He himself, as a unit, vanishes from the stream after a few years. But
a minority called into being by him takes up his course and maintains it indefinitely.…Such a minority develops into a true “breed,” even when it had begun
merely as a party, and the sureness of its decisions comes to be that of blood, not
of reason.…The great statesman is the gardener of a people…[building] from
the top storey downwards. (DW2 444–45)
Of course a close relation to the Nietzschean superman is evident here: “those enigmatical
men, predestined for conquering and circumventing others, the finest examples of which
are Alcibiades and Caesar.”33 This is resonant of Yeats’s claim that leaders exercise their
influence in society by filtration from the top to the bottom strata. It is the absence of this
form of strong leadership which Yeats refers to in 1928, in his publication of “Blood and
the Moon”: it is “a time / Half dead at the top” (VP 480; CW1 241).
Yeats’s vision of the avatar has some sympathy with Spengler: it is a racial entity; one
which becomes or invokes a despotic leader; one who employs a tyrannical will in his approach to the people. However, in a clear paradox to the authoritarian model described by
Adorno, the avatar is also related to the Thirteenth Cone:
Are souls about to be born at time of Avatar in spiritual cone?
Well to simplify—13th cycle souls are born or rather begin 13th cycle at time of
avatar. (YVP2 171)
The Thirteenth Cone is perhaps one of the most inexplicable and mystifying aspects of A
Vision. The Spirits of the Thirteenth Cone are outside the system, and despite the overall
determinism of A Vision, it represents an attempt to account for free will and autonomy:
“the work of the Thirteenth Cone or cycle which is in every man and called by every man
his freedom” (AVB 302). Ellmann comments that “All the determinism or quasi-determinism of A Vision is abruptly confronted with the Thirteenth Cycle which is able to alter
everything, and suddenly free will, liberty, and deity pour back into the universe.”34 Representing an escape from the ever-whirling cycles of reincarnation and rebirth, it signals
freedom, a form of discarnate Utopia: “The ultimate reality because neither one nor many,
concord nor discord, is symbolised as a phaseless sphere” (AVB 193). In a complicated
turn of events, this too is implicated in an overall scheme of opposition, as Hazard Adams
comments, “the determined is always opposed by the indeterminate, fate by destiny. This
is the role of the Thirteenth Cone, one’s freedom and possessed by all.”35 Hence Yeats
refers to “Chance being at one with Choice at last” (“Solomon and the Witch,” VP 388;
CW1 179), and also, in the poem “All Souls’ Night,” how the soul’s journey into afterlife
is marked by being,
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337
…free and yet fast,
Being both Chance and Choice
Forget its broken toys
And sink into its own delight at last. (VP 472–73; CW1 233)
Both fate and liberty are paradoxically united and the system is seen to encompass both
destiny and free will. It is a discernible feature of A Vision that the Thirteenth Cone ultimately denotes (for both history and the individual) another way “in which Yeats’s efforts
at mechanical philosophizing end in frustration.”36 However, like all Utopias, is impossible to apprehend the Thirteenth Cone, as it “can be symbolized but cannot be known”
(AVB 193). The avatar is thus inherently Janus-faced: in AE’s assessment, and that of the
Thirteenth Cone of A Vision, it is a liberating force for good. It is also heralds a dark and
oppressive mode of government. In this unsettled paradigm of Yeats’s occult politics, it is
relevant to review Yeats’s claim for the soul before rebirth:
The victim must, in the Shiftings, live the act of cruelty, not as victim but as
tyrant; whereas the tyrant must by a necessity of his or her nature become the
victim. But if one is dead and the other living they find each other in thought
and symbol, the one that has been passive and is now active may from within
control the other, once tyrant now victim. (AVB 238)
There is no permanent ascendancy of either tyrant or victim in Yeats’s schema: to learn
from the life lived, it is necessary to encompass the whole of experience, to appreciate the
other’s viewpoint. This has a fundamentally democratizing potential, despite Yeats’s own
extremist and anti-democratic political allegiances at this time.
Adorno’s assessment of the fascist personality is highly relevant in consideration of
the avatar and its relation to Spenglerian Caesarism: there is a tendency to crave “submission to authority, desire for a strong leader, subservience of the individual to the state, and
so forth.…Weakness in the ego is expressed in the inability to build up a consistent and
enduring set of moral values within the personality; and it is this state of affairs, apparently, that makes it necessary for the individual to seek some organizing and coordinating
agency outside of himself.”37 This desire for an external moral arbiter marks a clear correlation with an assessment of the occult. However, Yeats’s approach to any form of politics
was never wholly “uncritical.” Writing about his initial experience of the Irish Blueshirts to
Olivia Shakespear in July 1933, Yeats is obviously enchanted, and links the oppositional
theory of A Vision with a nascent anti-democratic policy:
It is amusing to live in a country where men will always act. Where nobody is
satisfied with thought. There is so little in our stocking that we are ready at any
moment to turn it inside out, and how can we not feel emulous when we see
Hitler juggling with his sausage of stocking. Our chosen colour is blue, and blue
shirts are marching about all over the country, and their organiser tells me that
it was my suggestion—a suggestion I have entirely forgotten—that made them
select for their flag a red St Patrick’s cross on a blue ground—all I can remember
is that I have always denounced green and commended blue (the colour of my
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
338
early book covers).…History is very simple—the rule of the many, then the rule
of the few, day and night, night and day for ever, while in small disturbed nations day and night race. (L 812).
As McCormack has identified, this letter was written just months after the persecution of
the Jews had been codified in the Third Reich, “with a national boycott of Jewish businesses, and after the suppression of Germany’s trade unions” (BK 49).38
However, it is important to assess the Blueshirts as a specifically Irish historical phenomenon. How far the movement can be considered an Irish emulation of Italy is problematic: “‘Irish fascism’ remains an open question, ideologically speaking—at least for
the early 1930s.”39 This is certainly the case in an analysis of the intellectual impetus
behind the Blueshirts, which was in obvious contradistinction to the motivations of many
of the members. The Blueshirts emerged as an amalgam of several different strands of
Irish political societies: “[They] sprang directly from the Army Comrades Association.
The foundation of Fine Gael, of which the Blueshirt movement was an integral part, was
brought about by the merging of Cumann na nGaedheal and the Centre Party with the
National Guard” (MB 211). The two political parties, Cumann na nGaedheal (which
Yeats supported during the Civil War) and the Centre Party had a background which
seemingly would attract Yeats’s late politics, being essentially conservative: the latter represented a restrained approach to Irish nationalism, and caution in economics and social
policy. Cumann na nGaedheal tended to attract “the propertied and business classes, the
confidence of the Catholic hierarchy and the trust of the British government” (MB 211).
From its foundation, the ACA emphasized it was apolitical, although there was some
level of sympathy between the Association and Cumann na nGaedheal. The resulting
Blueshirt hierarchy, led by General Eoin O’Duffy, claimed an allegiance to the Pope Pius
X’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, which outlined a social policy of corporatism and the
re-establishment of vocational groups: “‘the medieval guild system brought up to date.’”40
Given Yeats’s allegiance to the feudal system of the Middle Ages and his idea of “Unity
of Culture,” it is possible to see how such a scheme would appeal to the poet. However,
the influence of the papal encyclical was not restricted to any one political polarity, and
was “to figure prominently in the Constitution of 1937.”41 The Blueshirt intellectuals
tended to appeal to the Italian system as well as to the papal encyclical, but “minimised
the importance of the dictatorship” (MB 225) and in fact, such a proposal was in clear
contradiction to the Catholic societal model (MB 227). However, O’Duffy’s political aspirations were less cautious:
He saw the Blueshirts as part of a world-wide phenomenon and was quick to
identify himself as its leader. He was pleased to call himself a Fascist and enthusiastically immersed himself in the affairs of international Fascism.…His
crusading zeal and his view of Fascism as the Christian answer to the threat of
Communism…may have blinded him to the ugly reality of many aspects of the
Fascist movements he praised.… (MB 229)
Yeats obviously hoped that the Blueshirts would produce the Irish avatar, the occultist version of the autocratic leader: “I know half a dozen men any one of whom may be Caesar—
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or Cataline. It is amusing to live in a country where men will always act” (L 812). In fact,
he wanted to stage a Blueshirted version of Coriolanus at the Abbey, mercifully resisted by
other members of the Abbey administration.42 Whether the rank-and-file Blueshirts supported the idea of anti-democratic Caesarism is another matter entirely:
Any developing fascism which did exist within the Blueshirts should be seen as
a minority concern which was repugnant to, and therefore repelled by Fine Gael
and the Blueshirt members.…The role of the members and the party traditionalists in not supporting the excesses of O’Duffy showed that, despite the allure
of shirted politics across much of Western Europe, their overriding political allegiance was to the liberal democracy which had emerged following the years of
the Irish revolution and had been crystallised in the post-Treaty era.43
The intelligentsia of the movement went in a contrary direction to the grass-roots member.
Nowhere is this clearer than John A. Costello’s statement in the Dáil that the Blueshirts
would be victorious in Ireland in the same way as the Blackshirts had been in Italy and the
“Hitlershirts” in Germany.44
With respect to communism, O’Duffy and Yeats certainly concurred. In 1919, Yeats
claimed that, “What I want is that Ireland be kept from giving herself (under the influence
of its lunatic faculty of going against everything which it believes England to affirm) to
Marxian revolution or Marxian definitions of value in any form. I consider the Marxian
criterion of values as in this age the spear-head of materialism and leading to inevitable
murder” (L 656).45 In A Vision B he asks, “How far can I accept socialistic or communistic
prophecies?” (AVB 301). His rejection of democracy is equally uncompromising: “Doubtless I shall hate it [fascism] (though not so much as I hate Irish democracy)” (L 813). Like
O’Duffy, he saw fascism as a counter to communism: “At the moment I am trying in
association with [an] ex-cabinet minister, an eminent lawyer, and a philosopher, to work
out a social theory which can be used against Communism in Ireland—what looks like
emerging is Fascism modified by religion” (L 808). However, as McCormack observes,
his antipathy towards the far left is commonplace: “antagonism towards Bolshevism was
unremarkable, being shared by virtually everyone except members of a communist party”
(BK 169). What is more noteworthy is how this portrayal of the Blueshirt movement
is at odds with rank-and-file motivations for supporting the party: “members positively
scorned the idea that they feared communism. They saw the communist threat as an attempt by the Blueshirt hierarchy and the Church to drum up support” (BIP 134).
It is easy to see Yeats’s attraction to the movement. It represented a source of family
cohesion, as the Blueshirts included a youth association (the League of Youth), and reinforced the importance of the collective ancestral unit with which Yeats was obsessed.46
The party also sought to protect free speech against Fianna Fáil/IRA incursions, and more
generally, responded to the fears of an IRA military coup, the institution of de Valera
in a dictatorship, and the collapse of law and order (BIP 128–32).47 However, it also
emerged as a party which contradicted many of Yeats’s own beliefs. One of these, already
mentioned, is the proscription of membership in a secret society (although by this time
Yeats’s membership of the group that succeeded the Golden Dawn had lapsed). Another
is Yeats’s support of economic war with Britain,48 which is categorically against one of the
340
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
chief motivations of Blueshirtism: “De Valera’s attempt to bring Britain to its knees by
sanction and embargo did more to unleash the forces of Blueshirtism than any amount of
propaganda from O’Duffy” (BIP 128). Following his meeting with O’Duffy on 24 July
1933, Yeats’s mood was somewhat curbed, and he is obviously critical of the General:
“[he] is autocratic, directing the movement from above down as if it were an army. I did
not think him a great man though a pleasant one, but one never knows, his face and mind
may harden or clarify” (L 813). In fact, de Valera, not O’Duffy, emerged in the 1930s as
the strong leader. Reading Yeats’s evaluation of O’Duffy in the light of Adorno’s model of
authoritarianism, it is difficult to present Yeats as an unequivocal totalitarian. It is better
to address the question as Marjorie Howes does: “Like the good Blakean he was, Yeats affirmed that each contrary was no less true because its opposite was also true.”49 Ultimately,
the poet’s politics replicate his occult antinomies.
In fact, in his occult politics of the late 1930s, Yeats spurned both communism and
fascism. In the later version of A Vision, he claims “I…must think all civilisations equal at
their best; every phase returns, therefore in some sense every civilisation” (AVB 206). This
directly contradicts his earlier approval in A Vision for the hierarchical and despotic model
of the antithetical dispensation. As Marjorie Howes suggests:
On a theoretical level that coincides with the grand historical scale of A Vision,
Yeats accepts both democracy and authority, individual and race, equally, as the
necessary and interdependent faces of an important historical and political antinomy. Ethically, he was no less committed to his own version of values like
intellectual initiative and individual liberty than he was to family strength and
inherited wealth.50
This is confirmed by Elizabeth Cullingford: “Yeats’s poetry escapes simple political labels
because it is essentially dialectical” (YIF viii). The poet’s idea of fascism as a materialization of the antithetical dispensation is now firmly rejected: “Yeats had once thought that
fascism was turning away from final primary thought. He now realized that it was actually
the epitome of that thought” (YIF 218). Part of this rejection results from an enforced
unity which Nazi Germany represents: “What discords will drive Europe to that artificial
unity—only dry or drying sticks can be tied into a bundle—which is the decadence of every civilisation?” (AVB 301–2). 51 He criticizes such artificial unity in On the Boiler: “The
Fascist countries know that civilisation has reached a crisis…but from dread of attack or
because they must feed their uneducatable masses, put quantity before quality; any hale
man can dig or march” (CW5 230; Ex 424). There is neither synthesis nor the acceptance
of one side of the antinomies in the Yeatsian schema—there is rather a preference for
complete alterity.
In the Free State, Yeats represented the causes of individual liberty in the divorce and
the censorship debates, but he also supported the draconian measures of Kevin O’Higgins
and asserted his ideas of elitism. His idea of the political occult is fully revealed in “A
Race Philosophy” written in 1933 and copied into his diary after the Blueshirt incident.
It opens with the line “The antinomies cannot be solved.”52 Yeats continues with a clear
and uncompromising rejection of both political extremes: “Communism, Fascism, inadequate because society is the struggle of two forces not transparent to reason, the
The Political Occult
341
family and the individual.”53 In the accompanying “Genealogical Tree of Revolution,”
Yeats identifies that Hegel’s solution of Kant’s antinomies resulted in both communism
and fascism: “a diametrically opposed yet related series of propositions, centring on the
materialist/idealist polarity.…Fascism, which had once seemed the antithesis of communism, now looked more like its mirror image” (YIF 216). For Yeats, both political
regimes represent the suppression of the individual freedom and thus are to be rejected:
“Equality of opportunity, equality of rights, have been created to assist the individual
in his struggle.”54 However, existing simultaneously alongside this benevolent assertion
of “equality” is a more eugenic and authoritarian angle reminiscent of On the Boiler:
“Materially and spiritually uncreative families must not be allowed to prevail over the
creative.”55 There is conflict inherent in Yeats’s political occult here, which is ultimately
irreconcilable. Both personal liberty and authoritarian power are defended in this esoteric framework of oppositions. The “Genealogical Tree” concludes by “enshrining conflict
as its one constant.”56
Ultimately, after his Blueshirt escapade, Yeats rejects any real commitment to fascist
politics, which is not to say he does not envisage an anti-democratic, and aristocratic regime for Ireland. However, with the recognition of the political alterity of the later work
comes the caveat that the whole of Yeats’s occult enterprise is not necessarily incriminated
in exclusivist hypotheses (as in the example of the Golden Dawn), and this is a careful
distinction which should be made in any consideration of the poet’s esoteric studies. It is
impossible to remake Yeats as a benevolent but bewildered poet trespassing into an unfamiliar political forum, because Yeats’s occult poetics were invariably always political, and
on occasion, of a somewhat alarming variety. However, it is possible to retrieve the occult
from an absolute judgment that it inherently comprises right-wing, pseudo-fascist and
authoritarian doctrines. As a close study of Yeats’s occult career demonstrates, the political
implications of arcane pursuit are often far more elusive. As George Orwell concluded in
the 1940s: “No doubt Yeats wavered in his beliefs and held at different times many different opinions, some enlightened, some not.”57 A similar claim may be made for the occult
and its political inflections.
Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
George Orwell, “W. B. Yeats,” Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (London: Secker &
Warburg Limited, 1968), vol. 2, “My Country Right or Left: 1940–1943,” 275.
Conor Cruise O’Brien, “Passion and Cunning,” in In Excited Reverie: A Centenary Tribute to William Butler
Yeats, ed. A. Norman Jeffares and K. G. W. Cross (London: Macmillan, 1965), 207–278.
Seamus Deane, “Yeats and the Occult,” W. B. Yeats: Critical Assessments, ed. David Pierce (Robertsbridge:
Helm Information Ltd., 2000), vol. 4, “Assessments: 1980–2000,” 209.
Paul Scott Stanfield, Yeats and Politics in the 1930s (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 187.
Stephen Spender, Foreword to The Appeal of Fascism: A Study of Intellectuals and Fascism 1919–1945 by
Alistair Hamilton, (London: Anthony Blond, 1971), xi.
W. J. McCormack, Blood Kindred: W. B. Yeats; The Life, The Death, The Politics (London: Pimlico, 2005),
129; hereafter BK in text.
Theodor W. Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth and Others Essays on the Irrational in Culture, ed. S. Crook
(1994; London: Routledge, 2002), 31.
Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1979), 79.
Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 30–31.
342
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Nesta H. Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (1924; New York: A & B Publishers Group,
1998), 306–7.
AE (George Russell), The Descent of the Gods, ed. Raghavan Iyer and Nandini Iyer, (Gerrards Cross: Colin
Smythe, 1988), 3, introduction. Hereafter DOTG in text.
Iseult was charged but mysteriously acquitted.
Maud Gonne, A Servant of the Queen, Reminiscences (1938), ed. A. Norman Jeffares and Anna MacBride
White, (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1994), 212.
Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth, 229.
John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1892), 221 (cf. WBGYL 316; YL
308). See also Wayne Chapman, “Authors in Eternity: Some Sources of Yeats’s Creative Mysticism,” YA15
(2002), 288–312.
Cited by Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 249.
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, 2 vols., (London: George
Allen & Unwin, 1926–28), vol. 1, 106–7. See WBGYL 1989 (YL 1975). Hereafter DW1 and DW2 in
text.
Giambattista Vico, New Science, trans. David Marsh (1744: Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), 154 (cf.
WBGYL 456; YL 445); B. Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, trans. R. G. Collingwood (London:
Howard Latimer, 1913).
Roger Griffin, “Fascism: ‘Rebirth’ and ‘Ultra-Nationalism’” (1993), The Fascism Reader, ed. Aristotle A.
Kallis (London: Routledge, 2003), 174.
See Elizabeth Cullingford, Yeats, Ireland and Fascism (London, Macmillan, 1981), 151. Hereafter YIF in
text.
David Ward, Antifascisms: Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943–6. Benedetto Croce and the Liberals, Carlo Levi and
the “Actionists” (London: Associated University Presses, 1996), 81.
Gentile’s discussion of Kant is cited in AVB 70, footnote.
See Ward, Antifascisms, 188, for further discussion of Carlo Levi and the Actionists.
Ellic Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical Order (1887–1923)
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 284.
René Alleau, Les sources occultes du nazisme (Paris: Grasset, 1969), 214. Cited in Umberto Eco, Foucault’s
Pendulum, trans. W. Weaver (London: Vintage, 2001), 507.
Maurice Manning, The Blueshirts (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1970), 74; hereafter MB in text.
Yeats, “Commentary on the Three Songs,” The King of the Great Clock Tower, and Other Poems (1934;
Shannon, Irish University Press, 1977), 37.
See Roy Foster, Life2 628, and Welch, The Abbey Theatre 1899–1999: Form and Pressure (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 133. As McCormack points out, “his developing his theme in the house of his
lesbian lover should be accounted a triumph among Yeats’s liberal inconsistencies” (BK 122).
For further discussion on Purgatory and eugenics, see Marjorie Howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and
Irishness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 160–85.
Michael Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1995), 153.
See YVP3 121–22 for the Irish nation being at the opposite phase (8–9) from Europe’s Phase 23.
Mark Neoleous, “Racism, Fascism and Nationalism” (1997), The Fascist Reader, ed. Aristotle A. Kallis,
351–53.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Helen Zimmern
(London & Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1907), 122. Nietzsche was notoriously misappropriated by the Nazi
regime in Germany.
Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (2nd ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 286.
Hazard Adams, The Book of Yeats’s Vision: Romantic Modern and Antithetical Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 148.
Hazard Adams, “Criticism, Politics and History: The Matter of Yeats,” Georgia Review, 24 (1970), 158–82
at 168n.
Adorno and others, “Measurement of Antidemocratic Trends,” in T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik,
Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1950), 231–34.
By contrast, of course, Yeats supported the workers against the businessmen in the Dublin lock-out of
1913. Yeats’s militant anti-labor politics emerged during his Free State years.
The Political Occult
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
343
R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland: 1600–1972, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), 550.
Michael Tierney, cited MB 222.
F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine (London: Fontana, 1985), 528.
Welch, The Abbey Theatre, 122.
Mike Cronin, The Blueshirts and Irish Politics (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997), 197–98; hereafter BIP in
text. See also Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland (London: Profile, 2004), 416.
Cited in Tim Pat Coogan, De Valera: Long Fellow, Long Shadow (London: Arrow, 1995), 473.
See also NLI, MS 36,272/33, “Michael Robartes Foretells,” where Robartes says, “I reject Marxian Socialism, in so far as it is derived from [Marx]” (YO 221).
See BIP 125 for further details on the Blueshirts as “a family pastime.”
For de Valera and fears of a dictatorship, see Coogan, De Valera, 467.
Stanfield, Yeats and Politics in the 1930s, 19.
Howes, Yeats’s Nations, 162.
Howes, Yeats’s Nations, 162.
See also his letter of 30 November 1936 to Ethel Mannin (L 869).
NLI MS 30,280, “The Genealogical Tree of Revolution and A Race Philosophy,” 2. Published in A. Norman Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: Man and Poet (1966; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), 325–26.
NLI MS 30,280, 2.
NLI MS 30,280, 2.
NLI MS 30,280, 2.
Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), 73.
George Orwell, “W. B. Yeats,” 275.
Glossary
T
he following glossary is intended to provide guidance to readers who may just
want to check a term or confirm something. The following definitions are brief
and supplementary to the fuller treatment in the essays and almost all of the definitions and concepts are elaborated and modified significantly. It is based on the page on
“Terminology” at Neil Mann’s website, YeatsVision.com, though significantly adapted.
Where relevant, the essay in this volume that deals with the topic is given at the end.
Yeats was careful about italicization and capitalization of most terms, marking the
terms even in manuscript and typescript, though not always entirely consistently. In this
volume, we have preferred the form that is most commonly used in A Vision, favoring A
Vision B in cases where the two editions vary and general consistency where there is variation within an edition.
afterlife
The Yeatses’ system views birth and death not as true beginnings or endings but rather as significant junctures in a continuous process. Yeats compares a life to a night and a
day: birth happens at sunset, the life corresponds to night, dominated by the lunar; death
happens at daybreak, so that the afterlife corresponds to day, dominated by the solar.
The anatomy of the afterlife changed significantly between the two editions of A
Vision. In A Vision B it is divided into six stages or states of unequal duration, labeled
with the signs of the zodiac. A late draft of the material gives possibly the most succinct summary, though using calendar months instead of zodiacal signs:
The first symbolical state follows death immediately or accompanies it and
is the symbolical March. It has two moments the “vision of the blood kindred” and the “meditation upon the Celestial Body,” and it is the separation
of the Spirit from nature. The second state, or April, is called the return
and the dreaming back and completes that separation. The third state [Shiftings], or May, is the separation from good and evil. The fourth, or June, is
called the Beatitude or beatific vision … and the fifth state, or July, is called
the purification and unites the shade to its ideal aim and so moves it back
into good and evil. The sixth state or August is called the Preparation [AVB:
Foreknowledge] and displays its future life and so binds it to nature once
more. (NLI 36,272/22)
See Graham A. Dampier, “‘The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work,’” 55–89.
antithetical
One of the two Tinctures, the impulse to individuation and subjectivity, corresponding to the lunar (which operates on a larger and more general scale), and
predominating during the brighter phases of the moon, between Phases 8 and 22.
It is established in opposition to the primary Tincture and defines itself by continual
conflict with the primary. See Neil Mann, “‘Everywhere that antinomy of the One
and the Many,’” 1–21.
automatic script
A technique of mediumship, involving the clearing or distraction of the mind,
though not usually trance, so that the hand writes without the intervention of the
Glossary
345
conscious mind. The Yeatses’ automatic script is an incredibly complex series of questions and answers, evolving over several years, mostly between 1917 and 1920. After
this a technique of Sleeps was used, with decreasing frequency until 1924, though these
are usually loosely included under the general heading of ‘automatic script’. Only a proportion of the material that was collected (most now published in Yeats’s “Vision” Papers)
was finally refined and elaborated into A Vision. In part this was because Yeats did not
fully understand all of the material, in part because it was too personal or partial, and
also because of the natural limits imposed by the book which already contains a lot of
material. See Margaret Mills Harper, “Reflected Voices, Double Visions,” 269–290.
Beatific Vision
The culminating Moment of Crisis, following the Initiatory and Critical Moments.
In some manuscript material the term is also applied to the afterlife state usually
titled “Beatitude.” Both terms derive from the Latin root for “blessed” and are traditionally associated with religion and mysticism. See Neil Mann, “The Thirteenth
Cone,” 159–193, and Colin McDowell, “Shifting Sands,” 194–216.
Beatitude
The fourth stage of the afterlife, also called the Marriage, corresponding symbolically
to the passage of Spirit’s gyre through the zodiacal sign of Cancer, the sign of the
summer solstice. See Graham A. Dampier, “‘The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work,’”
55–89, and Neil Mann, “The Thirteenth Cone,” 159–193.
being
“By being is understood that which divides into Four Faculties” (AVB 86); as a special term, it is comparable to Heidegger’s Seiende, the process of being or what is
extant, as opposed to his Sein, the essence of being, which may be closer to the
Principles. However, as Heidegger goes on to say, “Alle Seiende ist im Sein; das Sein
ist das Seiende”—“all being is in Being; Being is being,” or in terms Yeats borrowed
from Plotinus: “temporal existence” is “the characteristic act of the soul” (VPl 934; Ex
397). See Rory Ryan, “The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known,” 22–54,
and Matthew Gibson, “‘Timeless and Spaceless,’” 103–135.
Body of Fate
One of the Four Faculties, the internal representation of the external world and “the
acts towards which we are impelled” (NLI 30,354). See Rory Ryan, “The Is and the
Ought, the Knower and the Known,” 22–54.
Cabala
Yeats’s spelling in A Vision is Cabala, but elsewhere he tends to use Cabbala; other
spellings include Kabbalah and Qabalah, or variant combinations of these. The last
is perhaps closest to transliterating the Hebrew word קבלהmeaning “tradition,” “received doctrine,” “received teaching,” or “received wisdom” (spelled with [ קqoph],
it comes from the same triliteral root, [ קבלQBL], as qibel, to receive). It is a system
of Jewish mysticism of rabbinical origin and unknown antiquity, which appears to
have gained its current form in Spain and France during the period between the
eleventh and thirteenth centuries CE. It formed the basis for the teachings of the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. See C. Nicholas Serra, “Esotericism and Escape,” 307–328.
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
346
Celestial Body
One of the Four Principles, highest of the hierarchy, which becomes the Clarified
Body once all earthly incarnations are finished. It is the basis of the Faculty of Body of
Fate. See Graham A. Dampier, “‘The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work,’” 55–89.
civilization
Usually used as the secular counterpart of a religious dispensation, a 2,200-year civilization runs from the midpoint of the preceding religious era to the midpoint of
the next. It does not necessarily correspond to any conventionally recognized cultural label, such as Minoan civilization or even classical civilization. Yeats’s classical
civilization runs from around 1000BCE to around 1000 CE, with the monotheistic
religions, focused on the Christian dispensation, starting at its midpoint (1 CE), and
giving way to the civilization which this enabled (Christendom) around the year
1000 CE (see AVB 203–4). These two historical cycles, therefore, have the same
length but are “syncopated,” the civilization corresponding to a lunar month (starting
at the New Moon) and the religion to a solar month (zodiacal and starting at the Full
Moon). Yeats also sometimes uses the term for periods of one-thousand-odd years,
referring for instance to a period corresponding to 1000 CE–2100 CE as “our Gothic
civilisation” (AVB 255). N.B. Yeats’s texts use the British spelling with “s.” See Matthew Gibson, “‘Timeless and Spaceless,’” 103–135, and Matthew DeForrest, “W. B.
Yeats’s ‘Dove or Swan,’” 136–158.
Clarified Body
The Celestial Body becomes the Clarified Body once all earthly incarnations are finished. Paradoxically, the soul prefigures this state not at Phase 1 but at Phase 15,
when “Its own body possesses the greatest possible beauty, being indeed that body
which the soul will permanently inhabit, when all its phases have been repeated according to the number allotted: that which we call the clarified or Celestial Body”
(CW13 59; cf. AVA 71; cf. AVB 136).
cone
A cone is a diagrammatic convenience to represent the gyre, but one that becomes a
synonym for gyre.
Creative Mind
One of the Four Faculties originally termed “Creative Genius” in the automatic script.
It represents the mind in its consciously constructive aspect, and in more subjective,
antithetical people can be seen as imagination (AVB 142). See Rory Ryan, “The Is and
the Ought, the Knower and the Known,” 22–54.
Critical Moment
The second of the Moments of Crisis, following the Initiatory Moment and preceding the Beatific Vision. See Colin McDowell, “Shifting Sands,” 194–216.
Cycle
1. A general term referring to the modified repetition of the gyre, and any of the
cyclical phenomena which inform the paradigm, such as the natural cycles of the day,
the month and the year.
2. A specific term (often capitalized as “Cycle”) referring to a complete round of
28 incarnations. The paradigm of the soul’s progress involves 12 such Cycles, after
Glossary
347
which it may then enter the Thirteenth Cycle (in AVA at least). These Cycles received
considerable attention in the automatic script, where they are labeled by the signs of
the zodiac, starting with Taurus. Yeats considered himself to be in his sixth cycle of
incarnation (the Libra cycle), while George was in her seventh cycle of incarnation
(the Scorpio cycle). See Neil Mann, “The Thirteenth Cone,” 159–193.
Daimon
A complex concept, which evolved with time, and which Yeats was probably never
entirely sure about. The Daimon is the supernatural opposite of the human being, but
part of a single continuous consciousness with the human, and can even be viewed
as the same elements in a different dimension and different emphases. To a certain
extent it controls human destiny, but needs its human counterpart to complete its
knowledge of reality. See Matthew Gibson, “‘Timeless and Spaceless,’” 103–135, and
Neil Mann, “The Thirteenth Cone,” 159–193.
Dance of the Four Royal Persons
In the fictions constructed around Kusta ben Luka, four of his followers claimed to
be the royal family of the Country of Wisdom and danced on the sand to demonstrate true wisdom (CW13 10–12; AVA 9–11). Their dance is a moving version of
the Great Wheel. See Colin McDowell, “Shifting Sands,” 194–216 and C. Nicholas
Serra, “Esotericism and Escape,” 307–328.
Discord
A relationship between Faculties, see AVB 93–94. The two Oppositions are Discords
to each other: Will and Mask, the two fundamentally antithetical Faculties, are each
the Discords to Creative Mind and Body of Fate, the two fundamentally primary Faculties. Each Faculty therefore has one Opposition and two Discords. The Discords
lead the being to “the enforced understanding of the unlikeness” within the other
Opposition, the realization that the goal is unattainable: “Life is an endeavour, made
vain by the four sails of its mill, to come to a double contemplation of the chosen
Image [Will contemplating Mask], that of the fated Image [Creative Mind contemplating Body of Fate]” (AVB 94). See Rory Ryan, “The Is and the Ought, the Knower
and the Known,” 22–54.
Double Cone
The “normal double cone” or gyre shows the two Tinctures as intersecting cones or
gyres. In this form, the Faculties appear to move as pairs of Discords, Will and Creative Mind joined by a line across one cone, and Mask and Body of Fate joined by a
line across the other. See Rory Ryan, “The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the
Known,” 22–54.
Dreaming Back
A subsidiary state in the second stage of the afterlife, the Return, in which the events
of the preceding life are relived according to their intensity. See Graham A. Dampier,
“‘The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work,’” 55–89.
Faculties
The four fundamental constituents of the human psyche during incarnate life. The
Faculties are: the active, lunar force of Will and its focus or target, the Mask, and
the active, solar force of Creative Mind and its focus, the Body of Fate. The Faculties
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
348
are all, however, Lunar in relation to the Principles, and, unlike the Principles, they
are creative but incapable of attaining understanding: ‘Man can embody truth, but
he cannot know it’. The Faculties are not intrinsically hierarchical, and are arranged
around the circle of the Wheel in rough equality, although during any particular
incarnation, one or more Faculties may be stronger. See Rory Ryan, “The Is and the
Ought, the Knower and the Known,” 22–54.
Fictions
Within a month or two of the start of the automatic script, Yeats was framing ideas
for fictions through which to present these new and exciting ideas. These centered
on two old sources and two modern characters: a European book by a Renaissance
writer, Giraldus, and an Arabian tradition based on the teachings of Kusta ben Luka,
brought together by Michael Robartes, who would tell his discoveries to Owen
Aherne. The earliest drafts are assembled in YVP4, and there are relics of this scheme
in poems such as “The Phases of the Moon” and the notes to various volumes of
poetry or plays. In AVA, Robartes’s discoveries are the same but the drama is over the
editing of papers by Aherne or Yeats, and there is more detail about Kusta ben Luka
and the Arabian background. Again with the same starting premise, Stories of Michael
Robartes and His Friends (1931 and incorporated into AVB) shifts the action, positing
a loose group of seekers, whose teacher is Robartes, with Aherne as his helper. See
Wayne K. Chapman, “‘Metaphors for Poetry,’” 217–251 and Janis Haswell, “Yeats’s
Vision and the Feminine,” 291–306.
Foreknowledge
The sixth and final stage of the afterlife state, corresponding symbolically to the passage of Spirit’s gyre through the zodiacal sign of Virgo. The text of A Vision actually
states, “The sixth and final stage (corresponding to Scorpio) [is] called the Foreknowledge” (AVB 234), but this is a mistake, probably caused by confusion of the symbols
of Virgo () and Scorpio ()—Yeats’s notes also frequently jumble the order of the
zodiacal signs. An earlier draft, using the months rather than signs, labels the six stages with the months from March (when Aries starts) to August (when Virgo starts),
and assigns August to this final stage (NLI 36,272/22). See Graham A. Dampier,
“‘The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work,’” 55–89.
Ghostly Self
Probably one of the most elusive concepts in the system, not least to Yeats himself. At
some points the Ghostly Self seems to be a view of the Daimon as the archetype from
which the individual human life is drawn and to which the soul will return, a concept
similar to Plotinus’s eidos of the individual soul, which resides in the realm of nous. At
other points the Ghostly Self appears to be closer to the Theosophists’ Atman, beyond
Celestial Body but mirrored in Spirit, existing as the inviolate first spark of divinity
which stays separated from all incarnation. Its name derives from the Holy Ghost of
Christianity, and the Self of Theosophical Buddhism. See Matthew Gibson, “‘Timeless and Spaceless,’” 103–135, and Neil Mann, “The Thirteenth Cone,” 159–193.
Giraldus
In the fictions Yeats created surrounding A Vision, Giraldus was a Renaissance author
who wrote a lost book called Speculum Angelorum et Hominum (1594), which set
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forth much of the system. Michael Robartes finds a mutilated copy of the work, and
later makes the connection with an Arabian tradition deriving from Kusta ben Luka.
Giraldus may be based on Lilius Gyraldus of Ferrara or else one of two translators
known as Giraldus of Cremona, who translated Arabic texts. However, a crucial reason for using the name may well have been its echo of the term “gyre.” See Wayne K.
Chapman, “‘Metaphors for Poetry,’” 217–251 and Janis Haswell, “Yeats’s Vision and
the Feminine,” 291–306.
Golden Dawn
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a society founded in 1888 by William
Wynn Westcott and Samuel Liddell (MacGregor) Mathers, with W. R. Woodman
as a relatively silent third, based on information and rituals derived from a cipher
manuscript of uncertain origin. The title Golden Dawn properly only applied to the
“Outer Order,” and was anyway superseded by “MR” (Morgenrothe) in 1901, after
a public scandal involving the name. The original body disappeared in the schisms
of 1903, which led to a variety of successors. For Yeats, as for Dorothea Hunter, it
might be said that “the Order was [his] university” (YA9 142). See C. Nicholas Serra,
“Esotericism and Escape,” 307–328.
gyre
The fundamental paradigm of growth and life in the Yeatses’ system. It represents the
cyclical nature of reality, and the recurrent pattern of growth and decay, waxing and
waning. See Neil Mann, “‘Everywhere that antinomy of the One and the Many,’”
1–21.
Husk
One of the Four Principles, the lowest in the hierarchy. It is the least permanent, but
the one that is most closely associated with incarnate life, corresponding with the Faculty of Will. See Graham A. Dampier, “‘The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work,’” 55–89.
Image
A projected form of the Mask: “The Image is a myth, a woman, a landscape, or anything whatsoever that is an external expression of the Mask” (AVB 107).
Initiatory Moment
The first of the triad of Moments of Crisis, which never fully entered into A Vision.
See Colin McDowell, “Shifting Sands,” 194–216.
Judwalis
The Judwalis, or diagrammatists, are an Arab tribe who follow the philosophy of
Kusta ben Luka. When Robartes meets them, their sacred book has been “lost or
destroyed in desert fighting some generations before,” but they have “a vast body
of doctrine” explained by diagrams drawn in the sand and “identical with those in
the Speculum Angelorum et Hominorum” by Giraldus (CW13 lxi; AVA xix). See Neil
Mann, “‘Everywhere that antinomy of the One and the Many,’” 1–21, Wayne K.
Chapman, “‘Metaphors for Poetry,’” 217–251 and Janis Haswell, “Yeats’s Vision and
the Feminine,” 291–306.
Kusta ben Luka
Kusta ben Luka is a Christian philosopher at the court of Harun al-Raschid or a later
Caliph of Baghdad. He is author of The Way of the Soul between Sun and Moon, since
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
350
lost, which forms the basis of the philosophy of the Judwalis. The poem “Desert
Geometry or The Gift of Harun Al-Raschid” details how the Caliph gave Kusta ben
Luka a wife who marks out symbols on the desert sand while sleep-walking. This
is effectively a concealed allusion to A Vision’s real origins in the automatic writing,
making Kusta ben Luka another Yeatsian alter ego. See Wayne K. Chapman, “‘Metaphors for Poetry,’” 217–251 and Janis Haswell, “Yeats’s Vision and the Feminine,”
291–306.
lunar
The more inclusive term for the subjective, individual, multitudinous and creative
pole of Yeats’s overarching duality, represented in incarnate life by the antithetical
Tincture: “the Tinctures belong to a man’s life while in the body, and Solar and Lunar
may transcend that body” (CW13 112; AVA 139). See Neil Mann, “‘Everywhere that
antinomy of the One and the Many,’” 1–21.
Marriage
An alternative name for the Beatitude, the fourth stage of the afterlife, conceived of
as the symbolic marriage of the Spirit and the Celestial Body. See Graham A. Dampier, “‘The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work,’” 55–89 and Neil Mann, “The Thirteenth
Cone,” 159–193.
Mask
One of the Four Faculties, “the image of what we wish to become, or of that to which
we give our reverence” (CW13 15; AVA 15), or the “object of desire or idea of the
good” (AVB 83). It only has meaning if there is the desire and choice of the Will;
it in turn provides the focus or target for the Will and together they make up the
emotional Opposition. See Rory Ryan, “The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the
Known,” 22–54.
Meditation
Part of the first stage of the afterlife, following the preliminary Vision of the Blood
Kindred, marking the transition of the consciousness from the Faculty of Will to the
Principle of Spirit, and corresponding to the Spirit’s passage through the sign of Aries. See Graham A. Dampier, who takes the Meditation as belonging more logically
to the second stage of the Return in “‘The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work,’” 55–89.
Michael Robartes
Robartes originally featured in the 1897 story Rosa Alchemica and in the titles of a few
poems in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), where it is explained that he is a principle
of the mind, and that “students of the magical tradition will understand me when I
say that ‘Michael Robartes’ is fire reflected in water” or “the pride of the imagination
brooding upon the greatness of its possessions, or the adoration of the Magi” (VP 803).
In the fictions surrounding A Vision, he is depicted as having discovered two traditions:
a European book of the Renaissance, the Speculum Angelorum et Hominum by Giraldus,
and an Arabian tradition followed by the Judwalis based on teachings of Kusta ben
Luka (see the subtitle to AVA). Robartes is the first to realize that the two share a fundamental scheme and in Yeats’s earliest plans, he was to expound the system in dialogues
with Owen Aherne. In the fictions presented in AVA, he had entrusted the editing of
his papers to Aherne, but quarreled with him over his Christian/primary bias, and has
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given them to the poet Yeats instead (drafts indicate that Robartes is conceived of as
being Phase 19 [YVP4 31]). In the Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends, included
in the prefatory material of AVB, he is a teacher, who has gathered a ragtag assortment
of students around him, and is something of a sage and prophet.
Moments of Crisis
An important element of the automatic script, which received cursory treatment in
AVA (172–73; CW13 139–40) and none in AVB, linked particularly with sexual love.
They are associated with the Daimon, the least predictable element of the system, and
are symbolized by the lightning flash. The Initiatory Moment represents a shift in the
nature of the Mask and Body of Fate, the “sensuous image,” effectively in our aims,
values and goals, which sets in motion a series of events that reach a climax at the
Critical Moment. The Critical Moment represents a moment of the greatest freedom
within an individual life, where the intellect is able to analyze the aims and actions
initiated, probably with the help of the Daimonic mind, and the individual is able
to act with as much free will as he or she is capable of. The Critical Moment is not
always reached, and even if it is, this process may be repeated without the individual
reaching the third stage of Beatific Vision, where the individual moves into a form
of greater wholeness, and possibly Unity of Being. See Colin McDowell, “Shifting
Sands,” 194–216.
Opening of the Tinctures
One of the more problematic technical ideas in A Vision, partly because Yeats’s understanding changed significantly between the two versions. In AVB he states that the
antithetical Tincture opens at Phase 11 and the primary at Phase 12, and that this means
“the reflection inward of the Four Faculties: all are as it were mirrored in the personality,
Unity of Being becomes possible” (AVB 88). The Tinctures close again at 18 (primary)
and 19 (antithetical), to open again on the other side of the wheel at 25 (antithetical)
and 26 (primary) until 4 (primary) and 5 (antithetical). Whereas the antithetical side of
the wheel gives an opening inward into personality, on the primary side the opening is
outward, a form of rarefaction of the personal: it is an opening to fate or “Weird” (AVB
111), spiritual objectivity before Phase 1 and physical objectivity afterward.
Opposition
A relationship between Faculties, see AVB 93–94. The two Oppositions are “the emotional Opposition of Will and Mask,” the two fundamentally antithetical Faculties, and
“the intellectual Opposition of Creative Mind and Body of Fate,” the two fundamentally
primary Faculties. In each pair one is the active, appetent Faculty (Creative Mind and
Will), while the other is the goal of its action, the target Faculty (Body of Fate and Mask).
Within the fundamental gyre, the active Faculty is the apex or origin of the gyre, while
the target Faculty is the base or widest expansion of the gyre; on the wheel, the Oppositions are diametrically opposed to each other. The two Oppositions form Discords to
each other. See Rory Ryan, “The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known,” 22–54.
Owen Aherne
A character who first appeared in 1897 in “The Tables of the Law,” where he is described as “half monk [first version: alchemist], half soldier of fortune” (VSR 151;
Myth 294; M2005 192). Revived for expository dialogue with Michael Robartes, as
seen in “The Phases of the Moon,” he is depicted in AVA as the original editor of the
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
352
papers Robartes has discovered, rejected in favor of Yeats because of his Christian/
primary bias. In the Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends, included in the prefatory material of AVB, he is more Robartes’s agent or factotum.
Passionate Body
One of the Four Principles, the third in the hierarchy. It corresponds to the Mask
in the Faculties and is associated with passion and desire, sharing much in common
with the “Desire Body” of the Theosophists. It persists after death and is involved
during the first two stages of the afterlife, after which it should be shed, but this is
not always possible, which entails a repetition in the same phase of incarnation, as in
the case of George Yeats herself. See Graham A. Dampier, “‘The Spiritual Intellect’s
Great Work,’” 55–89.
Perfection
There are four types of perfection attainable, and these only in certain phases of incarnation: Self-Sacrifice (in Phases 2, 3 and 4), Self-Knowledge (in Phase 13), Unity
of Being (in Phases 16, 17 and 18), and Sanctity (in Phase 27) (see AVB 95 & 100).
Generally Unity of Being is used by Yeats to cover some or all of these, since it was the
form that interested him most and which was personally possible to him.
Phantasmagoria
A subsidiary stage of the Return in AVB, the second stage of the afterlife, during
which life and imagination are completed in order to exhaust emotion. It is part of
what is referred to in AVA and the automatic script as the Teaching. See Graham A.
Dampier, “‘The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work,’” 55–89.
primary
One of the two Tinctures, the impulse to the collective and objectivity, corresponding
to the solar, which operates on a larger and more general scale, and predominating
during the darker phases of the moon, between Phases 22 and 8. It is the first of the
two Tinctures, since “in the Primary we are one, & because all are one before they are
many” (NLI 30,319[5]) whereas the antithetical defines itself by opposition to the primary (see AVB 71–72), however Yeats’s sympathies are more often with the antithetical. See Neil Mann, “‘Everywhere that antinomy of the One and the Many,’” 1–21.
Principles
The Principles represent pure knowledge and spiritual reality, but are uncreative and
incapable of making new material, only of understanding what life offers. They remain
in the unconscious mind during waking life, and are partially responsible for our
dream life, coming to the fore after death, where the individual needs to understand
and absorb the fruits of the preceding life before carrying on to the next life. The Principles are solar in relation to the Faculties and are intrinsically hierarchical, unlike the
lunar Faculties. Within themselves, the two solar Principles, Spirit and Celestial Body
are permanent and represent the continuity between lives, while the two lunar Principles, Husk and Passionate Body are impermanent, acquired afresh before each new life.
See Graham A. Dampier, “‘The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work,’” 55–89.
Purification
The fifth stage of the afterlife, where the spirit is cleansed of its previous incarnation
and starts to prepare for its coming life, as its new Passionate Body and Husk appear.
Glossary
353
It corresponds symbolically to the passage of Spirit’s gyre through the sign of Leo. See
Graham A. Dampier, “‘The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work,’” 55–89.
Record
In the Sphere, “All things are present as an eternal instant to our Daimon” (AVB 193).
However, this state is incomprehensible to us, because “all things fall into a series of
antinomies in human experience,” so that Yeats’s “instructors have therefore followed
tradition by substituting for it a Record where the images of all past events remain
for ever ‘thinking the thought and doing the deed.’ They are in popular mysticism
called ‘the pictures in the astral light,’ a term that became current in the middle of the
nineteenth century, and what Blake called ‘the bright sculptures of Los’s Hall’” (AVB
193). This definition seems to lay stress upon the past elements of the eternal instant,
rather than the future ones, and, as Yeats hints, may owe more than a little to the
Theosophists’ idea of the “akashic record,” images in the spiritual substance, as well
as to the tradition of anima mundi. See Neil Mann, “The Thirteenth Cone,” 159–193.
religion
Religion or dispensation is sometimes used to designate a period of 2,200 years, as
the solar counterpart to the lunar civilization. Like civilization, it does not necessarily refer to any conventionally recognized single religion; since Yeats’s focus is almost
exclusively European, Christianity is the dominant representative of the monotheism
which dominates the 2000-plus years of our current cycle, however, it also includes
Islam, philosophical Platonism, and, to a lesser extent, Buddhism. Yeats’s monotheistic religious period, focused on the Christian dispensation, starts at the midpoint
of the classical civilization in 1AD (1 CE), and the civilization that this dispensation
enabled, Christendom, starts around the year 1000 CE (see AVB 203–4). These two
historical cycles, therefore, have the same length but are “syncopated,” the civilization
corresponding to a lunar month, at the Ides of which (its Full Moon) starts a solar
month (the zodiacal sign). Both religions and civilizations alternate between being
antithetical and primary. See Matthew Gibson, “‘Timeless and Spaceless,’” 103–135,
and Matthew DeForrest, “W. B. Yeats’s ‘Dove or Swan,’” 136–158.
(For historical gyres of religion and civilization with junctures of annunciation, see figure on following page.)
reincarnation
One of the premises underlying the system of A Vision is the concept of reincarnation. Yeats does not deal with the origin of the “pilgrim soul” and only tangentially
with its goal. However, behind the concept of the wheel lies the idea that the soul sets
out from absorption in God or Nature at Phase 1 and incarnates through the successive
phases of the moon until it reaches Phase 1 again, when the cycle starts again at a more
advanced level. From Phase 2 onwards, the soul gains gradual self-awareness and independence of mind, until it reaches complete subjectivity and isolation at Phase 15. After
this, it starts to move return towards a more intellectual and social form of absorption
into the group, and finally into God. See Neil Mann, “‘Everywhere that antinomy of
the One and the Many,’” 1–21, and “The Thirteenth Cone,” 159–193.
ca. 1 BCE
polytheistic dispensations
ca. 1050 CE
new dispensation
ca. 2100 CE?
Christian and monotheistic
dispensations
Olympian and PRIMARY
ca. 1100 BCE
classical civilization
Christendom - Western civilization
PRIMARY
This diagram outlines the gyres of religion/dispensation and civilization/age, which are syncopated with respect to one another. The gyre of religion is drawn
in black and labeled along the bottom; that of civilization is drawn in gray and labeled along the top. The dates given are very rough.
At the height of a civilization’s gyre (Phase 15), comes the beginning of a religion’s gyre (Phase 1). At this point there is an influx from the Thirteenth
Cone (dotted line), which initiates the new dispensation, alternately antithetical and primary.
• The influx c. 2100 BCE is symbolized by the annunciation to Leda: after her rape by Zeus in the form of a swan, she gave birth to embodiments
of the antithetical heroic age—Helen, Clytemnestra, Castor and Pollux.
• The influx c. 1 BCE is symbolized by the annunciation to Mary: she was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, depicted in art by a dove, and gave
birth to the embodiment of the primary Christian dispensation—Jesus.
• The coming influx, c. 2100 CE or earlier, is as yet unknown, but an associated harbinger is the “rough beast” described in “The Second Coming.”
The civilization enabled by the dispensation follows about a thousand years after it, and similarly alternates between primary and antithetical. The classical,
pagan age enabled by the Ledaean annunciation arose around 1100 BCE and was finally exhausted by 1050 CE, while the age enabled by the Marian annunciation arose around the year 1050 CE and will finally close after 3000 CE, so is currently close to its maximum.
PRIMARY
unknown dispensation
ca. 3200 BCE?
ca. 2100 BCE
Babylonian mathematical starlight
PRIMARY
354
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
Glossary
355
Return
The second stage of the afterlife and the most complex, corresponding symbolically
to the passage of Spirit’s gyre through the sign of Taurus. It comprises several states in
each of which the Spirit attempts to understand its preceding life in different manners, and it passes from one to the other not in sequence but in rhythmic alternation.
The first of these subsidiary states is also named the Return, where events are relived
in sequence, and the other main stage is the Dreaming Back, where they are relived
according to intensity. Further stages include the Phantasmagoria and other variations
which Yeats does not label clearly. See Graham A. Dampier, “‘The Spiritual Intellect’s
Great Work,’” 55–89.
Shiftings
The third stage of the afterlife, during which good and evil are shed, corresponding
symbolically to the passage of Spirit’s gyre through the sign of Gemini. See Graham
A. Dampier, “‘The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work,’” 55–89.
Sleeps
After 1920, since George Yeats found the sessions of automatic script increasingly
draining, the Yeatses started the practice of “Sleeps” (or “Sleaps” in Yeats’s spelling)
where George would enter a trance and speak, while W. B. Yeats noted what she
said. He would often later go through these notes and expand on them, dictating to
George. These too decreased in frequency and ceased in 1924, with a few stray later
instances. George Mills Harper gives a clear summary in CVA xvii–xxiii. See Margaret
Mills Harper, “Reflected Voices, Double Visions,” 269–290.
solar
The more inclusive term for the objective, collective and unifying pole of Yeats’s
overarching duality, which represents wisdom, knowledge and ultimate reality. In
incarnate life the primary Tincture represents the solar aspect: “the Tinctures belong to
a man’s life while in the body, and Solar and Lunar may transcend that body” (CW13
112; AVA 139). See Neil Mann, “‘Everywhere that antinomy of the One and the
Many,’” 1–21.
Speculum Angelorum et Hominum
The Latin title translates as “The Mirror of Angels and of Men” and is the name of
the 1594 book by Giraldus, an alter ego for Yeats, and created as a fictional source
for the system of A Vision. The book is discovered in Cracow by Michael Robartes,
and, though it is mutilated, he is fascinated by its symbols and keeps it with him.
He later finds that the diagrams used by the Judwalis are “identical with those in
the Speculum Angelorum et Hominorum” (CW13 lxi; AVA xix). In A Vision A the
title appeared with the last word garbled as “Hominorum” and also “Homenorum,”
mistakes which were corrected in the second edition. See Wayne K. Chapman,
“‘Metaphors for Poetry,’” 217–251 and Janis Haswell, “Yeats’s Vision and the Feminine,” 291–306.
Sphere
The absolute and unitary form of being, beyond the gyres, the “ultimate reality.” The
human mind, fixed in the antinomies, can only perceive it as opposition to the mundane gyre, and therefore sees it as a gyre or cone: the Thirteenth Cone. See Graham
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
356
A. Dampier, “‘The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work,’” 55–89, and Neil Mann, “The
Thirteenth Cone,” 159–193.
Spirit
One of the Four Principles, Spirit, the active, solar Principle, is the origin of movement and the individual being within the archetype of the Celestial Body. Although it
comes second in the hierarchy, it is probably the most important of all, since it represents the impetus to life and experience. See Graham A. Dampier, “‘The Spiritual
Intellect’s Great Work,’” 55–89.
Teaching/Teachings
The Teaching is used in the automatic script and in A Vision A to refer to part of the
Return, corresponding to what is referred to as the Phantasmagoria in AVB. In AVA
Yeats divides the Return into Waking and Sleeping States (compared in turn to Sage
and Victim respectively): the Waking State, where other spirits intervene, “is commonly called the Teaching” (CW13 185–86; AVA 224–25). See Graham A. Dampier,
“‘The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work,’” 55–89.
Thirteenth Cone
The form of the Sphere, when seen through the antinomies. If you look at bright red for
a while and then look at white, it will appear green, the complementary color (a phenomenon harnessed by the Golden Dawn with Flashing Colors). Similarly, the human
being, trapped in the antinomies (red), sees the totality of the Sphere (white) as a form of
opposition, an opposing cone (green). See Neil Mann, “The Thirteenth Cone,” 159–193.
Thirteenth Cycle
Generally synonymous with Thirteenth Cone, since every cycle can be represented by
its own cone. However, the preceding twelve cycles are those of incarnation, which
also correspond roughly with the twelve months of the Great Year, so the Thirteenth
Cycle is sometimes seen as the beginning of a new, supernatural cycle of “incarnations,” and AVA complicates matters further by mentioning Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Cycles. See Neil Mann, “The Thirteenth Cone,” 159–193.
Tincture
The two Tinctures are the source of the fundamental conflict and tension that drive
human life: the primary representing the One, the macrocosm, the race, the collective, the objective, truth, and knowledge, which strives with and against the antithetical representing the Many, the microcosm, the soul, the individual, the subjective,
beauty and creativity. On a grander scale, the poles are referred to as solar and lunar,
the Tinctures being reserved for incarnate life. The term, which does not originate in
the automatic script, was borrowed from Jacob Boehme to give a joint name to the
primary—antithetical polarity in the preparatory card index. See Neil Mann, “‘Everywhere that antinomy of the One and the Many,’” 1–21.
Unity of Being
Yeats had used the term before A Vision but developed it significantly with relation to
the system. He derives the term from his memory of Dante’s Convito, claiming that
Dante compares it to “a perfectly proportioned human body” (AVB 82), although
Dante does not use it and the closest equivalent is a reference to harmony within a
language. It is defined in a draft as “Complete Harmony between phisical [sic] body
Glossary
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intellect & spiritual desire all may be imperfect but if harmony is perfect it is unity.”
In some ways it is a version of a Renaissance ideal, or even a Galenic one of the balanced four humors. It is declared to be the unity attainable through the Mask (AVB
82), therefore reserved particularly for the antithetical phases, when the Mask is free,
and only really attainable after the “Vision of Evil,” which some souls attain at the
Full Moon. In effect, therefore it is only really possible at Phases 16, 17 and 18—coincidentally the phases of Maud Gonne, W. B. Yeats and George Yeats respectively.
Victim and Sage
The Victim and Sage are general, interchanging figures who are of more importance
to A Vision A than A Vision B. The Sage represents the frail, fundamentally primary
soul, who has only his doctrine, while the Victim represents the antithetical soul,
and ‘Emotional Man’ who sacrifices all in a state of strength. They interchange
on the wheel at Phases 22 and 8, so that whoever has been Sage before 22 will be
Victim thereafter. Yeats also envisages them as changing over during the months of
the Great Year, seeing Christ as the Sage, and the next avatar (2,150 years later) as
the Victim or antithetical revelation. See Matthew Gibson, “‘Timeless and Spaceless,’” 103–135.
Victimage
A complex group of relationships through which one person or spirit may help to
work off another’s karmic debt. They result from the refusal of certain experiences or
experience itself (see especially CW13 199–200; AVA 242–43 and AVB 240).
Vision of the Blood Kindred
The start of the first stage of the afterlife after death, when all the impulses and images of the Husk or senses appear in a form of synthesis, a version of the tradition of
people’s life flashing before their eyes. It leads into the Meditation, which may also
be part of the first stage and indeed the more significant element, but Yeats’s account
is not entirely clear (AVB 223–24; 235). It corresponds to the sign of Aries. Graham
A. Dampier sees the first stage as confined to the Vision of the Blood Kindred in “‘The
Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work,’” 55–89.
Vision of Evil
The perception of the world as continual and necessary strife, only properly achieved
at or shortly after the Full-Moon incarnation. It is more the acknowledgement of a
dualistic, possibly even Manichean, universe rather than any diabolic sense: “… no
man believes willingly in evil or in suffering. How much of the strength and weight
of Dante and of Balzac comes from unwilling belief, from the lack of it how much of
the rhetoric and vagueness of all Shelley that does not arise from personal feeling?”
(“If I were Four and Twenty” VII, Ex 277, cf. CW5 43–44).
wheel
The wheel portrays the cyclical nature of the gyre, and is usually divided into twentyeight stages, identified by the phases of the moon. Yeats perceives time as cyclical
rather than linear and, as in the Hindu symbol, the wheel also represents the cycle
of the soul’s rebirth. Yeats, in an antithetical incarnation himself, does not see this as
something that it is necessarily desirable to escape. See Neil Mann, “‘Everywhere that
antinomy of the One and the Many,’” 1–21, and Rory Ryan, “The Is and the Ought,
the Knower and the Known,” 22–54.
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
358
Will
One of the Four Faculties, described as “a bias … an energy … the first matter of a
certain personality—choice’ (CW13 15; AVA 14–15), which “has neither emotion,
morality nor intellectual interest, but knows how things are done, how windows
open and shut, how roads are crossed, everything that we call utility. It seeks its own
continuance” (AVB 83). It is effectively the life force or survival instinct in a relatively
basic form, the will to continue. Without Mask it has no aim, but with the appropriate focus becomes the creative force in life. It was originally termed “Ego” in the
automatic script and Yeats refers to the “Will or normal ego” (AVB 83)—the term
is a borrowing from Madame Blavatsky (rather than from the English translators of
Freud), and indicates the self, but the lower self. The Will is not always the dominant
Faculty but is the one which determines the phase in which a person is located, so
that those of Phase 27 have their Will at Phase 27, although the other Faculties are
located elsewhere and may indeed dominate. See Rory Ryan, “The Is and the Ought,
the Knower and the Known,” 22–54.
zodiac
The zodiac is a band of space on either side of the ecliptic, the apparent path of the
sun through the year, within which the planets and the moon always appear. It is
divided in a number of ways, most commonly: into 360 degrees, into 12 irregular
constellations, into 12 regular signs, and into 27 or 28 mansions of the moon. Yeats
specifically uses the signs of the zodiac to record the movement of solar elements
within the system. The signs are usually reckoned from Aries, the start of which is
the spring equinox, and are in order: Aries (), Taurus (), Gemini (), Cancer
(), Leo (), Virgo (), Libra (), Scorpio (), Sagittarius (), Capricorn (),
Aquarius (), Pisces (). See Colin McDowell, “Shifting Sands,” 194–216.
372
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision
“The Harp of Aengus,” 220; “The Hero, the Girl
and the Fool,” 240; “His Memories,” 241; “His
Phoenix,” 218; “Human Dignity,” 240; “An Image from a Past Life,” 225, 231–33; “The Indian
upon God,” 179–80, 193; “Leda and the Swan,”
18, 137, 142, 147, 149, 150, 157, 158, 234,
236, 300, 301–2, 306; “Leda,” see “Leda and
the Swan”; “The Living Beauty,” 221, 247; “The
Man and the Echo,” 84–86; “A Man Young
and Old,” 236, 239, 240–41, 250; “A Meditation in Time of War,” 141, 231; “Meditations
upon Death,” 250, 258, 268, later divided into
“At Algeciras—A Meditation upon Death” and
“Mohini Chatterjee,” q.v.; “The Mermaid,”
240; “Mohini Chatterjee,” 250, 268; “Nineteen
Hundred and Nineteen,” 99, 228, 335; “The
Old Countryman,” 240; “Owen Aherne and his
Dancers,” 240; “The Peacock,” 264–65; “The
Phases of the Moon,” 3, 14, 18, 136, 137, 148,
193, 218, 219–220, 223, 225–27, 229, 234,
235, 240, 247, 249, 314, 321–22; “A Prayer on
Going into My House,” 219, 225; “Presences,”
218; “Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn,”
157, 170, 304; “Ribh Considers Christian Love
Insufficient,” 180; “Ribh Denounces Patrick,”
180; “Sailing to Byzantium,” 138, 145, 167,
245, 332; “The Saint and the Hunchback,” 225;
“The Second Coming,” 5, 15, 137, 138, 144,
147, 149, 150, 151, 157, 166, 167, 233, 249,
334, 335; “The Shadowy Waters,” 315; “Solomon and the Witch,” 151, 174, 180, 181, 225,
231, 294, 336; “Solomon to Sheba,” 151, 180,
294; “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” 285;
“The Statues,” 87, 100; “Stream and Sun at
Glendalough,” 173, 191; “Supernatural Songs,”
180, 244, 304; “There,” 180; “The Three Monuments,” 241; “To be Carved on a Stone at Thoor
Ballylee,” 231; “Towards Break of Day,” 225,
232, 240; “The Tower,” 231; “The Tree of Life,”
303; “Two Songs from a Play,” 97; “Two Songs
of a Fool,” 225; “Under the Moon,” 220; “Under the Round Tower,” 142, 150, 151; “Vacillation,” 173, 308, 321, 324, 326; “Whence had
they Come?” 167; “A Woman Young and Old,”
239, 241, 303; “Words for Music Perhaps,”
239, 250, 251; “The Young Countryman,” 240;
“Young Man’s Song,” 239;
collections of poetry: The Cat and the Moon and
Certain Poems, 231, 234, 236; The Collected
Poems (1933), 236, 240; The Green Helmet and
Other Poems, 287; Later Poems (1922), 218,
246, 305; Michael Robartes and the Dancer, 1, 5,
218, 225, 231, 232, 233, 240, 249, 296, 314;
Nine Poems, 218; October Blast (1927), 240; Responsibilities and Other Poems, 218, 278; Seven
Poems and a Fragment (1922), 232, 240, 248;
The Tower, 147, 218, 236, 240, 244, 245, 248,
249, 250, 300; The Wild Swans at Coole, Other
Verses and a Play in Verse (1917), 218, 231, 246;
The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), 217–18, 219,
225, 227, 240, 246, 314; The Wind Among the
Reeds, 303, 305, 325; The Winding Stair, 240,
241, 243, 244, 245, 250; Words for Music Perhaps, 244, 250, 268;
plays: At the Hawk’s Well, 228, 229–230, 231, 246,
248, 249, 278; Calvary, 181, 227, 228, 229,
245, 248; The Cat and the Moon, 231, 234, 246,
249; Cathleen Ni Houlihan, 230; The Death of
Cuchulain, 245, 248; The Dreaming of the Bones,
227, 228, 229, 248, 249, 278; Fighting the
Waves, 234; Four Plays for Dancers, 227, 228,
230, 234, 314; A Full Moon in March, 244, 245;
The Green Helmet, 248; The Herne’s Egg, 181–
82, 193, 245, 305; The King of the Great Clock
Tower, 245, 342; On Baile’s Strand, 248; The
Only Jealousy of Emer, 219–20, 229–30, 248;
Purgatory, 137, 245, 264, 334, 342; The Resurrection (and “Introduction”), 1, 7, 17, 106, 113,
118, 217, 234, 236, 245, 324; The Shadowy Waters, 315; The Unicorn from the Stars, 180, 249;
Where there is Nothing, 180; The Words Upon the
Window-Pane (and “Introduction”), 1, 11, 20;
prose works: “The Adoration of the Magi,” 138,
147, 155, 157, 236; “Introduction to Aphorisms
of Yoga,” 185; Autobiographies (Au; CW3), 11,
107, 235, 260, 291, 301, 303, 303, 307, 312,
314, 315, 318; “Introduction to Bishop Berkeley,” 110; The Celtic Twilight, 101, 152, 252,
267; Discoveries, 19, 303; Fairy and Folk Tales
of the Irish Peasantry (FFTIP), 101, 249, 250;
“From Democracy to Authority,” 331; Hodos
Chameliontos, 260; “Introduction to The Holy
Mountain,” 131; “Introduction to An Indian
Monk,” 135, 191; “Invoking the Irish Fairies,”
320; “J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time,”
246 “John Sherman,” 292; “Magic” (1900), 167,
188, 279, 314; “Introduction to ‘Mandukya
Upanishad,’” 131; “My Friend’s Book,” 108–9,
111, 112, 161, 248; “The Need for Audacity of
Thought,” 100; On the Boiler, 185, 329, 334,
340, 341; “Introduction to The Oxford Book of
Modern Verse,” 131, 248, 259–60; A Packet for
Ezra Pound (“A Packet for Ezra Pound” in AVB;
PEP), 1, 19, 21, 90, 98, 136, 139, 141, 189, 192,
217, 235–36, 245, 246, 249, 250, 252, 253,
256–63, 267, 268, 284, 286, 289, 304, 307;
PEP sections: “Rapallo,” 90, 250, 252, 258–60,
262–63; “Introduction to A Vision,” 217, 235,
236, “To Ezra Pound,” 250, 283, 324; —Pages
from a Diary Written in 1930, see unpublished:
Diary of 1930; Per Amica Silentia Lunae, 20,
107, 131, 156, 184, 188, 190, 211, 218, 219,
Index
225, 236, 248, 253, 277–79, 281, 284, 289,
293, 294, 319–20, 322; “Prometheus Unbound”
(essay), 185, 187; “Rosa Alchemica,” 157, 236,
279, 307; The Secret Rose, 157, 236; Stories of
Michael Robartes and His Friends (also “Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends” in
AVB; SMRF), 151, 217, 219, 236, 245, 249,
250, 251, 282, 289, 296–300, 301, 305, 306;
“The Stirring of the Bones,” 107; “Swedenborg, Mediums and the Desolate Places,”
248, 302; “The Symbolism of Poetry,” 291;
The Tables of the Law [and] The Adoration of
the Magi (1897), 138, 157; “The Tables of the
Law,” 193, 236; The Trembling of the Veil, 260;
A Vision, (passim); specific sections: “Blake and
the Great Wheel,” 237, 238; “The Completed
Symbol,” 5, 71, 86, 103, 114, 115, 129, 156,
162, 184, 186, 226, 239; “The Dance of the
Four Royal Persons,” 22, 235, 295; “Dedication to Vestigia,” 151, 283, 295, 316; “Desert
Geometry or The Gift of Harun Al-Raschid,”
see poems: “The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid”;
“Dove or Swan,” 92, 94, 118, 119, 126, 134,
136–158 (passim), 226, 236, 247, 255, 281,
301, 302, 305; “The End of the Cycle,” 138,
140, 154, 157, 187, 308; “Examination of the
Wheel,” 136; “The Gates of Pluto,” 7, 226,
229, 236, 240, 304–5; “The Great Wheel,” 57,
65, 66, 69, 94, 136, 235; “The Great Year of
the Ancients,” 18, 103, 136, 143, 236; “Introduction to the Great Wheel,” 250, 258;
“The Principal Symbol,” 4, 136, 165; “The
Soul in Judgment,” 8, 19, 55–89 (esp. 55,
56, 59, 77–78, 84–85, 88), 99, 103, 111–13,
156, 170, 177, 185, 187, 236, 239, 305; “The
Twenty-eight Embodiments,” (AVA), 54, 235,
254; “The Twenty-eight Incarnations,” (AVB),
33, 34, 50, 136, 149; “What the Caliph Partly
Learned,” 3, 53, 136, 234; “What the Caliph
Refused to Learn,” 136, 233, 234, 236, 237;
—Wheels and Butterflies (1934), 234; “William Blake and His Illustrations to the Divine
Comedy,” 292; “Witches and Wizards and
Irish Folklore,” 248;
works not published by Yeats, and drafts: “Appendix by Michael Robartes,” 194, 249; Diary
of 1930 (NLI 30,354 and Pages from a Diary
Written in 1930), 7, 10, 108, 112, 113, 122,
131–32, 152, 160–61, 170–76, 183–85, 188,
190–93, 239; “Genealogical Tree of Revolution”
(NLI 30,280), 185, 341, 343; “Guardians of the
Tower and Stream” (draft play, NLI 30,427 &
30,488), 230–33, 248; “Is the Order of R. R.
and A. C. to Remain a Magical Order?” 287,
319, 321; “Leo Africanus,” 161, 193, 248, 277,
279–81, 282, 284, 286, 289; Memoirs (Mem),
373
192, 287, 292, 307, 326; “Michael Robartes
Foretells,” 20, 190, 249, 343; “Notes upon the
Life After Death” (NLI 36,272/12) 186, 189,
192, 193; “The Phases of the Moon” (NLI
13,587 & 36,265), 219–21, 246, 247; “A Race
Philosophy” (NLI 30,280), 340, 343; Rapallo
Notebook B, (NLI 13,579) 187; Rapallo Notebook C (NLI 13,580), 20, 167, 190; Rapallo
Notebook D (NLI 13,581), 8–9, 19, 20, 191;
Rapallo Notebook E (NLI 13,582), 127; Rapallo Notebooks, 236, 251; “Seven Propositions,”
16, 19, 20, 171, 172, 191, 215, 216; The Speckled Bird, 193; drafts for SMRF (NLI 13,577),
251; Vision papers: Card File, 27, 31, 33, 39,
40–41, 49, 52, 53, 54, 56, 81, 82, 83, 88, 133,
144, 145, 149, 157, 188, 189, 196, 198–200,
207–9, 214–15, 251, 254; “Discoveries of Michael Robartes” (YVP4, draft), 12, 13, 16, 20,
44, 173, 188, 202, 226–27, 246, 255, 275, 308,
321–22; “Examination of my horoscope” (automatic script, NLI 36,256/25), 201–3; “Occult
Papers of W. B. Yeats” (OPWBY), 201, 202,
204, 209, 213, 219, 232, 313; Sleep and Dream
Notebooks, 56, 57, 86, 212, 232, 249, 286,
320; Vision Notebooks (VNB), 27, 28, 29, 31,
33, 39, 52, 53, 78, 79, 117, 201, 206, 207, 209,
215; “Whose Horoscope? Georges,” 203, 214
Yeats’s “Vision” Papers, see Harper, G. M.
Yechidah, 322, 324
Yesod, see also sephirah and Tree of Life, 323
Yorubans, 134–35
Zalewski, Pat, 325–26
Zen Buddhism, 87, 175
Zeno of Elea, see also Stoicism, 99
Zeus, 140, 146, 147, 283; Zeus and Leda, 147, 149,
150, 301, 306
zodiac, 9, 20, 115, 133, 174, 186, 199, 200, 214,
222, 251; afterlife stages labeled by, 67, 71,
192; in “Chosen,” 174, 241, 242, 243–44; solar
measure, 66, 67, 115–19, 121, 251; tropical/
sidereal, 132; see also Aquarius, Aries, Cancer,
Capricorn, Gemini, Leo, Libra, Pisces, Sagittarius, Scorpio, Taurus, Virgo
Zuckert, Catherine H., 101