"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Daniel Morgan

Like many men of the late Victorian age (though linked by a small cabal stretching throughout all ages), William Butler Yeats had a mind to look past grey, material sight, beyond the industrial wasteland of Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. There stirred in his heart something every artist, saint, or mystic has sought: the artifice of eternity. Much of Yeatesian scholarship has revolved around his political past, desire for an idyllic Ireland, passion for Maud Gonne, or other equally valid but peripheral pursuits. Though Maud Gonne or nationalism is the motivating force behind much of his verse, nearly all of them have a common worldview supposing and suffusing their backdrop. Contrary to the blithe dismissals of W. H. Auden and others, it is a critical mistake to underestimate Yeats' search for the ghostly Platonic realm in his poetry. As Yeats said, "The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write" (qtd. in Harper 2). Contrary to M. L. Rosenthal's assertion, even though "he plunged into arcane studies . . . his themes are most clearly the general ones of life and death, love and hate, man's condition, and history's meanings" (xv). Yeats cannot be surely interpreted without recourse to those arcane studies.

Self-conscious growing up, Yeats couldn't help but feel awkward around the "smarter kids" who had normal goals in life. Yeats was the kind of man with a mind too intense for one specific task or subject. The things that concerned him required a greater outlet or system that might embody "the greatness of the world in tears" ("The Sorrow of Love" 6). Fed by Irish myths from his mother, he would find those familiar tales a safe haven and resource away from urban decay, political bickering, or the ever-lingering doubts of the artist's mind.

Early in his life, Yeats helped found and chair the Dublin Hermetic Society, the first of many such organizations he would join. Assuredly, there would be many eccentric characters with whom he would identify, though he must have felt a numinous connection with George Russell in art school (Flannery 16). Like Yeats, Russell was deeply involved in the occult and they provided each other with books on Eastern mysticism. Then there was John O'Leary, a leading figure in the Irish Nationalist Movement. O'Leary shared his interest in Irish politics and, by books and conversation, helped sharpen Yeats' dualism between material England and spiritual Ireland (Flannery 17). Ireland became almost a sort of mandala for Yeats after that, urging him on to fulfill the potential the country offered for him. Quickly, it can be noted, the Indian guru Mohini Chatterji, who appears in so many poems, served as one of the few people who so one-sidedly influenced Yeats; Yeats was able to educate or inspire most of his other friends, being rather on the same level, but Chatterji was of a different sort, providing the example for Yeats to follow. It is this sort of relationship that would give Yeats reason to grow into the guru he became.

It is somewhat peculiar that even though the occult is an esoteric and individual-centered discipline, in Yeats' mind it was apparently favorable to individualist materialism or the communal nature of organized religion. When the time came for a spilt in the Theosophical Society, Yeats pulled away from the Western individual school towards an Eastern understanding, where monism and oblivion of self is taught. He thought that the tragedy he strived for in his plays "tends not towards the definition and discrimination of individuality, to all that is called character, but towards those moments when individuality sinks away, when drama is 'emptied' of the naively human" (Ure 43). Eventually Yeats had his actors wear masks to hide their "naïve" humanity.

As esoteric as Yeats was, he never sought obscurity for the sake of obscurity. Magic for him was meant to be universal. It is most unfortunate to read selections of Yeats' work that are as byzantine as the visions of Blake. For those occasions, one is as disappointed as a young occult-delving C. S. Lewis was upon listening to a much older Yeats at a reading. Surrounded in smoke and haze, the decrepit man droned on and on, a mere shadow of his former genius, the logical conclusion to the magician's isolation. It is during those moments that Yeats is drowned out by the vast fog of his beliefs. While his artistic achievements remained bolder than his early Romantic work, his web of mental constructions and mystical connections consumed him like conspiracy theory. Who knows what might have happened to him had he lived to read a grown-up Lewis' essay, "Myth Became Fact", about Christ's consummation of pagan mystery, or even had he heeded Chesterton's earlier admonishment on Faery stories?

In relation to Yeats' views on individualism, the subject of demon possession is most telling. When he was one-and-twenty, Katherine Tynan took Yeats to a séance where at one point he felt to be possessed (Flannery 17). It scared the hell out of him. One should remember in the Christian tradition, it is only safe to empty oneself like Christ did (i.e., Phil 2:7) if something better comes in to fill (the Holy Spirit). That day Yeats discovered the negative side to oblivion and a greater fear of playing innocent with prestidigitation. Another schism in the Order of the Golden Dawn was precisely over the fact that some adepts wished to conduct more experiments than research. Yeats played it cautious, preferring research to actual experience.

An interesting note on the individualism of Yeats can be found in the common practice of taking pseudonyms. For Yeats, it was for occultic purposes that he adopted "Demon Est Deus Inversus" (Ellmann 99). Like Oscar Wilde ("Sebastian Melmoth") or George Russell ("Aeon"), the second name conveyed a deeper part of the personality. It also reflected the schismed Victorian, beginning to go self-conscious like the Post-modernists would. However, the Victorian split was not resultant of any post-war angst, though it was indeed existential. The meaning of "Demon Est Deus Inversus" connotes just how dramatically Yeats tied opposites together, just as Blake married Heaven and Hell.

As said above, while many scholars look to Yeats' political career as indicative of his character and life, they overlook the idea that perhaps politics was merely an expedient route to cleanse Ireland from modern filth and restore its former pagan glory. Irish myth for Yeats, myself, and others who believe humanity is hardly ever more real than in story, remains a potent testimony to older, simpler patterns of thinking. If Yeats was ever passionate in politics it was because he felt the weight of Irish legendary heroes harrowing his mind. His colossal sense of the nature of things had to be channeled. He once proclaimed, "I would have Ireland re-create the ancient myths with subjects taken from [the artist's] religious beliefs. Only in this way and perhaps only in Ireland is it possible to achieve once more the union of art and religion" (qtd. In Harper 117). Why Yeats saw Ireland as such a ley line for this union is not clear. Perhaps it was due to the people's intense connection to the land and its folk tales or resistance to industrialization. Whatever the case, he linked "deeper magic", to borrow Lewis' phrase, to the land where green was worn.

Much of this folk mythology is achieved through Yeats, again not through forlorn love or politics, but through his symbolist poetry. The study of the motif of gyres will be omitted for the sake of originality. Symbols and archetypes (or alternatively secret knowledge in general) constitute perhaps the chief thrust of the occult, beside themes of sex and death (Flannery 15). More than mere allegory, the symbol at once references all the images an individual has built up on his life that can be consciously and unconsciously linked together. This creates a huge wave of resonance that "speaks" to the reader. Imagine the word "water": it connotes the primitive world (2 Peter 3:5), the Flood (verse 6), the Jordan crossing, the life and death of baptism, the feminine and unconscious, the moon, eastern dragons, a glassy crystalline sea or the storms of uncertainty, amniotic fluid, the Holy Spirit, snow and ice and steam, as well as any collage of memories the reader has built up during all his experiences (and, for some people, throughout all their past lives or collective unconscious). Objects in nature or religion are the most powerful of these symbols, evoking either deep nostalgia, peace, love, or hate. The parallelism to poetry is obvious. Yeats constantly made use of motifs like pale moons, stars reflected in a pool, unloosed hair, forlorn twilight, red mournful lips, mouse-grey death, swans, and typical Romantic sorrow. Rosenthal agrees "he had given his entire adult life to the study of mystical symbolism" which stored "tremendous psychic power" (xxxii, xxii).

Much has been made of Carl Jung's work with archetypes, dreams, and the collective unconscious, but less is known of his revival of alchemy and the occult. As with Yeats (and even the first recognized modern scientists like Isaac Newton), Jung's occult beliefs were popularly overshadowed by his outer profession. But both men knew that primal word-pictures, symbols, or sigils have the immediate power of summoning a deity or uniting two opposites. In Christianity, a relationship with Christ conveys all of the danger and secret worlds but none of the evils of the occult. Instead of malicious, unknown forces that might possess a young man like Yeats, the Bible gives imagery of the Holy Spirit in terms of water (John 3:5) or fire (Matt 3:11), catharsis and catastrophe. How can one object be represented by two opposing ideas? That is the key to the occult, especially in alchemy, that "of a sexual principle at the heart of all existence and all history" (Rosenthal xxxii). The purification and union of two opposite elements, the intercourse between the macrocosm and the microcosm, brings about something wondrous.

Speaking of intercourse, it seems a good place to touch on Yeats' sexuality as it concerns the occult. Partaking in spiritual marriage with Maud Gonne was hardly the only unorthodox event that characterizes Yeats' views on marriage. But unlike his profligate mentor Shelley, Yeats expressed his eroticism more in verse than in the bedroom. Since "Alastor" was his favourite "song of experience" of Shelley's, it can only be reasoned that Yeats lustily identified with such images of the perfect mate, youthful dreams for knowledge (in the biblical sense as well), and burned out passion. Without being digressive, it is possible that the raw energy of even the "Crazy Jane" poems can be traced to Yeats' mystical preoccupation. The discussion of opposites "fair and foul" in "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop" is but one example. "For nothing can be sole (soul) or hole (whole) / That has not been rent." (17-18). Indeed, one might even see a blending of Maud and Yeats in the woman too wild for love, yet enslaved to it all the same.

Perhaps nowhere is this side of the occult played out more than in "Leda and the Swan" (1928). The rape of Leda by Zeus is destined to birth the actions of the Trojan War through Helen (one might say like Maud Gonne): "The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead" (10-11). Just at the point of conception the meter changes; with the "terrible beauty" of Easter, everything changes. This union starts the yarn of two millennia of pagan history, only clipped when Mary's "divine rape" started the next two millennia of the Christian era. Of course, the parallels are not so convenient outside of a poetic context, but the occult wording is dreadfully ominous. "Did she put on his knowledge with his power?" (13). Yeats desired to look into the heavenlies and not just be pushed and possessed like some pawn. He desired an answer to existence. Unfortunately his tone is coldly skeptical in finished Leda's fate, dropped by the "indifferent beak" (14). It does not get any bleaker than that.

How might his literary predecessors, largely consisting of Romantics, offer him an answer to this question? Surely they posed it themselves after witnessing what they did. Shelley, seeing the poet as a prophet-god figure on the horizon, once claimed to have seen his own doppelgänger before his death. Blake frequently saw faeries, and on one occasion witnessed a whole faery funeral train. Yeats was not alone then in his prophetic dreams as a boy and his encounter with faery lights. As an adult, his devotion to Shelley and Blake did not waver, though his quest was too intensely personal to include them. While we might not know the conclusion Yeats reached in the end, it is important to analyze one last poem that foretold what his expectation was for the rest of the world.

During his involvement with MacGregor Mathers in the Order of the Golden Dawn, Yeats received a vision by cartomancy to be used in "The Second Coming" (1922). The image of the slouching beast over the sand is much more than a simple metaphor. In this remarkable work lies a rather dire forecast when the Antichrist-figure comes: "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . . The ceremony of innocence is drowned" (4, 6). This apocalyptic first-person account is graphic in its generality with the "blank gaze" and "slow thighs" of the Sphinx. The naivety of the viewer coupled with the immanent death and carrion (signaled by the desert birds) compile this future vision. There is no psychedelic, "free-sex" Age of Aquarius on the way.

And then just as suddenly as the "vast image" comes, "The darkness drops again" (12, 18). The sudden end suggests the same fog there was before the vision began. With the experience over, the narrator can only surmise about what's coming with a trembling question about the nature of the beast. Yeats only points to the Spiritus Mundi (similar to the Romantic Zeitgeist) as an indication of the source of the poetic vision. The echoes of Shelley and foreshadowing of Jung are evident in this most obscure, and hardly edifying, of inspirations.

Indeed, for Yeats the mists of magic never seemed to clear. Ireland remained choked with the grey cement streets and buildings it had in "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" (1920). The green circle of faery was still an illusive realm. All the popular hermetic and spiritualist covens were splintered and disparate. When Yeats died, the modern world (broadly bereft of Spirit-filled Christianity) still knew nothing of the unity of opposites. While this outcome does not detract from the purpose of Yeats' poetry ("The Second Coming" even seemed to confirm this end), there will remain a gloam of disappointment, unrequited love, and mortal sorrow over his verse.

Works Cited

Ellmann, Richard. Yeats: The Man and the Masks. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1978.

Flannery, Mary Catherine. Yeats and Magic: The Earlier Works. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1977.

Harper, George Mills. Yeats's Golden Dawn. Great Britain: Barnes and Nobles, 1974.

Ure, Peter. W. B. Yeats. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1963.

Yeats, William Butler. "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop". The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Collier, 1989.

---. "Leda and the Swan". The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Collier, 1989.

---. "The Second Coming". The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Collier, 1989.

---. Selected Poems and Three Plays of William Butler Yeats. Ed. M.L. Rosenthal. New York: Collier, 1986.

---. "The Sorrow of Love". The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Collier, 1989.

---. "The Stolen Child". The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Collier, 1989.

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