The Widening Gyre

Leap Day Extra

2012-02-29T23:27:00.016-05:00

To High Spirits
You have taken the vodka
That I was probably
Saving for tomorrow.
Go on and take it
For there's more enterprise
In waking naked.

by Kenneth Koch

(with nods to William Carlos Williams and William Butler Yeats)

Antithetical Sidelights

2012-02-18T19:02:00.000-05:00

Nothing is less real than realism… Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986), "I Can't Sing, So I Paint! Says Ultra Realistic Artist; Art is Not Photography—It Is Expression of Inner Life!: Miss O’Keeffe Explains Subjective Aspect of Her Work," interview in the New York Sun, 1922.

The Will looks into a painted picture. The Creative Mind looks into a photograph, but both look into something which is the opposite of themselves. The picture is that which is chosen, while the photograph is heterogeneous. The photograph is fated, because by fate is understood that which comes from without, whereas the Mask is predestined, Destiny being that which comes to us from within. We best express the heterogeneousness of the photograph if we call it a photograph of a crowded street, which the Creative Mind—when not under the inﬂuence of the Mask—contemplates coldly; while the picture contains but few objects and the contemplating Will is impassioned and solitary.
(A Vision A, 15; cf. A Vision B, 86–87)

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

e. e. cummings (1894–1962), letter to a high-school student, 1958.

As life goes on we discover that certain thoughts sustain us in defeat, or give us victory, whether over ourselves or others, and it is these thoughts, tested by passion, that we call convictions. Among subjective men (in all those, that is, who must spin a web out of their own bowels) the victory is an intellectual daily re-creation of all that exterior fate snatches away, and so that fate's antithesis; while what I have called 'the Mask' is an emotional antithesis to all that comes out of their internal nature. We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy.
(Autobiographies, 189; Collected Works III, 163)

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs (1955–2011), commencement address at Stanford, 2005.

The antithetical Mask and Will are free, and the primary Mask and Will enforced ; and the free Mask and Will are personality, while the enforced Mask and Will are code, those limitations which give strength precisely because they are enforced. Personality, no matter how habitual, is a constantly renewed choice, varying from an individual charm, in the more antithetical phases, to a hard objective dramatisation; but when the primary phases begin man is moulded more and more from without.
(A Vision B, 84; cf. A Vision A, 18)

The West Coast Tarot Reading

2012-01-28T12:29:00.000-05:00

Train 7.15pm Mar 24 [1920]
on way to San Francisco [from Portland, Oregon]
(past Ashland)

Shuffle & deal out 28 packs
look for medium as Queen of Cups – WB as King of Wands
Then write again
28th pack
now 16th
17 & 18
now gather all up & by short method using medium ask [how]
[upside down writing] successful was Saturday night
Dont read till after judgment
Yes Yes
No swords
a predominant receptivity
martial activity
swords indicate Eastern influence – that is lacking here
It looks like a failure
Use Kg of Wands in same way
Yes Yes that is allright – much better Sword is yourself and the symbolism is complete – We wanted eastern symbolically incarnation – it looks like it – The sword is the daimon
No influence from medium
I am speaking of nature – not actual conception
Yes
That which came from west to east returned to west
Now it must be the reverse
in the multitudinous avatar all symbolism of all people must go from East to west & back to East
(YVP2 536)

En Route

As far as I can tell, the Yeatses were taking Southern Pacific's West Coast train from Portland, Oregon, to San Francisco. George noted "past Ashland", one of the last towns in Oregon, so they were probably just crossing into California when they made this reading.

Before they had left Portland, on the night of Saturday 20 March, "A rather wonderful thing happened" (WBY to Edmund Dulac, 22 March 1920). A young Japanese man, Junzo Sato, had given Yeats a 550-year-old samurai sword "wrapped up in a piece of beautifully embroidered cloth, from some ancient lady-in-waiting's dress" (Junzo Sato's description; see Life2 167). This would feature in several of Yeats's later poems, most strikingly "A Dialogue of Self and Soul".

Tarot card back, featuring Golden Dawn's Rose-Cross Lamen

Creating a Spread

The Yeatses were here using a form of tarot reading based on the 28 phases of the moon. Normally in any of the practices associated with the system, we struggle to gather what could have been going on from a few scraps; here what is remarkable is that so much is spelled out on paper, though it is still very fragmentary. In part this would seem to indicate that they had not done this before, or at least not in this form, so that the script is giving fairly full instructions.

They would have known very well that the "significator" for George, the medium, as a mature woman with moderately fair complexion, would be the Queen of Cups, and that W. B. Yeats's darker looks marked him as King of Swords. This is entirely consistent with standard Golden Dawn practice which specified Kings and Knights for men, older and younger, Queens and Pages for women, older and younger, and then divided the suits by complexion with Wands at the fairest end, then Cups, Swords, and Coins as the darkest. It is quite probable that the Yeatses also considered rising signs, with GY's ascendant in the watery sign of Scorpio corresponding to Cups/Water and WBY's Aquarius ascendant corresponding to Swords/Air, (Wands or Staves would show Fire signs and Coins or Pentacles Earth ones). So it seems slightly strange to see this being stipulated by the spirits.

King of Swords, modern Marseilles Tarot

What they were being told to do was to deal the tarot pack or deck into 28 piles, and then look to see in which pile the two significators were found. Each pile would have contained only two or three cards, since there are only 78 cards in the tarot pack (Phases 1 to 22 would have three cards each, the rest only two). This is like a part of the main Golden Dawn tarot reading method called "Opening the Key," particularly the second or third part, where the cards are dealt out into twelve piles based on the houses or the zodiac.

At this point in the script it's difficult to be certain what happens, but it seems that, having looked at the different piles, George, as herself, then wrote down the piles where she found the two significators. One of the significators was found in the 28th pack of the Fool (2 cards) and the other in the 16th pack of "The Positive Man" (3 cards). The next line, "17 & 18", would refer to their own phases — WBY's Phase 17 and George's Phase 18—to broaden the picture (3 cards each). But in neither case can we tell what was done with these packs or groups of cards. Normally the reader would look at the surrounding cards to form an idea of the influences surrounding the person in question, balancing the elements according to the Golden Dawn's rules to see which supported and which weakened the main cards, and the cards would give views of wife and husband from two separate angles—first significator in context and then the influences on their respective personal phases. The problem is that without knowing the cards surrounding these or the cards in the other two piles, it is impossible to see exactly how the method might have worked.

Queen of Cups, Marseilles Tarot 1710s

Second Spread

The next question is whether these 11 cards were kept aside or included when they were told to "gather all up", but it seems probable that they were included.

Furthermore, it soon becomes clear that the reading has to do with whether or not they had conceived a child the previous Saturday. Their daughter Anne had been born in February 1919 and they were evidently considering another baby.

The next instruction to use "the short method using the medium" indicates that they will use the Queen of Cups (medium/George) again, and one the shorter Golden Dawn methods that they preferred. This is hardly surprising since "Opening the Key" involves five separate operations that divide the pack in spread according to the 4 letters of God's name, then 12 houses, then 12 signs, then 36 decanates, then the 10 sephiroth of the Tree of Life. A shorter method would tend to fix on the most pertinent of these stages, or other possible spreads.

Three of Swords, Sola Busca Tarot 1490s

This time we learn that the Queen is found in a group of cards containing no swords. This means either the group of cards itself or that by counting cards and not including all of them (the rules for counting through cards in the GD method are simple enough in their own way, but mean that only certain cards are included in the main reading). The script notes that this indicates an energy that is not outgoing but receptive (probably either Cups/Water or Pentacles/Earth or a combination of both). You might have thought that this was positive for conceiving and nurturing a child, and Swords in tarot are generally the negative suit and one that most readers would be glad to see lacking. However, that does not seem to be the case here.

Martial activity seems to contradict this receptivity—though it might be a misreading here for marital activity—the script is seldom clear. However, it could indicate cards that involve Mars either by sign or decanate (the GD's system included extensive correlations between signs , planets, decanates and cards, and the Yeatses had marked such correspondences on their own cards). And there was a special reason for wanting Martial activity, as we shall see.

The Two of Coins or Pentacles, Italian Tarot
WBY has noted that this corresponds to the Jupiter decanate of Capricorn by the GD system.
At the top, he has noted"Difficulties" and, at the bottom, "pleasant change, visit to friends etc."
(see the National Library of Ireland's Exhibition on W. B. Yeats)
Similar cues are included on the cards that Frieda Harris designed for Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot (below)

It then becomes clear that the spirits want swords, however,— "swords indicate Eastern activity". Now in the Golden Dawn system Air (and therefore swords) is identified with the East (Fire-South; Water-West; Earth-North), so there is some logic in the search for swords within the spread if Eastern influence is important.

The script notes that the venture looks like a failure—and indeed with respect to conceiving a child, it was to prove a disappointment, as their second child Michael was not born until late August 1921.

Yet the reading then proceeds to search for other possibilities, this time using the King of Wands (not Yeats's significator normally). And the reading continues with positive acclamations for the presence of swords=East. Here we are also told that the Sword=Daimon (and that is another can of worms), and it is worth noting that Yeats's Daimon was said to be "Martial" (YVP3 292), which is probably what lies behind the comment "Sword is yourself and the symbolism is complete" (though George's Daimon was also a Mars influence). There is also a very complex sense in which the Eastern influence was important to the Yeatses themselves: their second child was to be an avatar of the new age.

Ace of Swords, Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, 1910

Okay, so this is getting very involved and grandiose. Those of you who expected a simple tarot spread are getting a picture of parents who were more than ordinarily delusional, and those who find this stuff way too weird gave up at least three paragraphs ago.¡

It has to be said that this is where even the people who can easily cope with the weird in Yeats find that they are a little embarrassed. Basically, the Yeatses thought that they might/would be giving birth to one of the next age's avatars. These avatars of the coming age would be multiple or "multitudinous" and to some extent national, but they would be incarnations of the divine force. It also leads us back to the whole theme of the Conjunctions... (skip to the end if you just want to see how the tarot works).

Conjunctions: East and West

The script seems to imply that the child to be born will not be influenced by the mother's character or "nature", so that the child will be be more like its father, and A Vision includes a rather obscure passage about symbolical East and West as father and mother, though here it seems to work the other way round:

All these symbols can be thought of as the symbols of the relations of men and women and of the birth of children. We can think of the antithetical and primary cones, or wheels, as the domination, now by the man, now by the woman, and 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. Such symbolical children, sealed as it were by Saturn and Jupiter or Mars and Venus, cast off the mother and display their true characters as their cycle enters its last quarter. (AVB 211)

If Yeats, King of Swords, is seen as the Eastern influence, then he is fathering a child who will also be Eastern. Obviously here neither child is a Phase 1 or 15, since these are not human incarnations, but they embody that principle, though as usual Yeats does not make it clear quite the two concepts relate to each other precisely.


Seven of Wands and Two of Disks, Thoth Tarot, 1938–43 The Seven of Wands is one of six minor cards that correlates with a Martial decanate.

Indeed the Yeats children were said to have been sealed by the planetary conjunctions in their birth-charts: Anne, a Phase 16, by Mars and Venus, and later Michael, a Phase 14, by Jupiter and Saturn. Yeats reflected on this some fourteen years later:

I was told...that my two children would be Mars conjunctive Venus, Saturn conjunctive Jupiter respectively: and so they were—Anne the Mars-Venus personality.... George said it is very strange but whereas Michael is always thinking about life Anne always thinks of death. (L 827–28; 25 August 1934)

They also embody the Christian dispensation, Mars-Venus, and the coming antithetical dispensation, Jupiter-Saturn, not perhaps as avatars (that seems to have died down), but as symbolic children (still a fairly strange role for them to be playing, however unwittingly). For the primary dispensation at the birth of Jesus: "That which came from west to east returned to west | Now it must be the reverse | in the multitudinous avatar all symbolism of all people must go from East to west & back to East". I'll return to this subject again, I'm sure, but leave it for the moment, in order to conclude about the tarot reading.

Back to the Tarot Spread

So, finally we have a reading that is based on two aspects—a wheel of 28 Phases, where the querents' significators are used as well as their own phasal positions—and secondly, a shorter spread that involves some way in which the significators—in one case apparently a different one—are associated with distinct groups of cards such that GY's card is not located with any Swords, but WBY's is (here I show my ignorance, and would welcome any help or comments).

It's nothing radical—we can only assume that the phasal positions had the same basic meaning as they did in the Great Wheel. But without comment from the Yeatses, all we can tell is that they found a way of working their system into a new spread as they traveled southwards into California.

And it all seems to have an even greater weight, given that their luggage included a samurai sword from the East, given to them by a young man from Japan on the West coast of America.

Yeats and European Unions

2012-01-07T20:20:00.001-05:00

I'm not sure how much it matters or should matter to what extent the symbolism of A Vision describes a recognizable reality. If it were totally alien to what we experience, could it still have any validity? Does its claim to be "An Explanation of Life" require testing?

Much of the fascination of A Vision as with any symbolic system lies in the internal coherence, but without some reference to externals it would quickly lose our interest. A Vision's system does of course itself refer outwards to the lives of the men and women who people the incarnations represented by the phases of the moon, and to the great gyres that it claims to discern in the sweep of history.

In doing so Yeats does not make matters too difficult for himself, since he is free to assign people as he wishes to the phases (there is no external mechanism allocating them to a particular phase, as in astrology), and his interpretation of history is sketchy enough and broad enough to select only those few strands that actually fit the desired lineaments. Though his treatment of the historical gyres largely confines itself to Western European history, it is, as G. R. S. Mead noted, remarkable in omitting such major elements as the Reformation, the voyages of discovery and their consequences. Even so, the ideas raised and suggested are often provocative and can make the reader see certain matters anew.

The same is true of the forecasts that Yeats made (see YeatsVision.com), though he pruned the more detailed view of the future after the first publication, giving only the most general view of the coming years in A Vision B. One of those vague lines does, however, haunt me in a nagging way:

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)

To what extent was he looking forward to the European Union? and does it constitute as he saw it some "vast plaster Herculean image, final primary thought" (AVA 214) that he referred to in his more detailed view of the future in A Vision A? Surely in terms of his own theory, the civilization is far from decadent if we take the 2000-year measures that are the basis of his views. Yet, if the primary civilization that was enabled by Christianity and monotheistic religion in general started in 1000 C.E. and we find ourselves at the peak of the political primary, then has democracy reached its limits?

In some ways the image he uses is a false one—green sticks can be bound quite well into a bundle as long as they are straight enough and dry twigs resist being woven into a basket or any other unitary shape. However, at its heart probably lies the image of the bundle of sticks of the Roman fasces, a symbol of authority from ancient Rome that has had a wide range of uses in modern civic symbolism.

Most of us probably think first of Mussolini's adoption of the symbol and use of the term "fascism", and it is certain that Yeats would have had this image in mind. But the emblem appears in many places worldwide, including in many American insignia. The chair where Abraham Lincoln sits in the National Mall's Lincoln Memorial has fasces at its front, as a symbol of the Union.

The final section of A Vision B is dated "1934–36", so when Yeats envisaged Europe in artificial unity in the Thirties, did he see some possibility of fascist union? of enforced union? of something like the Union of the United States? Whatever he imagined, he would no doubt recognize the European Union that does exist as a fulfilment of his thought.

Within A Vision "discords" are both the technical relationship between certain Faculties and the more general opposite to concord, the antithetical strain of the Tinctures. The word also carries its usual meaning of conflict and strife and, though it would be crass understatement to call the Second World War discord, it is perhaps that paradox that is the greatest foresight in Yeats's formulation. The original core of the European Union, the six-member Coal and Steel Community of France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg arose in part from a desire to make war and conflict impossible, hence the post-war discords give birth to unity.

Artificial? That may be the real crux. Yeats all too often seems to glorify war and conflict in his writing, viewing them as vital and vivifying:

Much of what I say is Heraclitus. "Homer was wrong in saying 'Would that strife might perish from among gods and men'. He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe; for if his prayer was heard all things would pass away". And again "War is the father of all; some he has made gods ans some men; some bound and some free".

In his antithetical fervour, it sometimes seems that he would view the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia with more satisfaction than the peaceful union of European countries. But to call such union artificial simply because it represents the primary trend seems unnecessarily partisan. Doomed in the long term, perhaps, but not artificial.

In the broader cycle, the current civilization with span of some two thousand years is only reaching its midpoint. But this is analogous to "classical civilization" from 1000 B.C.E. to 1000 C.E., within which many empires rose and fell and many movements flourished and withered from the rise of Mycenean culture to the fading of Byzantium — few living through it would have seen it as a continuous whole. The historical cycles dealt with in "Dove or Swan" are rather shorter, lasting only a thousand years or so, and in this context therefore the civilization that arose around 1000 C.E. has already reached a maximum scope — the widening gyre of "The Second Coming" that has reached its point of collapse.

The Ten of any suit has reached its limit and the only way onward is to return the way it came, dwindling towards the Nine, or the start of a new suit, the Ace. In Yeats's system, both things happen: The Ace of the new gyre arises, while the gyre of the old retreats back towards its source.

It is perhaps easy at the moment to say that European civilization is in decadence or is on the point of collapse — certainly quite a few people are doing it. Yeats was right to point out that there is no infinite progress, and our current world is more primary than in his day, more democratic, more interconnected, and often putting quantity of information before depth of thought. In many ways, Yeats's vague vision of the future has already been realized. Yeats himself evades the question of what follows next.

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)

It may not be connected to reality, but it sure as hell feels as if it is. The symbols remain uncertain perhaps, but they speak to us and we discern the outlines of our world.

Spot the Difference: Answers

2012-01-02T17:49:00.000-05:00

In the spot the difference post, I put up three different versions of the Great Wheel designed by Dulac. From the top downwards they come from A Vision A (1925), Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends (1931) and A Vision B (1937). They're all essentially the same, apart from a few significant details.

At first glance, the most obvious difference is probably the least important: they are printed on different types of paper, A Vision A and Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends on lighter, half-glossy paper, tipped into the book, brown and grey respectively, and A Vision B printed on the book's standard white paper.

A Vision A

If you look a little more carefully you might then note that the lines in Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends are thicker and firmer, with fewer breaks than the original and that A Vision B returns to the slightly broken lines of the first version.

Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends

These heavier lines apply particularly to the symbols placed in the top left and bottom right, which are also interchanged in Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends — the symbols for Fire and Water. However, A Vision B again reverts the earlier version.

A Vision B

The big change is the interchanging of the zodiac signs: Cancer and Capricorn are changed in Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends and stay changed in A Vision B.

What does this mean? Effectively it reverses the zodiac from being one that runs in parallel with the phases of the moon and in an anti-clockwise direction into one that runs counter to the phases and in a clockwise direction, a truly solar zodiac.

In their own copies of A Vision A the Yeatses had noted some or all of these these changes. They kept four copies out of the 600 numbered copies printed, numbers 83, 366, 385 and 498. The first had no markings and is no longer in the Yeatses' library as now held by the National Library of Ireland, but the other three are all marked to a greater or lesser extent. The most fully marked was the last, which was the one sent to the printers to show what they were to retain and adapt for A Vision B (WBGYL 2466b and YL 2433c). In it Cancer and Capricorn were interchanged on the wheel both on Dulac's illustration (strips glued on) and on the diagram on page 13 of AVA (in ink; see CW13 343). Copy 366 shows the changes that were implemented in Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends: both Cancer and Capricorn and Fire and Water interchanged (CW13 341; WBGYL 2466a and YL 2433b), while the diagram on page 13 repeats the change of signs, since the elements aren't shown there.

It might have been Yeats's intention for the changes of #366 to be incorporated since, as Connie K. Hood notes, the printers asked him to send them a copy to clarify difficulties that they were having with "The Great Wheel" diagram ("The Search for Authority: Prolegomena to a Definitive Critical Edition of W. B. Yeats's A Vision [1937]", 127–28):

However, in copy #366 of AV-A, which was sent to the printers on 26 July 1937 for "diagram corrections," both the astrological signs and the two triangles are marked for correction. It is not clear whether the diagram correction involved the "Great Wheel" (66) or the placement of Dulac's unicorn plate (64). The triangles were not changed by the printers. It cannot be ascertained whether Yeats intended to make the diagram in AV-B identical to that in SMR (in that case, he could have simply sent to the printers a copy of SMR) or whether, as he so frequently did, he changed his mind again on the galleys. ("The Search for Authority", 220)

The important thing though is the zodiacal signs, and the reversal of direction that this interchange represents. It becomes a (more) solar zodiac.

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:

when the Husk or symbolic moon by whose movements alone we measure out the month upon the wheel has reached the middle of the second month, the Spirit, the sun in the annual symbol, is passing from [Aries] to [Taurus] & so on. The signs being so innumerated that the [solar] Spirit which moves from left to right [i.e. clockwise] & the [lunar] Husk that moves from Right to left [i.e. anti-clockwise] may both pass through their zodiac in the natural order of signs.

As this passage makes clear, it is important that each element, going round the wheel in its own direction, passes through the stages marking its progress in natural order forwards, whether it is the solar Spirit or its counterpart of Creative Mind, or lunar Husk or its counterpart of Will.

In part the change may be linked to Yeats's greater understanding of how his diagrams related to the precession of the solar equinoxes (AVB 254) and the four cardinal signs of the zodiac (Aires, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn) that had been included in some of the very earliest diagrams in the automatic script. These signs are also linked to the concepts of Head, Heart, Loins and Fall, that lie in cross-form across the wheel. Head, Heart, Loins and Fall deserve their own post or page later, but for the moment it is worth noting that Aries coincides with Head (and the sign is traditionally identified with the head of the body and is the sign of the sun's astrological "exaltation") while Libra coincides with Fall (the sign is traditionally identified with the lumbar region and is the sign of the sun's astrological "fall"). These two don't change. The other two do and towards a more logical form: Cancer is traditionally associated with the stomach region of the body and Capricorn with the knees—neither Heart (Leo) nor Loins (Scorpio)—but the sequence follows better with Aries, the zodiac's first sign, at the Head, followed by Heart aligned with Cancer, the fourth sign, rather than Capricorn, the tenth sign. Putting Libra, seventh sign, at the ambiguous term Fall, and then Capricorn at Loins does seem to give a line down the body.

The mid-points that these terms mark have other significances too including the position of the equinoxes and solstices at the centre of the coming antithetical civilization in ca. 3000 C.E. (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; AVA59); and positions linked to the four types of wisdom. Concerning this last, Yeats also had doubts: “I have more than once transposed Heart and Intellect, suspecting a mistake” (AVB 100n), but he kept the automatic script’s original attributions. Part of the complication derives from the fact it is not always clear whether the conditions affecting, for instance, the Mask, which is always opposite Will, should be placed with the Mask's position or the phase it affects.

However, this illustration and its corresponding diagram are crucial so these variations are key. As Yeats noted to Frank Pearce Sturm: "If you master the diagram on page 13 & the movements of the Four Faculties therein you will understand most of the book" (20 January 1926; FPS 90), so the same should in fact be said of the revised version in A Vision B on page 81.

A Vision A, 13

A Vision B, 81

But it must be remembered that the wheel is not a fixed circle and it is the cross currents of "the movements of the Four Faculties therein" that lie at the heart of the wheel and its variations.

Conjunctions I

2011-11-03T16:53:00.027-04:00

The earlier post on The Track of the Whirling Zodiac tried to set out some of the basics — and basic problems — related to the different ways in which the zodiac can be set against the circle of the phases, or actually any cycle against any other cycle. At the simplest level of A Vision, this entails quite a lot of thinking and work for not much reward, as the aspects where these various arrangements affect the material in A Vision are often unclear.

However, one place where the subject of zodiacs and phases running counter to one another does surface, albeit rather cryptically, is in A Vision's discussion of the "heraldic supporters" of the Full Moon. These are the influences on either side of Phase 15, the point where new religious dispensations start, and Yeats is dealing here in with cycles of about 2,150 years. These are measured according to phases for Will and, for Creative Mind, backward through phases or forwards through the Zodiac.

When Will is passing through Phases 16, 17 and 18 the Creative Mind is passing through the Phases 14, 13 and 12, or from the sign of Aries to the sign of Taurus, that is to say, it is under the conjunction of Mars and Venus. When Will on the other hand is passing through Phases 12, 13 and 14 the Creative Mind is passing through the Phases 18, 17 and 16, or from the sign of Pisces to the sign of Aquarius [actually Aquarius to Pisces], it is, as it were, under the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. (AVB 207)

If you know your traditional astrology, you will remember that Aries is ruled by Mars, so that the two are to some extent interchangeable, and that the same goes for Taurus and Venus, Pisces and Jupiter, and Aquarius and Saturn (Yeats sticks with the classical planets in this case). The animation below concentrates on the process of Will from Phase 12 to Phase 18, starting each time at Phase 12: first through phases and Zodiac, then focusing on just Will and Creative Mind, then substituting the planetary rulers for the signs, first with astrological glyphs and second in words, for clarity. It may help to view the animation a few times, concentrating each time on one aspect.


The passage of Will forwards through the phases 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18, and of Creative Mind through the zodiac Aquarius, Pisces, Aries, Taurus.

Since, therefore, a primary dispensation is said to start when Will is passing through 16–17–18 (i.e., a little after the mathematical point of Phase 15), its inception falls under the influence of Mars and Venus, taken from Creative Mind's passage through Aries and Taurus—religion is intrinsically more allied to the solar zodiac than the lunar phases. Similarly, an antithetical dispensation is said to start a little before the mathematical marker, while Will is passing through Phases 12–13–14, so its solar influence is Saturn and Jupiter from Creative Mind's passage through Aquarius and Pisces.

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 discovery 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)

The outward-looking mind (Mars-Venus) is fundamentally objective and primary, while the introspective mind (Jupiter-Saturn) is fundamentally subjective and antithetical. Yeats's main purpose in introducing these conjunctions is to characterize two dispensations, the primary dispensation typified by Christianity and the antithetical dispensation typified by the classical pantheons and due to return in the twenty-first century.

Strictly speaking Yeats thought that the primary dispensation had started maybe ten generations before Christ's birth—about two centuries. This would place the Phase 15 point at 200 B.C.E., so that at the time of Christ's birth the cosmic Creative Mind was passing through the Mars-Venus influence. (Buddha was the wrong choice not just from his character, but also from his dating.) And he gathered that all primary dispensations take a while to gain momentum in this way, so always fell under this influence.

In contrast, antithetical dispensations start before the preceding cycle is truly finished, i.e., while Creative Mind is still passing through Aquarius and Pisces, under Saturn and Jupiter. In other words, even if the antithetical era is not yet starting its cycle at Phase 15, it is fading in before the fact, maybe by a hundred years or more.

If Yeats took the length of a dispensation as 2,200 years, then the primary era beginning in 200 B.C.E. would be finishing in 2000 C.E., and the antithetical advent might be starting in 1900. This all means that primary dispensations are significantly shorter than antithetical ones, and also meant that Yeats himself might be living in the pre-dawn glow of the coming antithetical era. Even if the antithetical only starts a hundred years before Phase 15 is reached, the two hundred years off the beginning of the primary goes to the preceding antithetical, and the one hundred years of fade in of the new antithetical is taken off the preceding primary, so it could mean that an antithetical era is almost 600 years longer than a primary.

In the poem "Michael Robartes and the Dancer" Yeats chose to symbolize the Saturn-Jupiter conjunction that presides over the beginning of an antithetical era with the Sphinx. Given this association of the sphinx with the antithetical, it is no accident that the enigmatic "rough beast" that stirs in "The Second Coming" is appears like the sphinx at Giza—though a brilliant touch that it is described rather than named—as it ushers in the coming antithetical dispensation.

.... 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 indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The beast is not necessarily the age's avatar, nor the anti-Christ, except inasmuch as it heralds the antithesis to Christ's era (see Notes on "The Second Coming" on my website). However, it has many characteristics that Yeats found a variety of ways to explore. It leaves us with questioning and foreboding.

I'll look further at the symbolism and the complicated resonances that Yeats creates — which include making his two children representatives of the two combinations — ater on, in a second part "Conjunctions II".

Spot the Difference

2011-10-31T19:02:00.024-04:00

I'm sure that everybody has looked at puzzles where you have to spot the difference—I remember getting quite hooked on the one in the Washington Post magazine a while back. These ones aren't quite so fiendish, though you will have to make allowances for slightly different dimensions and angles of photographing. Here are three versions of Dulac's engraving of the Great Wheel. Spot the differences!

Three versions of "The Great Wheel"

(Answers, or at least a few of them, in while.)

The Track of the Whirling Zodiac

2011-09-29T18:12:00.002-04:00

When applying the zodiac to the phases there is always the problem of how to align them. It's not a question of order or anything: the twelve signs always run in the same order—Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces—though occasionally the sign at the start of the sequence may change. It's simply a question of which direction the zodiac should run in, where it should start in relation to the phases, and whether the boundaries match phase boundaries, some phases boundaries or none. And there is is no single answer but a very valid range of possibilities, each of which has a different significance within the system, and each of which serves a different purpose. The problem is that Yeats doesn't always make it very clear what principles he is applying, so it's often necessary to infer from his comments and there is definitely room for confusion, sometimes Yeats's own.
Twelve and the zodiac are, for Yeats, the sun's measures, while twenty-eight and the months are the moon's, so often Yeats uses the zodiac to emphasize a solar measure, opposed or contrasted to the moon's phases or months.

In Yeats's diagrams the phases of the moon always run anti-clockwise and for most purposes act as a foundation for the rest of the structure. If the sense of progression or order is following this basic pattern, then the zodiac follows the same direction. So if we seek to pattern the year after the phases, with Phase 15 in spring, Phase 22 in summer, Phase 1 in autumn and Phase 8 for winter, the months or zodiac will follow the same pattern, starting with March or Aries and proceeding anti-clockwise.

Other arrangements follow the cardinal directions of the compass, with Aries as solar East at Phase 22 (which is lunar East), Cancer as North at Phase 1 (lunar North), Libra as West at Phase 8 (lunar West), and Capricorn as South at Phase 15 (lunar South). (The solar symbolism is logical but mixes annual and daily elements: North and South are marked by the sun's tropical or turning points, its maximum northerly latitude coming at the Tropic of Cancer and its maximum southerly latitude at the Tropic of Capricorn; if Capricorn is at the daily midheaven in the South, then Aries is rising in the East and Libra is setting in the West.) This is the pattern used when dealing with the afterlife, when we are trying to stress the continuity with life, and the continuing process, the equivalents follow the order of the phases.

In the compass scheme solar East maps onto lunar East, but if we use the same terminology for the seasonal scheme we find that "Lunar South is Solar East" (AVB 198n), that is to say that Phase 15 (S) corresponds to Aries (E).

These are the two zodiacs shown in a previous post with the chess board, the seasonal one outside the phases and the one of the compass points shown in the inner ring of twelve. They demonstrate a form of solar and lunar zodiac: taking the ring of the phases as the reference anchor, with South as Phase 15, the outer seasonal or solar zodiac shows Phase 15 aligning with solar East, Aries. In the inner ring zodiacal South, Capricorn, matches phasal South, giving a lunar zodiac. Thus "a line joining Cancer and Capricorn in a lunar Zodiac cuts a line joining Cancer and Capricorn in a solar Zodiac at right angles" (AVB 198n).

Yet in another sense, both of these zodiacs are lunar, since they both run anti-clockwise. It's worth remembering that in general anti-clockwise is the lunar direction, patterned on the moon's course across the sky over successive nights (it is even noticeable in the course of a single night if you are gazing at the stars for long enough). And clockwise, like the clock itself, follows the path of the Sun during the day when you are facing south (northern hemisphere). Yeats was alerted to this rationale after the publication of the first edition by Frank Pearce Sturm (FPS 90-91) and used it in the second version (see AVB 80), but in many ways it follows the old ideas of right and sunwise being favoured or lucky (deiseal in Irish, the basis of the Wiccan coinage deosil), while left and widdershins are "sinister" and associated with the nightside. When describing the motion around the circles, Yeats himself often uses the very unclear terms left to right for clockwise and right to left for anti-clockwise, imagining always movement "over the top" of a diagram, rather than under the bottom (and when he does, writing about sides of cones, he gets them mixed up, see AVB 76).

So the two sets of Faculties each follow their own direction: viewed on the Great Wheel, the lunar Faculties of Will and Mask move anti-clockwise forward through the phases, and the solar Faculties of Creative Mind and Body of Fate move clockwise backward through the phases, but forward through their own measure, the Zodiac. Here when Will is placed at Phase 15, Creative Mind is at its equivalent, in this case Aries, and as Will moves forwards through Phases 16, 17 and 18, Creative Mind is moving forwards in its own measure through the rest of Aries and into Taurus.

Even if we take Aries as East aligned with Phase 15 as South, exact alignment is problematic but generally the centre of Phase 15 is the start of Aries, its 0˚, and after that the question is whether a sign of the zodiac is a twelfth of the complete circle, as above, or whether the zodiac maps onto discrete groups of phases, making whole phases match whole signs, usually with the cardinal phases taking a whole sign each and the others in triads, as below.

In this arrangement the Zodiac starts with Aries at Phase 15 again, but against the triad of 14-13-12 comes the whole sign of Taurus, followed by all of Gemini alongside 11-10-9. If you follow a single Faculty in either of the animations you will see the lunar Faculties of Will and Mask proceeding anti-clockwise through the phases or the solar Faculties of Creative Mind and Body of Fate proceeding clockwise through the zodiac.

These, I'm afraid, are only the preliminaries to some speculations about various types of cycle that are not included in A Vision itself, and which I shall come to in further posts (and they do not even touch on the disposition of the zodiac in Edmund Dulac's woodcut of the Great Wheel, which I'll come back to yet another day). However, this aspect of zodiacs and phases running counter to one another does surface, albeit rather cryptically, in A Vision's discussion of the "heraldic supporters" of the Full Moon, which I'll examine next.

The lot of love is chosen. I learnt that much

Struggling for an image on the track

Of the whirling Zodiac.

"Chosen"

Dulac and the Great Wheel

2011-09-25T19:40:00.007-04:00

This posting is even later to arrive than I had planned. The topic I was working on originally became larger, more complex and more unwieldy than I expected, so will take a little longer to organize. This is piece is slightly more self-contained, for the moment.

The Great Wheel of A Vision A, printed on brown paper,
tipped into the book on [p. xiv].

The Great Wheel that appears opposite p. xv in A Vision A is one of the enduring images that most readers retain of A Vision, an archaic woodcut that hints at symbolic meanings, some of which are never quite explored in the book itself. Yeats gave Edmund Dulac both guidance and latitude in his instructions for the design, trusting him as a personal friend, who shared many of his own esoteric interests, particularly astrology. He had already asked Dulac to make a picture of Giraldus, his putative author of Speculum Angelorum et Hominum in Cracow, and in thanking Dulac for the portrait he outlined his requirements for a diagram, supposedly from this Speculum, in October 1923:

My dear Dulac,

The portrait of Gyraldus is admirable. I enclose the sketch for the diagram. The pencilled words will have to be in Latin & I will get the Latin I hope tomorrow. The man I count on for it was out yesterday. You can use any symbolism you like for the elements—nymphs, salamanders, air spirits, or Roman gods or more natural objects.…

The round objects in the enclosed diagram are of course the lunar phases 1. 8. 15. 22 making new moon, half moon, full moon & half moon respectively. They will be nasty things to draw but your Kracow artist would not have drawn them very carefully. I can give the Speculum what date you please.…

(October 14, [1923]; cf. Letters 699–700)

I do not think that the sketch is extant, but its general outline is probably fairly close to the final picture, except in a few details. There are five elements to the final design: (1) the elemental attributions in the corners, (2) the circle of the moon's phases, (3) the zodiacal symbols, (4) the words designating the key phases, and (5) the central motifs.

- (1) Yeats's sketch must have indicated the placing of the elements, whether by word or symbol and, though he may have hoped for something a little more exuberant and elaborate, Dulac uses just the simple symbols for the four elements, placed on furled banners.

The kind of picture Yeats was originally thinking of?

Note the elemental corners, which have the same arrangement as that of A Vision. These surround a ring depicting sun and moon formed by two intersecting circles, one dark and one light.
Frontispiece of Musaeum Hermeticum (Frankfurt, 1625).

- (2) The "round objects" might not have been entirely self-explanatory, except that Dulac had no doubt been told about the 28 phases of the moon—everybody else seems to have been—so Yeats could therefore comment that they were "of course the lunar phases 1. 8. 15. 22" (I am using John Kelly's transcription, rather than Wade's; the other letters are drawn from Diana Hobby's unpublished thesis, "William Butler Yeats and Edmund Dulac, a Correspondence: 1916–1938" [Rice University, 1981]).

- (3) The zodiac signs are not mentioned but were almost certainly in the diagram as they were in most iterations of the schema in the notes and drafts, though Yeats was still unclear about their significance and later had doubts about their placing.

The kind of picture Yeats was originally thinking of?
Classical figures symbolize the elements on either side of the title (clockwise from upper left: Jupiter - Air; Prometheus – Fire; River god [?Nile] – Water; [?]Autumnus – Earth).
Above, Phoenix and Minerva, on the left, and Pelican and Mercury, on the right, flank Apollo with the Nine Muses. Below, the sun, with a lion (Leo), and the moon, with a crayfish (Cancer), flank an emblem of Nature, holding the light of perfection, followed by short-sighted researchers with lanterns.
Engraved title page of Musaeum Hermeticum revised (Frankfurt, 1678), by Matthäus Merian.

- (4) The "pencilled words" must have been the English—Beauty (15), Wisdom (1), Temptation (8) and, probably, Power (22)—and a little over a week later Yeats sent on the Latin that he had been given by Louis C. Purser, a distinguished classicist at Trinity College, Dublin: "put Pulchritudo at 15, Sapientia at 1, Tentatio at 8 and Dominatio (or Potestas) at 22. I enclose Purser's letter as his spelling may correct mine" (October 23, [1923]). There are two points of variance from the words Yeats gives, the minor one of "Temptatio" and the major one of "Violentia" rather than "Dominatio". The first may reflect Purser's spelling or Dulac's preference to avoid a spelling that looked more like his native French. "Violentia" is stranger and less readily explicable, but there was plenty of time for Yeats to modify his ideas, since it was over a year and a half before Dulac sent the design to him (see below).

The kind of picture Yeats was originally thinking of?
The four elements are symbolized by animals and the four humours by goddesses: (clockwise from top left) Diana/Artemis – Phlegm, corresponding to Water – Dolphin; Venus/Aphrodite – Blood corresponding to Air – Chameleon; Minerva/Athene – Yellow Bile corresponding to Fire – Salamander; [?]Ceres/Demeter – Black Bile corresponding to Earth – Mole. Septem Planetae, engraved title page by Gerard de Jode (after Maarten de Vos), 1581.

- (5) The emblems at the centre of the diagram seem to have been Dulac's own idea. Yeats had sent him a draft of the introductory material when he requested the portrait of Giraldus—"I send you my preface, in the rough, or rather Owen Aherne's. It will give you all the facts as I see them" (July 26, [1923]). This typescript spoke of a design where "the zodiacal signs were arranged in a circle with a unicorn in the center, while in the corners of the diagram <cancelled words> Biblical symbols", which Dulac seems to have realized only rather late in the day:

Herewith the Diagram. When it was done I remembered in that your description of it you mention that the square in the center is occupied by a design of a unicorn. Thence the accompanying design of the Animal in question. If it is not absolutely necessary that the Diagram should incorporate it leave it as it is, but if its presence in the Diagram is of vital importance, the engraver can make the two blocks and fit that of the Unicorn in its proper place for the purposes of printing. Otherwise it may be used as a tail piece somewhere else in the book. (April 30, 1925; LTWBY2 462)

The animal in question did indeed appear as a tail piece to the poem, "The Phases of the Moon", pasted in at the end.

If the designs were, however, Dulac's idea, Yeats was happy to incorporate them—"The designs are exactly right. 'The Wheel' could take in the whole British Museum" (May 5, [1925]). He changed the introduction so that the "lunar phases and zodiacal signs were mixed with various unintelligible symbols—an apple, an acorn, a cup" (AVA xviii), and later noted that "The East, in my symbolism … is always human power" adding as explanation that "In the decorative diagram from the Speculum Angelorum et Hominum … the East is marked by a sceptre" (AVB 257–58).

As this indicates, the emblems do logically express the words Yeats had given, at least to some extent: Beauty – a flower, plausibly; Wisdom – a fruit, possibly; Temptation – a cup, possibly too; Power – a sceptre, certainly. But they also show kinship with traditional playing card suits. Though the English-speaking world tends to use the suits of French origin—spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs—the rest of Europe draws on similar but different symbols.

Swiss suits; three variants of German suits; three variants of North Italian suits
from "Andy's Playing Cards", with thanks to Andrea Pollett.

Dulac's flower has definite similarities with the Swiss one, while the fruit seems to have the idea of the acorn mixed with the shape of the bell from Swiss and German iconography and may explain why Yeats refers to an acorn AND and an apple. The cup and sceptre are more clearly linked with the traditional Italian suits—denari, coppe, spade, bastoni—emblems which are also retained in the Tarot cards. Certainly this was in keeping with Yeats's own thought and the early drafts of the Arabian fictions outlined in A Vision A, indicate that "the four suits of the Tarot, the King, the Queen, the Knight & the Knaves should really be King, Queen, Prince & Princes, & were derived through the Saracens from the dance, & … these cards have in turn given birth to our common court cards" (YVP4 153).

In the end, however, what kind of picture was Yeats originally thinking of? He was willing to shift the date from the late sixteenth century to earlier, but he does seem to have conceived of a later, slightly more refined style than he was finally given by Dulac, although the style was clear and agreed on once he had the portrait of Giraldus. Of the illustrations above, one is before the date of 1594 that he gave and the other is other is after it, but both are rather more elaborate than the style that Dulac created. At that date, the woodblock style is more generally used for illustrations inserted into the text, while the finer lines and greater detail of engraving are used for full-page illustrations. It seems possible that Yeats had originally conceived of a more clearly sixteenth-century look, and also that the design would centre on a unicorn—symbol of the Daimon, or of the soul. Might he have been thinking of something more like this?

The Square Wheel and Chessboards

2011-08-11T16:46:00.090-04:00

It shouldn’t be surprising that the Great Wheel of A Vision has some characteristics that seem to fit rather well with a square format rather than the more familiar circular one.

Fanti, Triompho di Fortuna (1526)

When W. B. Yeats drew up a quick chart of the heavens, either for a person’s horoscope or to cast a horary chart, he usually used the traditional square horoscope, which he’d probably learnt from his astrological uncle, George Pollexfen. (I remember reading some years ago that Cyril Fagan, a distinguished Irish astrologer, had commented that Yeats was one of the last to use this old-fashioned format, and I was very dubious. I later saw the evidence of it for myself throughout his notebooks but now have no idea where that reference was, despite some desultory searching.)

Horoscope in Yeats's hand

Certainly his wife, George, from a younger generation—and probably more accustomed to using printed blanks—always used a circular layout. And that is the layout that dominates throughout the automatic script. Even when the spirits were taking control, their scrawls are almost always based on circular forms.

Yet certain features of the system lend themselves readily to a square format. For now I’ll limit myself to the two most fundamental and practical.

The first and most obvious one is that a standard chessboard, with eight squares on each side, has a perimeter of twenty-eight squares. Yeats actually states that "the individual phases are alternately primary and antithetical" (AVB 88), and here we have the alternating squares of black and white (and, as with Yeats’s comment, this does lead to the slightly odd situation of Phases 1 and 15 being the same).

It’s probably best to put the square on point, so that it can be seen in the same orientation as normal presentation of the Wheel in A Vision.

The second feature, that is probably the most interesting in some respects, although one which the Yeatses themselves don’t seem to have used, is the way that the square format helps the mapping of the twenty-eight phases onto the twelve months or signs of the Zodiac.

Mandala of 36 decanates and 28 mansions

When a circle is mapped onto a larger circle, the divisions scale up naturally, but when a square is mapped onto a larger square the sides transfer automatically but new squares appear at the corners, as the corner squares map on to each side and the new corner square. It makes more sense when you see it.

While 28 does not map easily onto to 12, if you place another row of squares along each side of the chessboard so that it is ten squares on each side, it has a perimeter of 36 squares, easily mapped onto a twelvefold scheme, with three squares for each twelfth. The division of the months into three periods of roughly ten days each may seem a little arbitrary, though it has good calendrical precedent as far back as ancient Egypt.

The diagram here takes the correspondences sketched out in "The Completed Symbol", Section VI, with March aligned with the Full Moon and September aligned with the New Moon and both phases and calendar proceeding anti-clockwise. Whereas Yeats comments "There is no reason why March, June, etc., should have one Phase, all others three; it is classification not symbolism" (AVB 196), here it is simply logical that the corner or cardinal phases should have a month or sign apiece.

Three faces or decanates of Taurus, Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara (ca. 1470)

It is also worth remembering that the Zodiac has long been divided into 36 decanates, divisions of 10˚ each, so that each sign has three sectors.

Square of 36 decanates and 28 phases

The correspondences here are those sketched out applied to the Zodiac rather than the months, so with Aries aligned with the Full Moon and Libra aligned with the New Moon, though Yeats actually places "the Ides of March, at the full moon in March" with "the Vernal Equinox, symbolical of the first degree of Aries, the first day of our symbolical or ideal year", so we'll need to look at the fine tuning beyond the broad principle shortly.

While we are about it, it is also worth considering that the central space is made up of four squares, surrounded by twelve squares, then twenty and then twenty-eight. The four and the twelve have relatively obvious applications (the inner Zodiac here is the one that corresponds with the phases during the afterlife, see AVB 223).

click on any of the images for a larger, more legible version

We'll come back to these boards again soon, since there are dimensions that touch on chess, both regular and Enochian, tarot and the I Ching, all of which are worth exploring in greater depth.

The start of a gyre. . .

2011-08-08T18:20:00.023-04:00

This blog is intended as a companion to my website about A Vision, YeatsVision.com, and both examine the esoteric system created by William Butler Yeats and his wife, George Hyde Lees. Whereas the website aims to offer clear and direct interpretation of A Vision for readers and students, confining itself largely to what Yeats himself wrote and to the academic study of his work, the comments and articles here will be rather more speculative, exploratory and possibly personal. I also hope that as and when people arrive they will feel able to enter into some dialogue about topics through the comments.

I will be adding to the blog very slowly, but since it is far from topical and will only be minimally sequential, I hope that readers will feel able and welcome to respond to any post, whether it was nominally put up the day before or months or even years before—this kind of web dialogue can be both instant and leisurely. Like Yeats, I recognize that most of the material here will not be of great general interest and is for the relatively small group of “my fellow students” of A Vision, but I know myself from the way that a search-engine or a link leads to unexpected places, there will be some people who stumble onto this without knowing much about what’s going on. If you are in doubt or are intrigued, do go and look at YeatsVision.com (especially Overview) for simpler and more straightforward explanation of the material.