The Delphic Oracle on Plotinus

To Yeats as a poet and magician, Plotinus is sometimes viewed less as the great exponent of Platonic philosophy than as the figure described by his disciple Porphyry in his biography: the man who saw his own Daimon and who was praised by the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi. 
 

Fyodor Bronnikov, Pythagoreans Celebrating Sunrise (1869)

Porphyry recounts how, when consulted by a follower about the fate of Plotinus's soul, the oracle spoke of how, after being buffeted by the waves of life and passion, his soul had arrived at last in Elysium:

Apollo was consulted by Amelius, who desired to learn where Plotinus' soul had gone. And Apollo, who uttered of Socrates that great praise, 'Of all men, Socrates the wisest'--you shall hear what a full and lofty oracle Apollo rendered upon Plotinus.

I raise an undying song, to the memory of a gentle friend, a hymn of praise woven to the honey-sweet tones of my lyre under the touch of the golden plectrum.
    The Muses, too, I call to lift the voice with me in strains of many-toned exultation, in passion ranging over all the modes of song:
    even as of old they raised the famous chant to the glory of Aeacides in the immortal ardours of the Homeric line.
    Come, then, Sacred Chorus, let us intone with one great sound the utmost of all song, I Phoebus, Bathychaites, singing in the midst.

Celestial! Man at first but now nearing the diviner ranks! the bonds of human necessity are loosed for you and, strong of heart, you beat your eager way from out the roaring tumult of the fleshly life to the shores of that wave-washed coast free from the thronging of the guilty, thence to take the grateful path of the sinless soul:
    where glows the splendour of God, where Right is throned in the stainless place, far from the wrong that mocks at law.
    Oft-times as you strove to rise above the bitter waves of this blood-drenched life, above the sickening whirl, toiling in the mid-most of the rushing flood and the unimaginable turmoil, oft-times, from the Ever-Blessed, there was shown to you the Term still close at hand:
    Oft-times, when your mind thrust out awry and was like to be rapt down unsanctioned paths, the Immortals themselves prevented, guiding you on the straightgoing way to the celestial spheres, pouring down before you a dense shaft of light that your eyes might see from amid the mournful gloom.
    Sleep never closed those eyes: high above the heavy murk of the mist you held them; tossed in the welter, you still had vision; still you saw sights many and fair not granted to all that labour in wisdom's quest.
    But now that you have cast the screen aside, quitted the tomb that held your lofty soul, you enter at once the heavenly consort:
    where fragrant breezes play, where all is unison and winning tenderness and guileless joy, and the place is lavish of the nectar-streams the unfailing Gods bestow, with the blandishments of the Loves, and delicious airs, and tranquil sky:
    where Minos and Rhadamanthus dwell, great brethren of the golden race of mighty Zeus; where dwell the just Aeacus, and Plato, consecrated power, and stately Pythagoras and all else that form the Choir of Immortal Love, that share their parentage with the most blessed spirits, there where the heart is ever lifted in joyous festival.
    O Blessed One, you have fought your many fights; now, crowned with unfading life, your days are with the Ever-Holy.
Rejoicing Muses, let us stay our song and the subtle windings of our dance; thus much I could but tell, to my golden lyre, of Plotinus, the hallowed soul.

Good and kindly, singularly gentle and engaging: thus the oracle presents him, and so in fact we found him. Sleeplessly alert—Apollo tells—pure of soul, ever striving towards the divine which he loved with all his being, he laboured strenuously to free himself and rise above the bitter waves of this blood-drenched life: and this is why to Plotinus—God-like and lifting himself often, by the ways of meditation and by the methods Plato teaches in the Banquet, to the first and all-transcendent God—that God appeared, the God who has neither shape nor form but sits enthroned above the Intellectual-Principle and all the Intellectual-Sphere.

Plotinus: The Ethical Treatises,
being the Treatises of the First Ennead with Porphyry's life of Plotinus...
translated by Stephen MacKenna
(London: Warner/Medici Society, 1917), 22–24.

Yeats radically condensed and versified this in "The Delphic Oracle upon Plotinus", the last poem in the series entitled "Words for Music Perhaps".

Behold that great Plotinus swim
Buffeted by such seas;
Bland Rhadamanthus beckons him,
But the Golden Race looks dim,
Salt blood blocks his eyes.

Scattered on the level grass
Or winding through the grove
Plato there and Minos pass,
There stately Pythagoras
And all the choir of Love. (VP 530, CW1 269–70)

The drafts are in the "White Vellum Notebook" (catalogued as MBY 545 when it was in Michael Butler Yeats's collection and now in private hands), and the selection of details was almost unchanged from the first draft to the final version (see David R. Clark, "Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems": Manuscript Materials [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999], 558–563). The wording also found its final form relatively quickly, indeed phrases such as "stately Pythagoras" were already given by MacKenna's translation.

Fair draft of "The Delphic Oracle upon Plotinus", White Vellum Notebook, 141.

     Yeats removes almost all the metaphysical and spiritual elements of the oracle to focus on the physical and the mythic Isles of the Blessed. The brothers Rhadamanthus and Minos, two of the mythical judges of Hades, are foremost.* Plato and Pythagoras appear as figures of history and legend, rather than philosophers. The "blessed spirits" are not to "be sought within the the self that is common to all" (AVB 22; CW14 17) in mystical contemplation, but are presented as "the choir of Love", an evocation of harmony.
    The viewpoint shifts from an external view of Plotinus struggling through the seas to Elysium—"Behold"—to the swimmer's own eyes, which discern only a blurred image of the "golden race of mighty Zeus" through the water and the blood. The second stanza involves a slightly different set of shifts, presenting figures both stationary and moving, scattered and winding, with the verb "pass" which again implies a viewpoint. The scene is almost suspended in time, so that it is worth noting the timeless present tense of "pass" in comparison with the same verb in the final line of of "Sailing to Byzantium", where the golden bird may sing: "Of what is past, or passing, or to come" (VP 408, CW1 194).      
      Elements of the sea-passage and of "blood-drenched life" are also important in "Byzantium" and in Yeats's revisiting of this theme in "News for the Delphic Oracle", but that will be matter for another post.

Jean Delville, The School of Plato (1898)

*The adjective "Bland" is a little strange—presumably it indicates that Rhadamanthus is not in his role as a stern judge, as Porphyry comments that the brothers are seen not as holding Plotinus "to judgement but as welcoming him to their consort to which are bidden spirits pleasing to the Gods". Rhadamanthus is generally described as "just", but it is possible that Yeats knew the Homeric epithet of "blond Rhadamanthus" ('xanthos Rhadamanthus', Odyssey 4:564) and that MacKenna's phrase "blandishments of the Loves" made this association in Yeats's mind.

We Die into Our Imaginations

I recently came across a provocative speculation about the growing literature on near-death experiences, their relation to "vision", and the relationship of vision to art. This is from a professor of philosophy and religion, Jeffrey Kripal, reflecting on such a near-death experience recounted by Elizabeth Krohn. This seems to me particularly relevant to Yeats's A Vision and his art in a number of ways, so that I will quote at greater length than I normally would.

The modern near-death accounts are made possible in their increasing number and depth by the advances of biomedical technology, which can “pull us back” from further and further into the death process. This might look like a minor observation, but it has major implications for how we think about the near-death literature as a whole. What we have in the near-death stories, after all, is essentially a new mystical or visionary literature made possible by new biomedical technology....
     The English expression “to have a vision” is very helpful here, as it can mean two very different things. First, it can name a more or less passive process. “To have a vision” in this sense is to be given something, as in a dream. But the same phrase can also name a process that is much more active, that is about creating and projecting something and then working toward actualizing that projected vision in the future. Here, “to have a vision” is to make something actual that was previously only potential. As such, it is more akin to writing, directing, and then projecting a movie. When I refer to the modern near-death literature as a visionary literature and write of our vision-work here, I intend both meanings: something is received or revealed, and then something is created out of the gift. I mean to suggest that these revelatory visions of our own deeper nature are also projects that we must engage with and act on; that these need our attention and intention to fulfill their purpose; and that they are finally about us changing us.
     We can think of the entire history of religions in this way. We can think of it all as a long series of science fiction movies—with the scenes painted on the walls (of the caves, of the churches, of the temples), and all of it inspired by countless and quite real supernatural special effects (like precognition and auras). For thousands of generations, we have been born and then died into these running science fiction movies, changing the scenes and stories as we go, largely unconsciously and gradually, but sometimes dramatically and, seemingly, all at once.
     Not surprisingly, the religions have always known something of this, if in a largely implicit, unconscious, or at least unexpressed way. This is why they have so richly supported and funded the arts, not for art’s sake, but for the vision’s sake. They understood very well that it is the image and the story that ultimately define a community’s worldview and religious experience. We do not have to share any of those values or beliefs (that is, we do not have to believe their movies) to see that they may well have been on to something very important, namely, that it is the image and the arts that largely determine what we see and what happens to us in the death process and in the afterlife, at least in the “near-death” zones from which we sometimes return.
     In short, we die into our imaginations, be these psychological, cultural, or religious. We die into our own personal and collective art....
     If any of this is close to the truth, and I think it is, the conclusion is as obvious as it is shocking: if we want better death experiences, it would do us well to make better art. If we want to be in a better science fiction movie “there,” it would serve us to make better science fiction movies “here.” Toward this same end, we might even decide to take up the modern near-death literature and create new art, i.e., new meditation and prayer practices out of it. We might use this literature and these reports to imagine what death might be like for us, or better, what we might want it to be like. By doing so, we could take more responsibility for our own visionary displays and work with them, as in a lucid dream, here and now before we die. We could not just “see visions.” We could also “have a vision”; that is, we could possess a vision of the future and consciously act on it as our project. We could decide for ourselves which paintings we want to die into.
     If we were really smart, we would also create practices that taught us that none of these forms of the imagination are literally true, that they are all “ours.” We might then seek the artist behind all the art, the projector behind all the movies. We might even wake up from our own dreams of life and death, however real they might seem at the moment.

Jeffrey J. Kripal, Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University,
in: Elizabeth G. Krohn, Changed in a Flash (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2019).

     Yeats's descriptions of the "bardo", the states existence between death and rebirth, in A Vision include differing levels and kinds of dream state, particularly in the first part where the soul deals with understanding the foregoing life. One in particular, which he calls the Phantasmagoria, is connected with "those among the dead who imagine themselves 'surrounded by flames and persecuted by demons'" and to the ghost in a Noh play who cannot stop believing herself "surrounded by flames" (AVB 230–31, CW14 168). All, however, take place within a construct where the enveloping dreams are created out of the soul itself and the community it is part of, both the "timeless and spaceless community of Spirits which perceive each other" ("Seven Propositions"), and also the community of our earthly life, particularly at the level of culture, art, and religion.
     Kripal suggests that artists contribute to the afterlife experienced by their society by forming the individual and collective imagination, which Yeats also suggests in poems such as "The Tower", where he states:

I mock Plotinus' thought
And cry in Plato's teeth,
Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul, 
Aye, sun and moon and star, all, 
And further add to that
That, being dead, we rise, 
Dream and so create
Translunar Paradise.
I have prepared my peace
With learned Italian things
And the proud stones of Greece,
Poet’s imaginings
And memories of love,
Memories of the words of women,
All those things whereof
Man makes a superhuman
Mirror-resembling dream. (VP 415, CW1 198–99, 2nd ed. 202)

Plato bans the artists from his republic because they create only lies or imitations of the true forms, but Yeats sees the artists as giving access to those forms, even if what is created is "a superhuman / Mirror-resembling dream" that reflects ourselves back to ourselves. Life and death are both included in the human visionary act, created from the imagination of the "bitter soul". In A Vision A, Yeats goes as far as to suggest that "time and space [are] the work of our ancestors", in the sense that the souls of the dead who do not reincarnate and "have found an almost changeless rest" are responsible for the "least changing things" in the universe, represented by the "Fixed Stars" (AVA 158, CW13 128) or the translunary world of traditional thought, while the living and the reincarnating dead create together the sublunary world. But Yeats's thought is fixed on the "Translunar Paradise" he will create through the art of Renaissance Italy and classical Greece, love poetry and memories.  
     In "Sailing to Byzantium" his inspiration is Byzantine mosaics and he asks the "sages standing in God's holy fire" to "be the singing masters of my soul" and to help form his existence once he is no longer "fastened to a dying animal" (VP 408, CW1 193, 2nd ed. 198). He asks them to "gather me / Into the artifice of eternity", recognizing that eternity is experienced through the artifice created by the soul and its song.