Yeats and the Stars 4

Yeats and the Stars 1; Yeats and the Stars 2; Yeats and the Stars 3

The Precession of the Equinoxes relates to the very slow wobble of the Earth’s axis, which moves the poles in a circle and, with that motion, the sun’s position relative to the stars at a given season. This would not happen if the Earth’s axis were not tilted, and as Yeats notes, in Paradise Lost Milton actually uses the tilt to illustrate the consequences of the Fall (AVA 149–50). The idea is that in the unfallen world, the sun’s apparent path—the ecliptic and the constellations of the zodiac —would run along the equator and the seasons would not change. The Earth's axis—“the axle. . . That keeps the stars in their round" (“Aedh Hears the Cry of the Sedge")—would point not towards the star that marks the North Pole—now Polaris at the end of the Little Bear’s tail— but towards the ecliptic pole, a point encircled by the constellation Draco, “the Polar Dragon".* Thus the prelapsarian “tentpole of Eden" mentioned in “Veronica's Napkin" would point to the dragon rather than the bear.

Albrecht Dürer's map of the northern heavens is centred on the ecliptic pole, surrounded by Draco. (N.B. The perspectives of celestial maps often reverse each other, depending on whether they are taken as “inside looking up" or “outside looking down". )

Many Arab and Renaissance views of the heavens actually put this “different pole" as the true centre of their schemes—in a plan, it has the advantage of putting the zodiac as a circle round the circumference—and the Golden Dawn used this arrangement too.  

The Tree of Life as Projected in a Solid Sphere: Though the constellations are unclear in this reproduction of the northern hemisphere, the Tree of Life is mapped on to the heavens. The small circle at the centre is the Tree's highest sephirah, Kether, surrounded by Draco. Below are Chokmah and Binah, each duplicated across the centre, and below them Chesed and Geburah, also duplicated. Tiphareth is on the central axis, but appears in notional form at four points on the ecliptic, the circumference of this circle, once at the position of Regulus, the heart of Leo, and the other three at ninety-degree intervals (in Taurus, Aquarius, and Scorpio). (Regardie, The Golden Dawn, vol. 4, 219).

MacGregor Mathers superimposed a spherical form of the cabalistic Tree of Life onto the heavens, with Kether the highest point of the Tree surrounded by the dragon’s coils.*  The central pillar from Kether down to Tiphareth, Yesod, and Malkuth is the axis, so only highest and lowest—Kether and Malkuth—are on the surface of the sphere. The pillars on either side—Chokmah, Chesed, and Netzach on the Pillar of Mercy, and Binah, Chesed, and Hod on the Pillar of Severity—are placed on the surface, but doubled across the central axis.

As divine influence pours from higher levels, down into the lower Tree of Life, it is inverted through the double cone of the hour glass (see YeatsVision.com on the Tree), arriving at Kether of the lower Tree, but convoluted through the coils of the dragon and thence to the zodiac. (Regardie, The Golden Dawn, vol. 4, 252.)

 

The paths between the sephiroth are also mapped onto the celestial globe, and each path is associated with a Tarot card. The path down from Binah to the central sephirah Tiphareth is attributed to The Lovers. Traditionally that often depicts the force of love or choice, particularly a young man choosing between two women.

Trump VI, The Lovers: (left) is a Marseille version of the type George Yeats owned and (right) an Italian one of the type W. B. Yeats owned. See the Yeats exhibition at the National Library of Ireland; unfortunately the online virtual tour is no longer available, but this shot shows the case displaying the Yeatses' Tarot packs.

Like constellations, Tarot cards are subject to some reinterpreation but generally change fairly little. The Lovers is an exception. This card was given a radically different form by the Golden Dawn,  depicting Perseus and Andromeda and a sea dragon, apparently drawing on the constellations.†

Bode, Uranographia (1801)

 

The Golden Dawn Tarot, painted by Robert Wang

In the explanation of “The Tarot Trumps", an unofficial Golden Dawn paper, Harriet Felkin explains that The Lovers shows “The impact of inspiration on intuition, resulting in illumination and liberation—the sword striking off the fetters of habit and materialism, Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the Dragon of fear and the waters of Stagnation” (Regardie, The Golden Dawn, vol. 4, 211).‡ And the Golden Dawn's version of the card and its meaning seem to be influences behind “Her Triumph”:

I did the dragon's will until you came
Because I had fancied love a casual
Improvisation, or a settled game
…. And then you stood among the dragon-rings.
I mocked, being crazy, but you mastered it
And broke the chain and set my ankles free,
Saint George or else a pagan Perseus;
And now we stare astonished at the sea,
And a miraculous strange bird shrieks at us.

Giorgio Melchiori and David Clark have explored the sources in western art—the drafts show references to Bellini, Carpaccio, and Titian—and Phillip Marcus has worked on the poem’s genesis and dynamics.  

Edward Burne-Jones, The Doom Fulfilled (Perseus Series), Southampton City Art Gallery.

In Yeats at Songs and Choruses, Clark favours Burne-Jones's paintings of the Perseus legend as the key inspiration because of the monster's coils—but the coils are there in the celestial pictures, as well as the Golden Dawn's cabalistic ones.

Bayer, Uranometria (1603)

Perseus strikes “off the fetters of habit and materialism"—and though Yeats's dragon may not be fear, stagnation may well be part of the “dragon’s will”. The use of “will” is also significant—in Hodos Chameliontos, Yeats uses Perseus and Andromeda to represent the artist’s Mask and Image, respectively, while the sea-dragon is Body of Fate. And all is under the control of “personifying spirits that we had best call but Gates and Gate-keepers” (Autobiographies 272–73) or in Yeats’s terminology, Daimons.

And we may christianise Perseus as St George and Andromeda as a later princess—the shift between pagan hero and Christian knight is similar to the transition of the focus in “Veronica’s Napkin", where Berenice’s Hair is transformed into Veronica’s Napkin by taking “a different pole".

 

———————

* The sea dragon of the myth is usually taken as the constellation Cetus, but the coils involved here imply that it is Draco. Note that Yeats made a similar association with the “Polar Dragon" in “Aodh Pleads with the Elemental Powers", where the dragon uncoils in its sleep:

The Powers whose name and shape no living creature knows
Have pulled the Immortal Rose;
And though the Seven Lights bowed in their dance and wept,
The Polar Dragon slept,
His heavy rings uncoiled from glimmering deep to deep:
When will he wake from sleep?

Yeats added a note in The Dome (1898): “The Seven Lights are the seven stars of the Great Bear, and the Dragon is the constellation of the Dragon, and these, in certain old mythologies, encircle the Tree of Life, on which is here imagined the Rose of Ideal Beauty growing before it was cast into the world".

† A completely different take on the Lovers card appears in Pamela Colman Smith’s design for A. E. Waite—does this perhaps reference the tent-pole of Eden?

Pamela Colman Smith's design for the Rider Tarot, conceived by A. E. Waite.

 (Note also a possible influence from Cecil French's Fountain of Faithful Lovers in Colman Smith's Green Sheaf.)

‡ In the manuscript book that Maud Gonne gave him in 1908, Yeats summarised a visionary ritual he conducted alone, noting that he saw “two forms side by side float up as spirits to top of Abiegnus & garden. The influences that lift the initiate above Tiphareth are five – the five paths & the five corresponding Tarot Trumps but it seems as if the [Gemini] Trump [=The Lovers] is the one when two souls ascend." (July 21 [1908], 4r). (The Golden Dawn used the symbols of the astrological elements associated with each Trump as a shorthand for the Tarot cards, so the symbol of Gemini stood for The Lovers. Tiphareth at the centre of the Tree is connected to all the sephiroth except Malkuth, and this path runs from Tiphareth up to Binah in the GD's scheme.)

    Possibly because the card is associated with breaking out of habit and stagnation, the GD design does not give Perseus his most famous weapon, the head of Medusa, which turned anyone who gazed on it to stone.

 

Invoking the Daimon

Following on the from the previous post about how the spiritual being of two sexes manifests as a human of one sex and a Daimon of the opposite sex, one of the key things that this entails is that contact with the Daimon means contact with the opposite. For a psychologist this would entail interior self-examination and possibly some form of therapy or analysis; however, for a magician, the interior examination would be dramatized as visualizations and the therapy as ritual invocation. Within the Golden Dawn, the visualizations would be structured through symbols drawn from the complex series of correspondences attached to the Tree of Life, with the "meditations", "skrying", or "astral travel" using imagery from astrology, alchemy, and Tarot, gods from Egypt and Greece, and angels and the names of God from the Judaeo-Christian traditions. The rituals, whether fully fledged ones at the Order's temple, or personal and private ones, would involve the same attributions, present both in physical form (through cards, colours, costume) and through the active imagination of the participants. One of the ways of invoking a force was to imitate the associated divine forms through ritual and sacred acting, with robes and masks, but more important was the assumption of the god-form, with the "symbolic God-form held firmly in the imagination" (Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn, vol. 3, 156)

One of the aims of the initiates of the Golden Dawn was an ascent on the central pillar of the Tree of Life, raising the "Human Consciousness and Lower Will [which should be located in Tiphareth] from falling into... the place of the Automatic Consciousness [Yesod]", as is the case in much of humanity. This also meant gaining greater contact with the higher spheres and a more direct flow from the higher levels, most immediately "the Higher Human Self and the Lower Genius, the God of the Man" but then the Higher Genius and beyond that the Angelic and Divine levels (see The Golden Dawn, 'Fifth Knowledge Lecture', especially 'The Microcosm—Man', vol. 1, 203–20, at 217 and 214; see yeatsvision.com on the Golden Dawn). Complementing the process of invocation of external powers, the Golden Dawn also taught evocation of forces from within the microcosm of the self.

WBY to Ezra Pound, July 15 [1918]. (ALS Yale)

Yeats frequently mentions the meditations that he associates with the symbols A Vision. The automatic script contains repeated though often unclear instructions to meditate, for example: "you will get all by meditation that you need"  (YVP1 440) and, for instance, Yeats writes of trying "to see Phase 26 in meditation & saw that stag with the crucifix between horns" (YVP3 94). When he sent the first drafts to Ezra Pound, he told him to "Read my symbol with patience ­allowing your mind to go beyond the words to the symbol itself — for this symbol seems to me strange and beautiful" (15 July [1918]). In his note on "The Second Coming", he fictionalizes the Judwalis as having "A supreme religious act of their faith is to fix their attention on the mathematical form of this movement" to achieve a moment of timeless contemplation (VP 824).

Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Cuala, 1922), note on "The Second Coming"

The Yeatses meditated on symbols associated with the Daimons of their children (YVP3 50-51), and it is likely that they also meditated on the subject of the Daimon and on their own personal Daimons (see also their Tarot readings involving the Daimons).

The hieros gamos or alchemical wedding, Rosarium Philosophorum (1550)

"The marriage bed is the symbol of the solved antinomy..."

Yeats's own female Daimon was reflected in part in the women in his life, not least George, and 'Solomon and the Witch' is one of his clearest tributes to his wife. The poem is a dialogue rather than the assumption of female voice and the witch is the Queen of Sheba,* who has cried out as a medium. Solomon interprets it as the crow of the cockerel that "crowed out eternity" ("Three hundred years before the Fall") and has crowed again now because, "Chance being one with Choice at last", he "Thought to have crowed it in again" (VP 388). This implies that the union of Solomon and Sheba has achieved the perfect fusion of the two lovers: "The marriage bed is the symbol of the solved antinomy, and were more than symbol could a man there lose and keep his identity, but he falls asleep" (AVB 52). The solved antinomy is the unity that transcends the duality of the antinomies which are intrinsic to our perception of reality. They have attained a state like that before "the ultimate reality, symbolised as the Sphere, falls in human consciousness... into a series of antinomies" (AVB 187)—or maybe "Three hundred years before the Fall"?

I see the Lunar and Solar cones first, before they start their whirling movement, as two worlds lying one within another--nothing exterior, nothing interior, Sun in Moon and Moon in Sun—a single being like man and woman in Plato's Myth, and then a separation and a whirling for countless ages... (AVA 121)

Even if Solomon does not fall asleep, however, there is not the perfect match of "imagined image" and "real image" —which is perhaps for the best as that is when "the world ends" (VP 388). Even so, the witch asks "let us try again" (VP 389).

The alchemical androgyne, Conceptio, Rosarium Philosophorum (1550)

The lot of love

A similar image of the perfected love dominates "Chosen", a poem fully in a female voice, speaking in terms at once Platonic, astrological, and astronomical.

The lot of love is chosen. I learnt that much
Struggling for an image on the track
Of the whirling Zodiac.

The pairing of lots and choice goes back to Plato's 'Myth of Er' in the Republic, which Plotinus refers to in his consideration of whether the stars cause destiny or merely record it (Ennead II.3). In the  astrological practice of his period there was an array of derived points called 'lots', often now referred to as the 'Arabic parts', though actually Hellenistic in origin (in Latin pars/'part' means degree as in the 360 degrees of a circle). These include the 'lot of Fortune', the 'Lot of Spirit', and the 'lot of Eros' or of love, which can be calculated for each individual chart and as such are fixed with the horoscope. Within Yeats's cosmology the birthchart is both fated and chosen—we can only be born at a moment that expresses our character but our character chooses our moment of birth (see yeatsvision.com on the 'The Seven Propositions' and 'Astrology and the Nature of Reality'). The 'whirling Zodiac' represents this descent into incarnation.

The horoscopes of WBY and GY with their Lot of Fortune (circle with saltire cross), Lot of Spirit (circle with vertical line), and Lot of Eros (circle with a heart). WBY is  night birth, so according to traditional rules his Lots are calculated differently from those of GY, a daytime birth. (For further consideration, see yeatsvision.com.)

The voice then speaks of a man, who whirls on the turning circuit of the zodiac:

Scarce did he my body touch,
Scarce sank he from the west
Or found a subterranean rest
On the maternal midnight of my breast
Before I had marked him on his northern way
And seemed to stand although in bed I lay.

This traces the constant motion of the zodiac to the western horizon where the sun, a planet, or a lot sets and its apparent passage 'under the earth' to the nadir or midnight, its northern point (as noon or the meridian is the southern point for those in the northern hemisphere). Noon and midnight form the vertical axis of horoscope ('seemed to stand'), but the zodiac keeps turning until the particular degree comes to the point where it rises in the east:

I struggled with the horror of daybreak,
I chose it for my lot!

The word 'struggle', used in the poem's second line, is repeated with the concept of chosen fate: Lot as Chance or Fate and Choice or Destiny become one, as in the love of 'Solomon and the Witch'.

If questioned on
My utmost pleasure with a man
By some new-married bride, I take
That stillness for a theme
Where his heart my heart did seem

There is a form of union, female and male, human and Daimon, both centred in the heart of the Tree of Life or the still point at the centre of the horoscope (just as the Daimon is positioned at the centre of the Wheel of the Faculties and Principles).

And both adrift on the miraculous stream
Where—wrote a learned astrologer—
The Zodiac is changed into a sphere.

With the union of Lot or Chance and Choice, fate and free will, the zodiac of time becomes the sphere of eternity, the realm of Daimon, and the cockerel of "Solomon and the Witch" can crow eternity in again.

Venus setting (lower right) in a shaft of zodiacal light (solar system dust illuminated by the sun, along the line of the zodiac), with the Milky Way arching over the upper part of the photograph.

If Yeats seeks to contact his own Daimon, he is seeking the female element of his own individuality. The internal is projected outwards, here as the relations of sexual love, whether Sheba and Solomon or the voice of "Chosen" with her man, yet in many ways this is a symbol of what is taking place on the inner planes.

Pope Pius XI said in an Encyclical that the natural union of man and woman has a kind of sacredness. He thought doubtless of the marriage of Christ and the Church, whereas I see in it a symbol of that eternal instant where the antinomy is resolved. It is not the resolution itself. (AVB 214)

The resolution would be the impossible fusion in the androgyne which symbolises the unity and wholeness that would be both consummation and extinction.


Note
* Although "the Witch" is not identified explicitly as the Queen of Sheba, the poem opens "And thus declared that Arab lady..." which seems to make it a continuation of "Solomon to Sheba", first published in 1918. The earlier poem ends:

Sang Solomon to Sheba 
And kissed her Arab eyes,
"There's not a man or woman
Born under the skies
Dare match in learning with us two,
And all day long we have found
There's not a thing but love can make
The world a narrow pound." (VP 333)

The epithet of "Witch" may be Yeats's allusion to P. B. Shelley's "The Witch of Atlas", dedicated to his own wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. It is interesting to note that the Witch of Atlas creates her own androgynous companion, "by strange art she kneaded fire and snow / Together" to form "A sexless thing" that "seemed to have developed no defect / Of either sex, yet all the grace of both".

The Daimon, the Sexes, and Androgyne Unity of Being

The androgyne Rebis from Splendor Solis, Solomon Trismosin,
painted copy from the British Library, London.

The history of the Golden Dawn at the turn of the twentieth century was a colourful helter-skelter of crisis, both internal and external, which led to various schisms and, eventually, multiple successors, including MacGregor Mathers's Alpha et Omega, A. E. Waite's Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, and the Stella Matutina under R. W. Felkin.

Georgie Hyde Lees joined the Stella Matutina, sponsored by W. B Yeats, and taking the magical name of 'Nemo Sciat' ('Let no-one know'). A few years later, in 1919, Violet Firth joined  Alpha and Omega taking her family's motto—'Deo Non Fortuna' ('By God, not by Fortune')—as her magical name and she went on to write under a streamlined version of it, 'Dion Fortune'. In due course, she also went on to found her own magical order, The Fraternity of Inner Light, and had a significant influence through her prolific writings, both fiction and books esoteric topics, including The Mystical Qabalah (1935).

 One of her earliest works is entitled The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage. It was written in 1924, and if readers can get past some of the imperialist, Anglocentric, and homophobic elements of the presentation, it is a valuable insight into ideas of sex and gender at the period in the groups related to the Golden Dawn. Indeed Moina Mathers accused Fortune of 'betraying the inner teaching of the Order'—a charge she was able to rebut (the relevant teachings belonged to a level that she had not yet reached; see Nevill Drury, Stealing Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Modern Western Magic, 129).

Ideas of Gender 

The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage is a short book and much of it focuses on occult polarity, gender, and sex. Fortune writes of the spiritual human as having two aspects: a timeless self or "individuality", which progresses through incarnations (cf. Yeats's Principles), and part of this is manifested in a particular incarnation as a temporary self or "personality" (cf. Yeats's Faculties).

Esoteric science... conceives [the spiritual human] not to be sexless, but on the contrary, bi-sexual, and therefore complete in himself. The individuality is two-sided positive and negative, has a kinetic aspect and a static aspect, and is therefore male-female or female-male, according to the relation of "force" to "form" in its make-up. The personality, however, is one-sided, and therefore has a defined sex. The individuality may be thought of as a magnet, having a positive and a negative pole, one of which is at a time is inserted in dense matter, and the nature of the pole inserted determines the sex of the body that is built up around it. (The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage, 31)

The timeless self therefore embraces both male and female in a form of alchemical union, where the two elements remain distinct though joined.

 The bisexual or androgyne as envisaged in alchemy is almost never a sexless fusion of female and male, but a union of female and male as the androgyne (Greek: andros-man and guné-woman), or less commonly hermaphrodite (Greek gods, Hermes and Aphrodite). It is often referred to as the 'rebis', re (thing), bis (twice), indicating its explicitly double nature, and the alchemists usually show their rebis with two heads (female and male) and often with both female and male genitals.

Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens, Emblem XXXIII,
engraving by Matthäus Merian, the Elder.

   Fortune envisages the complete spiritual human as being like a bar magnet, one end of which is plunged in matter, manifesting as male or female, while the rest of the magnet remains free and the opposite sex, complementing and balancing the incarnate half.

Hermetic Principles 

What Fortune calls 'esoteric science', taking on the language of the modern age, is more traditionally referred to as 'Hermetic wisdom' and traced back to the Corpus Hermeticum and the teachings attributed to Hermes Trismegistos.
   Anna Kingsford, founder of the Hermetic Society in the 1880s, had similarly seen a fundamental sexual balance, as expressed in the Hermetic principles underlying the universe: 'The Hermetic system [is superior to pseudo-mystical systems] in its equal recognition of the sexes'. This included both duality and gender as fundamental forces. Her introduction to the Hermetic dialogue The Virgin of the World, entitled 'The Hermetic System and the Significance of its Present Revival', offers a summary of some of the fundamental principles of Hermetic thought. She notes the fundamental unity of all things in Spirit, but that this is not incompatible with 'an original Dualism, consisting of principles inherently antagonistic'. Hermes Trismegistos tells Asclepios in The Virgin of the World that 'this law of generation is contained in Nature, in intellect, in the universe, and preserves all that is brought forth. The two sexes are full of procreation, and their union, or rather their incomprehensible at-one-ment, may be known as Eros, or as Aphrodite, or by both names at once', seems to lie behind Yeats's 'Supernatural Songs', such as 'Ribh Denounces Patrick' and 'Ribh in Ecstasy'.
   Mary Greer has drawn attention to how Kingsford's formulations foreshadow the later and now better-known axioms of the Kybalion (1912). There is no evidence that Yeats knew The Kybalion, but he certainly knew both the Hermetic Corpus and the contemporary interpretations of it, such as Kingsford's. And, despite the importance of Cabala and Rosicrucianism to the teachings of the Golden Dawn, it was called a Hermetic Order and at least one of its cover names was the 'Hermetic Students', as recorded in Yeats's autobiographies and on the invitation to his initiation.

Human and Daimon 

Anna Kingsford posited that 'Every human spirit-soul has attached to him a genius, variously called, by Socrates, a dæmon; by Jesus, an angel; by the apostles, a ministering spirit'. She explains that, ‘The genius is linked to his client by a bond of soul-substance’ and ‘is the moon to the planet man, reflecting to him the sun, or God, within him.... the complement of the man; and his "sex" is always the converse of the planet's' (The Perfect Way, or the Finding of Christ [1882], 89–90).
   The Yeatses' Daimon, as outlined in the automatic script and in A Vision A, similarly complements its human counterpart, "(the Daimon being of the opposite sex to that of man)" (AVA 27, CW13 25). The Daimon is not just a companion moon to the human planet, but closer in fact to the bar magnet imagined by Dion Fortune.
   Within physical life and normal contexts, the Daimon manifests through the people and habits of life—sexual relations, love for the other, all the complex knot of relationships and desires. Yeats imagines the Daimon or Guardian Angel conspiring with sweetheart and also jealous of her (AVB 240, CW14 175), referring to the western horizon or 'the seventh house of the horoscope where one finds friend and enemy' (AVB 213, CW14 157). Yet the Daimon also represents both the individual's destiny and the highest possibility of free will.
   In many respects, Yeats increasingly came to see the Daimon as the complete archetype from which the localized human is a fragment immersed into space and time to become manifest and experience phenomenal reality. Trying to formulate the relationship between human and Daimon in one draft, Yeats wrote:

Though it enters into memory & reflects in the human mind, it is not contained within that mind nor can that mind see the whole object as it is present before the daimon. though sometimes, it knows of it, through its own increasing excitement. & sometimes it shows some perception of the daimon in such a way, that the perception seems miraculous by seeing it separated from the general framework of its thought, as in prevision, & clairvoyance & those affinities of personality which are so swift that different personalities seem to coexist within our mind. Though for the purposes of exposition we shall separate daimon & man & give to man a different symbol, they are one continuous <consciousness> perception, seeing we perceive all that the daimon does & only remember & therefore only know what is in part a recurrance of our past.

(NLI MS 30,359, probably written in Cannes, December 1927/January 1928)

As Plotinus says of his 'guiding spirit', it appears that Yeats's Daimon 'is not entirely outside of ourselves; is not bound up with our nature; is not the agent in our action; it belongs to us as belonging to our Soul....' (Enneads III.4.5). We can be aware of it through excitement or a sense of miraculous perception, or in the case of Socrates, a sneeze. We are a continuous perception with the Daimon, and perception became increasingly important to Yeats as fundamental to identity (probably through the influence of Berkeley and through his attempts to understand the Principles), as is seen clearly in the formulations of the Seven Propositions which are posited on perception. 

    Much of the early automatic script is concerned with the nature and sources of different kinds of genius, a term that can refer to creative abilities as much as to a separate spirit, but often hovers between both in Yeats's thinking. Giving Yeats forms of contact with the genius was possibly the main reason for George Yeats's continued involvement with the automatic script, in terms of poetic material and of confident access to springs of creative energy. She probably saw the system as something of a personal support for her husband's creativity rather than something to be proclaimed to the world, and this was turned into the instructors' comment 'we have come to give you metaphors for poetry" (AVB 8, CW14 7). (This is not to say that she ventriloquized the whole automatic script, but in occult matters she evidently kept to the dictum she had taken as her motto—'Let no-one know'.)


   Certainly connection to the Daimonic aspect of perception or inspiration was something to be sought, particularly by those assigned to Phase 17, Yeats's own phase, the Daimonic person. One of the ways that he could do this was through seeking a female voice, approaching towards the opposite half of the bar-magnet-self.

 'a great mind must be androgynous'

In one of the earliest drafts of the system Michael Robartes expounds some of the system, and Owen Aherne makes a comment about remembering a 'passage in the Table talk [of Coleridge], he said that all great minds were androgynous' (‘The Discoveries of Michael Robartes’, typescript, YVP4 43). Aherne goes on to make a conjecture about the system of A Vision that is incorrect, but Virginia Woolf also seized upon this comment of Coleridge's, and explored it perhaps more richly and aptly:

Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine, I thought.... Coleridge certainly did not mean... that it is a mind that has any special sympathy with women; a mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself to their interpretation.... He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. In fact one goes back to Shakespeare’s mind as the type of the androgynous, of the man-womanly mind.... (A Room of One's Own, Ch. VI)

Key elements that echo Yeats's own ideas are those of fusion and a mind that uses all its faculties—one of the elements of Unity of Being, where on one Faculty brings the others into play automatically. When writing of Unity of Being Yeats uses the image of sympathetic vibration, Woolf here of resonance, but the porousness that allows the undivided mind to express itself and more of itself than is normal is part of the symbolic androgyne. Within A Vision and elsewhere in Yeats's writings, the term Unity of Being changes meaning and application as Yeats's ideas developed, but it was always something that the person should aim for, an ideal of the mind.

   The conjecture that Aherne makes is that 'If we understand the Primary nature as masculine the saying would apply very well to those phases as you have described them' (YVP4 43), which is wrong because in the Yeatses' system the primary is feminine and the antithetical masculine, but the vital thing is that all minds are an equal mixture of both tinctures. Whichever side of the Wheel Will and Creative Mind are on, Mask and Body of Fate balance them equally in the opposite tincture. Only perhaps those who achieve Unity of Being are able to fully realize this equal oppostion in a form of dynamic equilibrium, Coleridge's androgynous great minds, but the fundamental elements are there in all humanity.

Two sample dispositions of the Faculties. (a) a person with Will at Phase 4, and (b) a person with Will at Phase 17.
(See A Reader's Guide to Yeats's 'A Vision', p. 116, Fig.7.4.)

Every person is a balance of the primary and antithetical halves, and potentially of the male and female. In the first version of A Vision, Yeats goes one stage further, identifying Will and Creative Mind with the 'light' of the human mind (regardless of whether they are light or dark according to the coding for antithetical and primary) and Mask and Body of Fate with the Daimon's mind, which is dark to us.

The Will and the Creative Mind are in the light, but the Body of Fate working through accident, in dark, while Mask, or Image, is a form selected instinctively for those emotional associations which come out of the dark, and this form is itself set before us by accident, or swims up from the dark portion of the mind. But there is another mind, or another part of our mind in this darkness, that is yet to its own perceptions in the light; and we in our turn are dark to that mind. These two minds (one always light and one always dark, when considered by one mind alone), make up man and Daimon, the Will of the man being the Mask of the Daimon, the Creative Mind of the man being the Body of Fate of the Daimon and so on. The Wheel is in this way reversed, as St. Peter at his crucifixion reversed by the position of his body the position of the crucified Christ : “Demon est Deus Inversus”. Man’s Daimon has therefore her energy and bias, in man’s Mask, and her constructive power in man’s fate, and man and Daimon face each other in a perpetual conflict or embrace. This relation (the Daimon being of the opposite sex to that of man) may create a passion like that of sexual love. The relation of man and woman, in so far as it is passionate, reproduces the relation of man and Daimon, and becomes an element where man and Daimon sport, pursue one another, and do one another good or evil. (AVA 26–27, CW13 24–25)

Too many critics, perhaps, take this comment as license to identify the Daimon with any and all of the women in W. B. Yeats's life (and little else), but there is definitely an element of truth in the idea that the Daimon and its influence are discerned in these women, not least George Yeats.

   In A Vision, the system's myth of itself is that it is the product of the Daimons of W. B. and George Yeats—that is WBY's female Daimon and GY's male Daimon (— with possible contributions from the Daimons of the children, Anne and Michael). Indeed, though the supposed instructors worked through a hierarchy of communicating spirits, one of the voices, Ameritus, was said to be George's Daimon (YVP2 300).
   There is thus a complex interchange of man and woman sitting and writing questions and answers, or the man questioning the sleeping woman, yet it is the Daimons of the two who supposedly originate, and they influence their own charge directly but also work through the spouse. Male and female are fused and yet distinct, androgynous.

Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens, Emblem XXXVIII, engraving by Matthäus Merian, the Elder.

The following post will look at Yeats's use of female voices in poetry to express a potentially Daimonic view of reality, and subsequent ones will consider the Daimon with Plotinus and the Golden Dawn, and concepts of Unity of Being.

A note on the Golden Dawn

It is common nowadays to use "Golden Dawn" to refer to all the orders that share the bulk of the original Golden Dawn material, starting from the Cipher Manuscript "discovered" by William Wynn Westcott and most of it assembled or created by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers.

We have books, blogs, web sites, tarot packs, and modern versions that blazon the name, including George Mills Haper's Yeats's Golden Dawn. However, during Yeats's lifetime "Golden Dawn":

(1) was never used outside their own circle and was almost always presented as unexplained initials "G. D." or "G∴ D∴";
(2) was properly applied only to the "outer" part of the order (the inner was the Order of the R.R. & A.C.—variously expanded as Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis or Rubidae Rosae et Aureae Crucis, both meaning "red rose and golden cross");
(3) was dropped in 1902 following the scandalous Horos court case* and replaced with M.R. (the German Morgenröthe, "dawn", lit. "morning redness"); and
(4) disappeared when the renamed order dissolved over the next few years into several schismatic groups, including the Stella Matutina, the successor group that WBY was involved with into the 1920s.

     Confusion can arise if all the successors are referred to casually as "Golden Dawn", so that Charles Williams's involvement with the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross can be conflated with Dion Fortune's involvement in the Alpha et Omega or George Yeats's in the Stella Matutina.

     A fuller form of the name now widely used is the “Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,” but Nick Farrell, who has both scholarly authority and practical interest in the history of the order, maintains in his biography of MacGregor Mathers, King over the Water,† that:

the Golden Dawn was never called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (HOGD). That name was invented by Regardie for his book. The First Order was called the Golden Dawn in the Outer (GDO) although on some letterheads it was called the Esoteric Order of the Golden Dawn. Hermetic Order does appear on some letter heads and course material but it was never the Order's name.

(King over the Water, 17, [referring to this blog posting].)

     Certainly the form of "Order of the G. D. in the Outer" is what appears on Yeats's invitation "To initiate you"—where he was also told to "Ask for Mr Mathers, & the Hermetic Students' Meeting", and the "Hermetic Students" was the name that Yeats used for the group in his autobiographical writing (Au 575, CW3 453):

The invitation to WBY's initiation (pasted into NLI MS 36,276/2). Though his autobiography  states that he joined “in May or June of 1887” ( Au 183, CW3 160), the order was not formed until 1888 and the date here is 7 March 1890. Click on the image for a clearer version.

As Farrell indicates, course material kept by WBY and his uncle George Pollexfen contains ownership plates with “Hermetic Order of the G. D.,” often with the “G. D.” overwritten with “M. R.” (i.e., "Morgenröthe").¶

Click on the images for clearer versions (though still poor resolution—apologies).

     In the end, however, it seems impossible to fight for too much accuracy over a name that was possibly even hazy to those who used it at the time—when we only ever use initials, they take over from the full name. Though it entails major caveats, less explanation is required and it is almost accurate to say that Georgie Hyde Lees joined the Golden Dawn on 24 July 1914, sponsored by W. B. Yeats (Saddlemyer, Becoming George, 66-68).

      The name "Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn" is probably a modern invention, but is succinct and has become standard. In a similar way Yeats's project for "Celtic mysteries" at the Castle of Heroes in Lough Key are often now referred to as the "Celtic Mystical Order", a term that had no currency at the time (see Collected Letters 2, 663-69), .




 * For the Horos case, see chapter 1 of R. A. Gilbert's, The Golden Dawn Scrapbook: The Rise and Fall of a Magical Order (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1997).

† Nick Farrell, King over the Water; Samuel Mathers and the Golden Dawn (Dublin: Kerubim Press, 201); see also Mathers' Last Secret (revised): The Rituals and Teachings of Alpha et Omega (Rosicrucian Order of the Golden Dawn, 2011).

¶ See items passim in groups NLI MSS 36,276–36,280, listed in National Library of Ireland's Collection List No. 60, “Occult Papers of W. B. Yeats”, compiled by Peter Kenny.

Epiphany

Today is the Feast of Epiphany, commemorating the arrival of the "wise men from the east" in Bethlehem, bearing gifts of "gold, and frankincense, and myrrh" (Matthew 2:1–11). This story is given in the Gospel of Matthew, while most of the other elements—no room at the inn, the manger, and of the adoration of the shepherds—are drawn from Luke (the ox and the ass are later additions to the legend). Though many of us have become used to the fusion of the two—mainly through the hymns or readings associated with Christmas and the tradition of the nativity scene or crèche—in art, most of the old masters represent the adoration of the shepherds and the adoration of the Magi (kings or wise men) separately.

Sandro Boticelli, The Adoration of the Magi, ca. 1480, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.

Yeats takes these two adorations as archetypes. In the notes to The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), he characterizes three speakers of the collection's poems:* "'Michael Robartes' is fire reflected in water", "Hanrahan is fire blown by the wind", "Aedh ... fire burning by itself". Yeats then goes on:

To put it a different way, Hanrahan is the the simplicity of an imagination too changeable to gather permanent possessions, or the adoration of the shepherds; and Michael Robartes is the pride of the imagination brooding upon the greatness of its possessions, or the adoration of the Magi; while Aedh is the myrrh and frankincense that the imagination offers continually before all that it loves. (Variorum Poems, 803)

The Wind Among the Reeds (London: Elkin Matthews, 1899)

Yeats says that "It is probable that only students of the magical tradition will understand" the elemental attributions, and it is clear that he is drawing upon symbolism that includes the astrological fire, associated with intuition and imagination, while water is associated with emotion and air with intellect. He links Hanrahan and Robartes further to the idea of possession—a more earthy association, but imaginatively as much the possession of learning—and to the idea of two different revelations: the unexpected angel appearing to the shepherds in their fields, opposed to the studied revelation of the star that leads the wise men to Judea, where it is then related to written prophecy. Neither revelation is better, and though the unburdened spontaneity of the airy imagination might seem superior, the dedicated mission of the Magi is an important part of the mystery too. What the shepherds may have gained by simplicity of heart, the Magi have gained through great learning, but both have arrived at the same truth.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, The Adoration of the Shepherds, 1668, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.

Yeats wrote his own story "The Adoration of the Magi" at much the same time (1897), and his three old brothers from the western islands of Ireland have qualities of both the shepherds and the Magi. Simple countrymen, they are inspired by a voice to visit Paris, in search of a place where they finally find a dying prostitute. The god Hermes speaks through one of them and tells them to bow down and hear “the secret names of the immortals” that “the immortals may come again into the world” (Variorum Secret Rose 168var; see Mythologies 2005 424n13), and the dying woman appears to give the secrets of religious mysteries, such as those Yeats was attempting to create at Lough Key: “she told them the secret names of the immortals of many lands, and of the colours, and odours, and weapons, and instruments of music and instruments of handicraft they held dearest; but most about the immortals of Ireland and of their love for the cauldron, and the whetstone, and the sword, and the spear, and the hills of the Shee, and the horns of the moon, and the Grey Wind, and the Yellow Wind, and the Black Wind, and the Red Wind” (VSR 170var). When Yeats revised the story in the 1920s, while he was writing the first version of A Vision, instead of these revelations of these ancient secrets, the dying whore gives birth to a unicorn, though the birth is unseen and supernatural and recounted by Hermes.
 

Georges Lallemand, The Adoration of the Magi, c. 1624, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.

The revelation comes differently, but the import is ultimately the same—the advent of a new religious dispensation, which is first glimpsed by those who have the gift of grace or the result of preparation.

When Yeats looked back on his days in the Golden Dawn of the 1890s, he recalled:

We all, so far as I can remember, differed from ordinary students of philosophy or religion through our belief that the truth cannot be discovered but may be revealed, and that if a man do not lose faith, and if he go through certain preparations, revelation will find him at the fitting moment. I remember a learned brassfounder in the North of England who visited us occasionally, and was convince that there was a certain moment in every year which, once known, brought with it "The Summum Bonum, the Stone of the Wise." But others, for it was clear that there must be a vehicle or symbol of communication, were of the opinion that some messenger would make himself known, in a railway train let us say, or might be found after search in some distant land. (AVA x–xi, CW13 liv)

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*Four names actually feature in the poems' original titles—Mongan is the fourth—alongside "the Poet"; these were later changed to a generic "He..." or "The Lover...".