An Image of Eternity
Plotinus gives a geometrical image of the Three Hypostases based on the circle, which is central to Yeats's exploration of the
Principles in terms of Neoplatonism:
The total
scheme may be summarized in the illustration of The Good as a centre,
the Intellectual-Principle as an unmoving circle, the Soul as a circle
in motion, its moving being its aspiration. (IV. 4. 16)
In
A Vision B:
When I try to imagine the Four Principles in the sphere, with some hesitation I identify the Celestial Body with the First Authentic Existant of Plotinus, Spirit with his Second Authentic Existant, which holds the First in its moveless circle; the discarnate Daimons, or Ghostly Selves, with his Third Authentic Existant or soul of the world (the Holy Ghost of Christianity), which holds the Second in its moving circle. (AVB 193–94, CW14 142)
This concentric vision is picked up again when Yeats maintains that "a system symbolising the phenomenal world as irrational because a series of unresolved antinomies" such as the one presented of
A Vision] "must find its representation in a perpetual return to the starting-point. The resolved antinomy appears not in a lofty source but in the whirlpool's motionless centre, or beyond its edge" (
AVB 194–95,
CW14 143).
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| A spiral galaxy, NGC 1232 |
The "resolved antinomy" is an ideal of equilibrium or annihilation of the antinomies, which is unattainable because the opposites'
conflict is needed for consciousness and life—"Could those two impulses, one as much a part of truth as the other, be reconciled, or if one or the other could prevail, all life would cease" (1930 Diary,
Ex 305).
Trinity and Hierarchy
To complement the circles with the motionless centre, Yeats also envisages a more hierarchical view of "the
Four Principles in the sphere," also based on Plotinus. There are two presentations of the material, first in words and then in a diagram, which differ enough to cause problems. First he describes a trinity corresponding to the First, Second, and Third Authentic Existants or Hypostases (Yeats conflates the Hypostasis and Authentic Existant, see
Plotinus and A Vision, Part II), as quoted above. After the
Celestial Body and
Spirit, the Third Authentic Existant is related not to a
Principle as such but "the discarnate
Daimons, or
Ghostly Selves", though it is then associated with the lunar
Principles "sensation and its object (our
Husk and
Passionate Body)," with the "
Husk as part of the sphere [merging] in
The Ghostly Self" (
AVB 194,
CW14 142). The diagram that illustrates this description, however, omits the
Daimons and
Ghostly Selves, and it seems to place the pair of
Passionate Body—Husk as higher and lower aspects of the World Soul, in turn generating the Wheel of the
tinctures. These then draw their character from the Second and Third Authentic Existants respectively.
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| AVB 194, CW14 143 |
In the diagram it is slightly unclear whether the Third Authentic Existant is considered to correspond with the
Passionate Body or
Passionate Body and
Husk together, but the corresponding text would indicate that it is both. Even so, how
Daimon/Ghostly Self can become
Husk (and
Passionate Body) is never explained in
A Vision and resists any easy explanation.
An Earlier Formulation
Some elucidation can be found in the development of these ideas, elaborated in drafts that came after the publication of
A Vision A. They can, however, be a little convoluted and the following exploration is really only "
intended for students of
Plotinus, the Hermetic fragments & unpopular literature of that kind. The
chances are a hundred to one against your liking it", as Yeats told Ignatius McHugh (26 May [1926]).
The first draft of the formulation that became "the
Four Principles in the sphere," speaks rather of the "resolved antinomy" or at least an approach to this final ideal state. Yeats’s initial idea was to see The One as the Sphere, and to see the
two other Hypostases as the ideal states based on the two forms of union of
Spirit and
Celestial Body: the monistic
Celestial Body in
Spirit (the Intellectual-Principle) and of diverse
Spirit in
Celestial Body (the World Soul)
. The distinction between
Celestial Body
in Spirit and
Spirit in Celestial Body is not used in either
version of
A Vision, though it is appears in drafts and manuscripts of the late 1920s, and they can be taken simply as another version of the antinomy, with
Celestial Body
in Spirit being a manifestation of the One/unifying/solar/
primary pole and the
Spirit in Celestial Body being a manifestation of the Many/individuation/lunar/
antithetical pole (they are explored in my essay on
'The
Thirteenth Cone,' YVEC 159ff.; the manifestations of the antinomy are tabulated in
A Reader's Guide to Yeats's 'A Vision', Table 4.1 pp. 66–68
).
An early manuscript draft can be a little confusing on first reading and adding punctuation can become very intrusive, so I use the layout here to make the reading slightly more fluent and only include cancelled text that is significant:
I identify
the moment where the antinomy is
resolved with Plotinus['s] first Authentic Existant or the One,
the Celestial
Body in Spirit with the Second Authentic Existant &
the Spirit
in Celestial Body with the third Authentic Existant or Soul of the
World.
A Spirit in Celestial Body is sometimes called the ghostly self because its
condition can like the
third Authentic Existant be identified with the Third Person in the ^Christian^
Trinity [i.e., the Holy Ghost].
Plotinus has a fourth condition Boehme’s mirror which is the
Third Authentic Existant reflected into sensation & discursive reason,
& this condition I compare to the ghostly self reflected as the daimon
into Husk & Passionate body or the daimon.
Daimon
& ghostly self are however one & only seem to us different.
If I would arrange Principles & Faculties into such a diagram
as comes naturally to the students of Plotinus I arrange them thus
|
|
| Draft and diagram mapping Principles and Plotinian Hypostases (NLI MS 36,272/15) |
The upper triangle
Before moving on to the question of the
Daimon,
Ghostly Self,
Passionate Body, and
Husk, it is worth noting that here they are all excluded from the upper trinity. Rather than collapsing the
Four Principles into the Three Hypostases, this arrangement makes the two permanent
Principles, Celestial Body and
Spirit, into three manifestations, though the highest one may even be above the
Principles. Perhaps because of the association of
unity with the solar
primary,
Yeats seems to search for a term for this Ultimate Reality that avoids
associations of singularity, rejecting terms such as 'Monad', 'One', or 'Unity', before settling on 'The Resolved Antinomy' as the equivalent of the First Authentic Existant.
If the reader bears in mind that
Celestial Body
in
Spirit indicates the solar, unifying force—and hence, in the diagram, reflecting inot the
primary tincture—and
Spirit in
Celestial Body represents the lunar, individuating force—and hence reflected as the
antithetical tincture—the typescript based on this draft takes the ideas further:
When Spirit and Celestial Body are in union, union may be either
Celestial Body in Spirit or Spirit in Celestial Body. Spirit in
Celestial Body is that reality which supports and precedes
phenomena; a community of timeless and spaceless autonomous beings, each
being unique [?or a species in its self], a complete multiplicity.
Celestial Body in Spirit is that reality we discover in thought: a single
spaceless and timeless being all others its creation and endowed with
reflected limited life. These two conceptions imposed upon us by the
whirling gyres are the antinomy that underlies all life and the supreme
religious experience cannot be other than its solution in a condition
beyond intellect. If as my instructors insist consciousness is conflict
the supreme act must rend the intellect in two. By such an act the
whirling ends and the soul passes into the sphere, or into the divine
life, but in human life these conceptions alternate; from the first
descends the antithetical tincture, from the second the primary, from
the first incarnation, from the second discarnate existance. Every
moment, emotion or act of the imagination separating itself from all else, seeks its own turns towards some
unique being, its goal [i.e., the individuality of the soul], every logical process, every moral act proclaims
a single being [i.e., oneness in the whole]; from this conflict all suffering arises. (NLI MS 36,272/17, annotated typescript).
This passage intimates a kind of realization to the resolved antinomy, through
“the supreme act” that rends “the intellect in two” or, by rending it ,
negates the antinomies and becomes non-dual, yet asserts that “all life”
partakes of one or other element of the duality. This recalls the meditation attributed to the fictional Judwalis and explained in the note to "The Second Coming" (1922):
A supreme religious act of their faith is to fix attention on the mathematical form of this movement until the whole past and future of humanity, or of an individual man, shall be present to the intellect as if it were accomplished in a single moment. The intensity of the Beatific Vision when it comes depends upon the intensity of this realisation. (VP 824)
The final duality expressed in the draft is also put into the mouth of Michael Robartes in the fictions that preface
A Vision B:
Every action of man declares the soul's ultimate, particular freedom, and the soul's disappearance in God; declares that reality is a congeries of beings and a single being; nor is this antinomy an appearance imposed upon us by the form of thought but life itself which turns, now here, now there, a whirling and a bitterness. (AVB 52, CW14 37)
The lower triangle
To return to the question of the Daimon, Ghostly Self, Passionate Body, and Husk, the draft arrangement indicates that, though it may do some violence to Plotinus's actual thought, Yeats's reading of the Enneads is influenced by the Boehmist thinking that he had used in the Works of William Blake.
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| The Works of William Blake, vol. 1, p. 246 |
There he had written that "Like Boehmen and the occultists generally, [Blake] postulates besides the Trinity a fourth principle..." (
WWB 1:246), a mirror that reflects the ideal world into multiplicity and manifestation (see
1:247,
1:265). Reflection in the mirror is both a metaphysical reality and a metaphor for incarnation (see the
Seven Propositions).
Whether because Yeats again needed somehow to create four out of three or because his thought fell into inveterate patterns, he applies the same construction here (which I repeat for clarity):
Plotinus has a fourth condition Boehme’s mirror which is the
Third Authentic Existant reflected into sensation & discursive reason, & this condition I compare to the ghostly self reflected as the daimon
into Husk & Passionate body or the daimon. Daimon
& ghostly self are however one & only seem to us different.
In this formulation, the multitudinous union of
Celestial Body in
Spirit appears to be equated with the
Ghostly Self, which
reflects as sensation (
Husk) and discursive reason (
Passionate Body), which singly or together are equivalent to the
Daimon, and all are really aspects of each other, viewed from different perspectives.
A Vision B
Seeing how the idea was originally conceived gives some clues as to how Yeats reconceived the ideas by the time he came to the published version in
A Vision B. He has gone a step further, in ascribing individual
Principles in the Sphere to the Three Hypostases, identifying in the diagram
Celestial Body at the apex point (1), with
Spirit (2), and
Passionate
Body (3), though without the Hypostases' names (I repeat the diagram):
 |
| AVB 194, CW14 143 |
The text repeats the identification of
“the
Celestial Body with the First Authentic Existant of Plotinus,
Spirit with his Second Authentic Existant, which holds the First in its
moveless circle,” indicating clearly that these two are the One and the Intellectual-Principle, unmoving
eternity. However, the diagram’s
Passionate Body is replaced in the text with “the
discarnate
Daimons, or
Ghostly Selves,” identified with Plotinus’s
“Third Authentic Existant or soul of the world (the Holy Ghost of
Christianity)” (
AVB 194,
CW14 142). Thus, as in the drafts, the
Ghostly Self is seen as a discarnate form of the
Daimon, but the term
Daimon is usually applied to the incarnate
Daimon.
As the drafts show, Yeats had no problems moving between
Principles and
Daimon/Ghostly Self (which "are however one & only seem to us different"), and it seems that he sees
Daimon and
Passionate Body–Husk as different manifestations of the same aspect of being. Indeed, a few pages earlier he notes that "the
Husk (or sense)” expresses
“the
Daimon’s hunger to make itself apparent to certain
Daimons,” so is
part of our own
Daimon, whereas the object of sense, the “
Passionate
Body is the sum of those
Daimons” (
AVB 189,
CW14 139), the community of spirits.
Caveats
Though this all makes sense and fits together, it does not quite square with the
treatment of the
Daimon elsewhere. Thus, it is not clear how
Spirit (as "the
Daimon's knowledge") and
Celestial Body ("all other
Daimons as the
Divine Ideas their unity") remain separated from the discarnate
Daimon
or
Ghostly Self. And Yeats seems to have shifted position on the
Daimon's relationship to the
Principles, making several different identifications, such as that "The Daimon is
Spirit
fully expressed in matter (PB)" (NLI 13,580, Rapallo C) or that "there
is one gyre in the 'daimon', the 'daimon' being itself the 'celestial
body'" (NLI 36,272/24), or including them all: “Man is expressed in the
Four Faculties the daimon in the
Four Principles” (NLI 13,582, Rapallo E). Amidst all this confusion of attributions, he also seems to have forgotten or ignored the scolding from one of the instructors in 1928, who is reported to have "insisted. I must not say the Principles & Faculties
expressed the daimon all man did was
approach the daimon. He insisted that the outward movement of the daimon & the inward movement were the same thing in the perfection of the daimon" (NLI 30,359).
I doubt that Yeats ever reached a conclusion in this respect—the
Daimon never quite fits into the scheme as neatly as the more schematic elements of
Faculties and
Principles. There may however be some form of resolution in Plotinus's distinctions, in particular the suggestion that humanity operates on the level of Soul and discursive reason, as opposed to the ideal realm of Intellect. Yeats comments that the
Daimon is out of time and "does not perceive, as does the linear mind of man, object following object in a narrow stream, but all at once" (NLI 30,359), recalling the difference between Soul and Intellect in Plotinus's formulations:
Soul
deals with thing after thing—now Socrates; now a horse: always some one
entity form among beings—but the Intellectual-Principle is all and
therefore its entire content is simultaneously present in that identity:
this is pure being in eternal actuality; nowhere is there any future,
for every then is a now; nor is there any past, for nothing there has
ever ceased to be; everything has taken its stand for ever, an identity
well pleased, we might say, to be as it is; and everything, in that
entire content, is Intellectual-Principle and Authentic Existence; and
the total of all is Intellectual-Principle entire and Being entire.
In
A Vision A the
Daimon is the dark of the mind, controlling the
Faculties that are out of our control—her
Will is our
Mask and her
Creative Mind is our
Body of Fate (see
AVA 27,
CW13 25)—but later the distinction is that the human mind "deals with thing after thing" in contrast to the
Daimon's viewing all as "simultaneously present". Part of the shift in Yeats's thinking from viewing the
Daimon as
the opposite of the human being to seeing it as a greater archetype is
probably informed by this description of a state of "pure being in
eternal actuality", which Yeats takes as the
Daimon's state, and specifically when in the Sphere or
Thirteenth Cone.
Conclusion
The relationship between the
Daimon and the
Principles remained uncertain, but Plotinus's thought clearly helped Yeats to formulate his understanding of the
Principles in the years following the publication of
A Vision A, especially through his ideas about the Hypostases and their levels of reality. The more that I study the system, the more I see that the
Principles are one of the pillars on which the construct is founded, and that the
Faculties are relatively secondary to them. This fundamental point is why Yeats felt embarrassed by
AVA, where he had failed to appreciate the
Principles' role or to give them the prominence that their place in the automatic script would have warranted. Yeats's reading in philosophy was important in giving them the weight they deserved. In particular, the distinctions and hierarchies of Plotinus's
Enneads helped Yeats to understand the relations between them and to clarify his metaphysical construct, offering him another vision of what he saw as the reality behind the phenomenal world and expressed in a way that Yeats found particularly engaging.
Whether or not he manages to convey that understanding and show the importance of the
Principles to his readers is doubtful. As I have commented earlier, readers as perceptive as Helen Vendler, Graham Hough, and Donald Torchiana found the
Principles a redundant doubling, and the ordinary reader cannot to go rummaging through drafts to appreciate their significance for Yeats and his system. Certainly in this respect, Yeats failed.
In conveying his understanding of Plotinus,
A Vision probably gives too little evidence to go on.
Despite the efforts of Rosemary Puglia Ritvo, and those who have followed her, to save Yeats from the charge of having misinterpreted the concept of Authentic Existence and the Hypostases, Yeats does seem to have misread Plotinus in this respect. The spelling of "Authentic Existant" probably shows that Yeats is working from memory and not really checking his source, and it is seems likely that Yeats just thought that the term
was more attractive and more immediately comprehensible than
"Hypostasis", forgetting that it was a different
concept or blurring the distinction. Yet as Harold Bloom has shown, art may rely on levels of misreading and Yeats's is a respectful but strong misreading. The fact that he was using Plotinus to illuminate his own ideas probably makes Yeats a bad reader of the
Enneads, but as he wrote in a different context, he was "
a symbolist & no
philosopher” (NLI 13,579, Rapallo B).
