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.

 

The Unicorn and the Lightning-Struck Tower, IV

Previous posts have considered the symbolism of the unicorn, the tower and the lightning flash within Yeats's work and in the system of A Vision, but the most immediate source in many respects is, of course, the Tarot card of the lightning-struck tower. This card is labelled "La Torre" in most Italian packs, such as the one that W. B. Yeats himself had, and "La Maison Dieu" in the older French packs, such as George's Marseilles pack. The majority of designs show a lightning flash, often coming from a cloud, striking the top of a crenelated tower, dislodging its crown, and with two or more people falling, along with a hail of particles.

In the Golden Dawn's specific iconography, the card is named the "Blasted Tower" and titled "Lord of the Hosts of the Mighty". In the Order's syncretic system, the Tarot trumps were identified with the paths connecting the sephiroth on the Tree of Life, and these in turn had correspondences with astrological principles. In their system, The Tower corresponds with the path on the Tree of Life joining Hod and Netzach, one of three horizontal paths on the Tree, identified by the Hebrew letter Peh (פ)  and the planet Mars. In many ways both these attributes have some appropriateness for George: Peh means "mouth" and her work as medium for the automatic script gave words to the communicators, and she was strongly marked as a Scorpio, both by her astrological rising sign and her cycle sign in the system, ruled by Mars (Pluto had not been discovered, and the Yeatses generally used the traditional rulers anyway). George was also said to have a Mars Daimon (YVP3 292) as did WBY.

The symbolism may well extend further. The Golden Dawn's Outer Order was not involved with magic—that came later in the Second Order—rather, it was designed to provide a grounding in the basics of occult knowledge and to help balance the temperament of the aspiring initiates by a series of elemental initiations, Earth, Air, Water and then Fire. In this structure, Water and Fire were associated with Hod and Netzach, respectively, so that the path joining them is the last one that is wholly within that elemental world. Beyond that came the Portal Ritual, after which the successful aspirant would pass to the Second Order. This ritual symbolically involves crossing the "Veil of the Paroketh", separating the lower sephiroth from the central ones.

The lower four sephiroth on the Tree of Life, with some of the Golden Dawn correspondences. For Mathers' diagram of the whole Tree in relation to the GD, see http://www.YeatsVision.com/GD.html.

W. B. Yeats joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in March 1890 and, by the time he stood as a candidate for the Golden Dawn's Portal Ritual in January 1893, he had passed through the four initiations of the Outer Order. There was a minimum period of three months at each grade, so Yeats's progress was not unduly fast.

After induction into the Order as Neophyte (0=0), preparation for the grade of Zelator (1=10) focused on elemental Earth and the sephirah of Malkuth; next came Theoricus (2=9), elemental Air and the sephirah of Yesod; then Practicus (3=8), elemental Water and Hod, followed by Philosophus (4=7), elemental Fire and Netzach. These processes focused on exploring and balancing the 'lower' personality, represented by these four sephiroth, preparatory to advancing towards actual magical workings and raising of the consciousness towards the Higher Self in the Second Order, Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis. The Portal Ritual does not have a specific grade related to it, representing a liminal level: the fifth element of Spirit or Akasa, the culmination of the Outer or First Order and an induction into the Second Order.

George followed the same steps, over twenty years later, inducted into the Stella Matutina in August 1914. Her advance through the grades seems to have been a little rapider, with initiations into the next grades in September and then November or December (as far as can be told from astrological charts she drew up that seem to indicate the times of initiations, see Becoming George 69-71). She probably advanced to Practicus (3=8) in May 1915.  At the end of that ritual, the Hierophant congratulates the newly made Practicus, and confers "the Mystic Title of 'MONOCRIS DE ASTRIS', which means 'Unicorn from the Stars' and I give you the symbol of MAIM which is the Hebrew Name for Water" (Regardie, The Golden Dawn, 2:118; see also the earlier version in Equinox 1:2, 274, where the title is "MONOKEROS DE ASTRIS").

Three or more months later, the aspirant might be ready to undergo the initiation to Philosophus. In this ritual he or she is addressed by the title of "Monocris de Astris", and symbolically approaches the sephirah of Netzach via the three paths that lead to it from the lower sephiroth already mastered:
· first from Malkuth by the path of Qoph, identified with the Tarot card of The Moon and the zodiac sign of Pisces;
· then from Yesod by the path of Tzadi, identified with The Star and the zodiac sign of Aquarius;
· and finally from Hod by the path of Peh, identified with The Tower and the planet Mars.

The ritual of the Philosophus, approaching Netzach via the horizontal path from Hod, shows the card as conceived by the Golden Dawn:

          And the Sixteenth Key of the Tarot:
It represents a Tower struck by a lightning-flash proceeding from a rayed circle and terminating in a triangle. It is the Tower of Babel. The flash exactly forms the Astronomical symbol of Mars. It is the Power of the Triad rushing down and destroying the Column of Darkness. The men falling from the tower represent the fall of the kings of Edom. "On the right-hand side of the Tower is Light, and the representation of the Tree of Life by Ten Circles. On the left-hand side is Darkness, and Eleven Circles symbolically representing the Qliphoth."

Aleister Crowley notes that this card "which we have seen in the 4°= 7° Ritual represents a tower struck by a flash of lightning, symbolising the Tower of Babel struck by the wrath of Heaven, and also the Power of the Triad rushing down and destroying the columns of darkness, the light of Adonai glimmering through the veils and consuming the elementary Rituals of the 1°=10°, 2°=9°, 3°=8°, and 4°=7° grades" (Equinox 1:2 293). This underlines that this stage is the true final stage of the elemental levels, associated with a breaking down of the Tower of selfhood that was built before, so that a new one can be constructed consciously to lead to the Higher Self.

A new Tarot pack, coming from the Golden Dawn tradition, actually includes a unicorn in the symbolism of the Tower card.

This Tarot is designed Harry and Nicola Wendrich, painted by Harry, in association with Nick Farrell and the Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea, a successor to the Golden Dawn. The tower seems to have been constructed out of letter blocks, with the base constructed from the twelve so-called simple letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the middle tier from the seven double letters, and the highest level from the three mother letters. (These categories come from the Sepher Yetzirah and correspond in turn with the twelve signs of the zodiac, the seven ancient planets, and the three elements—excluding earth.) The arrow that strikes and topples the crown of the tower issues from a circle in the form of the symbol for Mars, the card's astrological counterpart, and connected to the red colours that dominate this card. The circle is in fact a complex geodesic form of sphere, patterned on the "flower of life". This widespread form of sacred geometry can in turn be used as a matrix to generate the cabalistic Tree of Life: the patterns of the two sets of discs or globes that fall on either side of the tower, as noted by Mathers in the ritual description of the card.
The brightly coloured, positive tree is on the viewer's right and the muddy coloured negative tree on the left, with an extra eleventh sphere at its base, symbolizing imbalance. Over the stormy left side the rainbow arches, recalling the rainbow that came after the Flood that destroyed almost all human and animal life on earth. If the tower recalls the destruction of the Tower of Babel, it is testimony to the less fatal punishment that the promise of the rainbow symbolizes. The Hebrew letters letters for "bow", Q-Sh-Th, also correspond to the three lowest paths on the tree \|/ that meet in Malkuth, which Yeats linked to his vision of the Archer: the arrow is the path of Samekh, which crosses that of  Peh.

"On the right hand side of the Tower is Light and the Tree of Life. There is also the Unicorn of the Stars which is a reference to the 3=8 ritual and the Archangel Uriel. Uriel is the angel of the Mysteries, who overthrows the false perceptions" (Farrell and Wendrich). Traditionally also, Uriel is the angel who warned Noah about the coming flood, so the card brings together many aspects of emerging from an experience in which the old order is swept away to be replaced by a new one. "In fact if you cross the path from Hod to Netzach you are looking at the pulling apart of your existing universe, however if you travel the path from Netzach to Hod you are seeing your higher self creating a new Universe out of the letters it sees. The path of Peh is therefore a destruction and construction" (Farrell at the Wendriches' website).

It seems that the Yeatses must have been thinking about something very similar, and made the connection through study, or more likely through vision. In an e-mail, Nicola informed me that "The inspiration to include the unicorn in the Tower image came from a joint meditation wherein my husband and I met with the Tower archetype, who requested that Harry paint a unicorn in the image to represent the Archangel Uriel.  Uriel is the Angel of the Mysteries, who overthrows false perceptions".  Farrell also made the same connection, independently: "At the time I was inspired by the fact that the Unicorn was a symbol of the Archangel Uriel whose energy tends to unsettle and destroy in this way.  Unfortunately for the life of me I do not know where I got this association from. When I said to Harry I think we should should stick a unicorn in, he said 'oh good we have been getting that in our meditations too' " (e-mail). (See further considerations of the path and the card on Nick Farrell's blog for June 2011.)

With symbolism that is both different and strikingly congruent, the Wendrich card of the Tower bears out much of the passage that was quoted at the end of the "The Unicorn and the Lightning-Struck Tower, III":

In the same way that the external divine of the Thirteenth Cone sends the revelatory shock of the new era in a lightning flash, the Daimon's contact with its human counterpart marks turning points in an individual life. The crises are a form of constructive destruction. He expresses through a system of images a harmony of related aims and we should discover in this harmony of aims, in this unity of being not the mere intervention of the thirteenth cone but the sphere itself. . . that which only contradiction can expressnot “the  lone tower of the absolute self” but its shattering*; that whi unknown reality painted or sung by the monks of Zen. * When my Instructors talk of the shattering of the tower they seem to [depend on?] the old symbol. I am thinking of the Tarot trump [of the?] tower struck by lightning.        (NLI MS 36,272/22, p. 29) The shattering of "the lone tower of the absolute self" comes through the Daimon's lightning flash and frees the inner being. George's bookplate is thus a symbol of contradiction, a Daimonic moment of crisis, of freedom, connection with "the sphere itself", and Beatific Vision.

It may seem a strange emblem to choose as a bookplate, but it is a constant reminder that the initiate is remaking herself, shattering the tower of self that has been constructed largely unawares in youth, and that part of building a new structure of self and life comes from the words, letters, and speech of the books she reads.

The Unicorn and the Lightning-Struck Tower III

The Lightning Flash

 When Yeats first outlined his understanding of the Daemon in Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917), he referred to three paths: "the winding path called the Path of the Serpent," which is natural; "straight paths," "from the fire," which are intellectual; and one which "is neither the winding nor the straight line but zigzag, illuminating the passive and active properties, the tree's two sorts of fruit: it is the sudden lightning," (CW5 28-29). The first is the path of common humanity, the second the path of "saint or sage," and the third the path of the Daemon, whose "acts of power are instantaneous" like the lightning. Yeats emphasizes three qualities of lightning: the zigzag, the suddenness and illumination, albeit very brief.

Lying behind this explanation, partly hidden by vows of secrecy and partly obscured by poetic elaboration, is the Golden Dawn's teaching on the Tree of Life. Most of these teachings were derived from traditional Cabalism so were public, albeit recondite, knowledge, and after Aleister Crowley published many of the Golden Dawn's rituals in his magazine Equinox in 1909,  they had not been so secret. Nowadays a simple search on the web will reveal all that and far more, so it is sometimes difficult to remember the oaths that Yeats felt bound by,  and the care with which he uses Cabalistic material.  When he does use Golden Dawn terms, they almost always have meanings and associations that different from those that emerge in the Order's own documents. (For this and much else here, see T. Jeremiah Healey III, "'That Which is Unique in Man': The Lightning Flash in Yeats's Later Thought", Yeats Annual 13, 253-262.)

The Lightning Flash, the Lightning Bolt or the Flaming Sword represents the primal process of creation and emanation, starting with the manifestation of the first sephirah, the Crown, Kether, and proceeding through the subsequent sephiroth in order, to ground itself in the Kingdom, Malkuth.

.

Equinox I:2 [Autumn 1909]

The sephiroth are arrayed in a symmetrical pattern with three vertical groups or pillars, on the left the Pillar of Severity and on the right the Pillar of Mercy, while down the centre the balanced Pillar of Mildness. The central pillar connects the Kingdom, at the base, to the Crown, at the top, and it is sometimes viewed as the direct path towards godhead or sanctity, but too direct in most cases. The path of Nature follows a more tortuous course, dependent on the paths between the sephiroth. Connecting the ten sephiroth are twenty-two paths, and the serpent's coils connect these twenty-two paths in reverse order, representing the laborious ascent of the human soul.

George Pollexfen's diagram of the Lightning Sword and Serpent. The Lightning has ten colours, representing the ten sephiroth (the names alongside). The Serpent has twenty-two colours, representing the twenty-two paths, identified by the astrological correspondences that the Golden Dawn used for the Tarot trumps.

The Lightning Flash is the act of divine creation: timeless, eternal or momentary, for "eternity is not a long time but a short time. . . . Eternity is in the glitter on the beetle’s wing. . . . it is something infinitely short" (cit. Hone, W. B. Yeats, 327).  It is the connection between the archetypal world of the Daimon and the actual world of the human counterpart. Indeed, the Daimon is in some respects like a personal aspect of the divine, the fragmented, multitudinous, antithetical vision of unified, single, primary godhead. In a draft of the passage from Per Amica Silentia Lunae  quoted at the beginning, Yeats had written:

The influx from the mirror life of the dead, who themselves receive it from the condition of fire falls upon the winding path, called the path of the serpent. . . . The influx of those who live but naturally is wandering, but that of those upon the straight path not wholly straight.  I remember another image of the Kabalists, & then we strike upon the Target of the sun, a challenging arrow & the God answers with his crooked lightening. (NLI 30,532, pages numbered 48, 50)

In the published version, God is not mentioned and the lightning is the Daimon’s path. Even in 1901 Yeats had been uncertain whether the lightning was reserved for God, writing that we “receive power from those who are above us by permitting the Lightning of the Supreme to descend through our souls and our bodies” [“Is the Order of R.R. & A.C. to Remain a Magical Order”, 1901; YGD 266], where the plural of “those who are above us” is not quite contradicted by the ambiguous substantive of “the Supreme”, which could be either singular or plural. 

The Daimon's connection with the human, particularly the antithetical human being, centres on the Moments of Crisis, which the Yeatses figured a series symbolised by the lightning flash. The flash was in fact the first element of this complicated, and ultimately unused, part of the system to appear in the automatic script.

Card L7: the Lightning Flashes, treated in the automatic script of January 5, 1918.

Each angle of an individual's lightning flash is attributed to a phase, representing "states of soul & people" (YVP1 205). Yeats’s are marked 17, 16, 14, 18, 12 (YVP1 205; YVP3 330), his own Phase, Maud Gonne’s, Iseult Gonne’s, George’s (YVP1 525n) with a final term still unrealised in 1919 (YVP2 222).  George's are 18, 8, 25 and 17, her own phase, her father's, an unnamed person's, then Yeats's, with a subsidiary link to "the 3 birds", a coded reference to Yeats's female influences, Maud, Iseult, and George herself, or possibly another (Augusta Gregory or Olivia Shakespear?).

These angles are connected in turn to the Moments of Crisis, though they do not necessarily correspond to them. They are too complex for any detailed treatment here, but the important thing about these moments is the sense of shock involved, as the Daimon brings us to crisis in order to force a re-evaluation.  The first of them, the Initiatory Moment is liable to pass unmarked until hindsight reveals the change of "sensuous image", and the course which has been set in train is brought to a head at the next, the Critical Moment, however Yeats summarises its traits cogently:

All IM’s reveal weakness in the self (in subjective man in its realization of the objective world[)].  They give a shock to the belief in self & bring the man under the influence of an image, they increase “lure” to cure inaction & abstract dreaming. . . . All IM’s change the mind.  This “lure” is caused by an external event (PF) & this is produced by the daimon & the IM forces up into conscious some emotion that compells realization of its contrary. . . . The daimon drives us from the self made prison.  ?The lure to a man is a woman. . . . They are caused by a deception – false information, or misunderstanding. 

(Yeats's Vision Papers 3 194)

The Moment is therefore salutary but possibly unpleasant in nature, inciting some form of action and driving a person to reality, but generally more pertinent in the case of an antithetical person.  Yeats queried the role of the opposite sex, but it is clear that women are implicated in most of his own Moments. In a long formulation of the nature and form of "The IMs" from 1922, Yeats opens with the statement that "The Daimons who produce the IMs of a man, are his own Daimon & the daimon of that woman with whom he will attain, if attain he do, the Beatific Vision (BV).  These Daimons, even though the man & woman have not met know each other & draw the man & woman together, through the agency of the Pylons" (YVP3 113),[note*] so that whoever or whatever was involved in a given Moment in the life of Yeats, for instance, the crisis is the expression of his and George’s Daimons. Furthermore, he also sees his children's spirits or Daimons overshadowing all of his loves, prior to bringing their parents together.  In this sense all roads eventually lead to the Beatific Vision, and all of Yeats's digressive amours are preparatory to his marriage with George.

This is in part possible because the lightning flash is an intersection of the timeless with time, "expressing not merely the nature of successive forms of emotional experience in external life, but as the nature of the emotional life it self at every moment of its existence they are that which is unique in man.  His entire emotional past as always present" (YVP3 114), and in this it reflects the Daimon itself, which perceives existence not in succession in time or space but simultaneously related through kinship, emotional or personal ties. 

The Lightening Flash is therefore the man in emotional relation to his past, made present; & in intellectual relation to his future conceived as present.  It is because of this that he is an individual & not merely a type of his phase.  at every moment he chooses his entire past & his entire future, though he is not conscious of his choice till on the threshold of the B[eatific] V[ision]. (YVP3 115)

Inasmuch as the Daimon is the archetype of the individual it is not placed at any phase and it links its human counterpart with other phases of the Wheel, both past and future incarnations, and those of other people.

The Daimon and its lightning are part of what lift the system of A Vision from cyclical determinism.  The Vision papers show continual attempts to align the Moments of Crisis with astrological influences, which Colin McDowell has examined in his essay "Shifting Sands: Dancing the Horoscope in the Vision Papers" (W. B. Yeats's "A Vision": Explications and Contexts, 194-216), but planetary cycles are almost certainly too regular to express the lightning flash, which by its nature is unpredictable: a symbol of revelation and itself revealed.  Yeats declares that, "The Lightening Flash because of its irregular & incalculable movement expresses that which is unique, that which cannot recur just as wheel & cone expres all that is seasonable" (YVP3 114).  The uniqueness of each person’s Daimonic trajectory makes it more elusive, falling outside the general schema.

The  source of the lightning is the Daimon's place, the Thirteenth Cone, so that, in one formulation, during the Critical Moments or in the Beatific Vision, the individual comes “under the sway of the thirteenth cone” and the Daimonic perspective substitutes "the sphere for the cone" (AVA 172).  Similarly in broader history, the sweep of the gyres and their seasons is inevitable, but the future remains unpredictable beyond a general outline, “for always at the critical moment the Thirteenth Cone, the sphere, the unique intervenes” (AVB 263). Indeed Yeats foresees the reversal of the gyres in terms of a lightning flash:

All visible history, the discoveries of science, the discussions of politics, are with it [the objective, primary energy]; but as I read the world, the sudden changes, or rather the sudden revelations of future changes, are not from visible history but from its antiself. . . . every new logical development of the objective energy intensifies in an exact correspondence a counter-energy, or rather adds to an always deepening unanalysable longing. That counter-longing, having no visible past, can only become a conscious energy suddenly, in those moments of revelation which are as a flash of lightning. Are we approaching a supreme moment of self-consciousness, the two halves of the soul separate and face to face? A certain friend of mine has written upon this subject a couple of intricate poems called The Phases of the Moon and The Double Vision respectively, which are my continual study, and I must refer the reader to these poems for the necessary mathematical calculations.
                         (The Dial 1920; CW8 134; Ex 258-59)

In the same way that the external divine of the Thirteenth Cone sends the revelatory shock of the new era in a lightning flash, the Daimon's contact with its human counterpart marks turning points in an individual life. The crises are a form of constructive destruction. In a cancelled draft, Yeats speculated that a Swedenborg (perhaps a Yeats too), who 

becomes conscious of the Wheel of the Principles and that of the Faculties in their mutual relations is at the same instant awake and asleep, alive and dead. He expresses through a system of images a harmony of related aims and we should discover in this harmony of aims, in this unity of being not the mere intervention of the thirteenth cone but the sphere itself, that something beyond system more discernable in Burmah [i.e. Boehme] than in Swedenborg, that which only contradiction can expressnot [sic] “the  lone tower of the absolute self” but its shattering*; that whi unknown reality painted or sung by the monks of Zen.

* When my Instructors talk of the shattering of the tower they seem to [depend on?] the old symbol. I am thinking of the Tarot trump [of the?] tower struck by lightning.
       (NLI MS 36,272/22, p. 29)

The shattering of "the lone tower of the absolute self" comes through the Daimon's lightning flash and frees the inner being. George's bookplate is thus a symbol of contradiction, a Daimonic moment of crisis, of freedom, connection with "the sphere itself", and Beatific Vision.

---

* Note: “The daimon of woman, or man acting through the Pylons chose the men or women who will excite the symbol into acting”, and the Pylon “acts out of the general nature of the influence” (YVP3 113).  The term "pylon", Greek for "gateway", recalls the titles that he uses in “Hodos Chameliontos” for what he there terms “personifying spirits” (i.e. Daimons): “Gates and Gate-keepers” (Au 272)

The Unicorn and The Lightning-Struck Tower II

Part II

Alexandria's was a beacon tower, and Babylon's
An image of the moving heavens, a log-book of the sun's journey and the moon's;
And Shelley had his towers, thought's crowned powers he called them once.

I declare this tower is my symbol; I declare
This winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair;
That Goldsmith and the Dean, Berkeley and Burke have travelled there.

'Blood and the Moon' (VP 480–81)

It needs no great familiarity with Yeats's work to recognize the importance of towers as a recurrent symbol in his work. There are many influences that contribute to this:

The Round Tower at Glendalough, Co. Wicklow

the towers of myth, legend and history—whether Nimrod's tower at Babel or Babylon's ziggurats for watching the heavens, the lighthouse at Alexandria, one of the wonders of the ancient world, or the round towers in Ireland's historic landscape, such as those at Glendalough and Cashel.

Added to these are also important literary influences, most notably Shelley's poetry, as well as Milton's 'Il Penseroso', which inspired a series of engravings by Samuel Palmer. All of these are evoked when Yeats has his fictional characters of Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne arrive at the foot of Yeats's own tower-house at Thoor Ballylee, Gort.

We are on the bridge; that shadow is the tower,
And the light proves that he is reading still.
He has found, after the manner of his kind,
Mere images; chosen this place to live in
Because, it may be, of the candle-light
From the far tower where Milton's Platonist
Sat late, or Shelley's visionary prince:
The lonely light that Samuel Palmer engraved,
An image of mysterious wisdom won by toil;
And now he seeks in book or manuscript
What he shall never find. 

'The Phases of the Moon' (VP 372–73)

Samuel Palmer, 'The Lonely Tower'

With the purchase of Thoor Ballylee, Yeats was deliberately embodying a symbol in stone and mortar with a title deed. The first property Yeats had ever owned, it stood close to Augusta Gregory's house, Coole Park, and though he had bought it before his marriage to Georgie Hyde Lees, it became a sort of present to her and a statement of their marriage. He sees it as a representation of friendship and love, when he notes how he:

For an old neighbour's friendship chose the house
And decked and altered it for a girl's love,
And know whatever flourish and decline
These stones remain their monument and mine.

'Meditations in Time of Civil War' V (VP 423)

Ezra Pound viewed it with less romantic embellishment, referring to as Yeats's 'phallic symbol on the Bogs. Ballyphallus or whatever he calls it with the river on the first floor' (in a letter to John Quinn, 24 March 1920, in Reid, The Man from New York, 419).

Ironically, therefore, when Yeats has Robartes and Aherne talking on the road next to his house, he makes Robartes a liar, for if they had seen a light at the window, Mr. Yeats was almost certainly not alone and seeking wisdom in a 'book or manuscript' but rather engaged with his wife in the strange form of inspired communication involved in the Automatic Script. This new wisdom may be expressed in geometrical terms but it comes not from the mysteries of ancient texts, rather from the wisdom of the body:

             The signs and shapes;
All those abstractions that you fancied were
From the great Treatise of Parmenides;
All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight things
Are but a new expression of her body
Drunk with the bitter sweetness of her youth.

("The Gift of Haroun Al-Raschid", A Vision A 126-27)

The tower occurs with some frequency in the script and it kept recurring in complex sketches along with birds, butterflies, cliffs, hands, water and trees. Apparently, at one point the Instructors prompted a stay in Glendalough, and Yeats asked if this was because of the round tower, to be told gnomically that it was there 'To put in your mind for a purpose' (20 March 1918, YVP1 395). While there, the Instructors agreed when Yeats asked if the tower was a symbol of the Passionate Body (YVP1 394) and antithetical (YVP1 396, though this may refer only to the Glendalough tower). This makes a good deal of sense, insofar as the tower is a natural symbol of isolation and the antithetical is what seeks to divide the individual from others, and is founded at the level of the Principles in the Passionate Body, the vehicle of emotion and love (developed further in Oxford the following year, YVP3 50–51). In A Vision B, Yeats writes of how 'the Celestial Body is a prisoner in a tower rescued by the Spirit' (AVB 189), while in a draft for A Vision B, he contrasts the divine dimension, 'the sphere itself, that which only contradiction can express,' saying that it is'not "the lone tower of the absolute self" but its shattering, "the absolute self" set free, that unknown reality painted or sung by the monks of Zen' (NLI 36,272/12; & cf. 36,272/22). Here the tower represents very much the antithetical separation of the individual soul, while the Sphere is its opposite, the shattered tower, where the absolute self, probably the Ghostly Self, is freed of the tower of the 'lower self': the body, the personality and the emotions.

7 January 1919, cf. YVP2 163: Cashel with symbolic objects

On a personal level, however, both Yeatses were in antithetical incarnations, so it was their natural mode, and the tower also hints at the structure they were building both in terms of the system and their marriage. While they were in Glendalough, they were told that 'The tower is incomplete' with advice to love the natural life, and that 'the tower is not joined' followed by a picture of a tower with a crack down the middle (24 March 1918, YVP1 399). At one stage, one of the Instructors opened a session with the admonition: 'Do not forget that the Tower is still your symbol | In all lives', though even Yeats seems to have wondered 'In what way am I in danger of forgetting' (15 September 1919, YVP2 427)? However, at other times they were told that, possibly as a protective symbol, the tower was more George's emblem than his (15 January 1918, YVP1 257; 28 October 1918, YVP2 102).  'You', of course, is ambiguously singular or plural, and in many ways the tower often seems to represent the relationship or partnership.

November 24, 1919, viz. YVP2 492

There also seem to have been personal rituals involved, as when Yeats was told 'tower tower you' (expanded by the editors of YVP to 'you[r thought]' for no obvious reason; 19 March 1918, YVP1 391) or one Instructor signed off, 'Goodnight | Yes | tower symbol over her' (6 November 1919, YVP2 475). Another evening they were counselled to ask only 'a few questions but build the tower & gild the sun | the moon is cold and worried and nervous and needs plenty of sun and quiet — nervous' (the part about the moon is in mirror-writing, which seems to have been used mainly when the message was meant to by-pass George; 2 November 1918, YVP2 108). Whether this was esoteric ritual or simply conjugal advice couched in symbolic language, it is clear that there is much to the Automatic Script that was a private language and involved at least as much that was unwritten as was written.

19 August 1920, Notebook 6, cf. YVP3 36

One sketch from 19 August 1920 brings together a tower with water, apple trees and flowering trees as well as birds and a unicorn (labelled, on the right-hand side), said to be carrying a mask from a tree with its horn and “Rushing” (YVP3 37). The two sets of trees are labelled apple trees and flowering trees, which may represent the same contrast of flower and fruit that Dulac used in his woodcut of the Great Wheel. But elsewhere in the Automatic Script, the tree is the symbol of the primary and the mask of the antithetical, so that the unicorn's carrying away may represent a temporary triumph of the antithetical or rescue for the antithetical Yeatses, as they build the tower of their antithetical system.

I do not know what my book will be to others — nothing perhaps.  To me it means a last act of defense against the chaos of the world; & I hope for ten years to write out of my renewed security. (letter to Edmund Dulac, 23 April [1924]).

The important thing is the meaning of the tower, both in building and destruction, is also key to the Tarot image as seen by the Golden Dawn, and therefore, I think, to the image used for George Yeats's bookplate. But before moving on to that, in the next post I shall look at the Daimon and the Lightning Flash.

The tower remains probably Yeats's most public and amongst his most recognized symbols, and he regarded it as linked to the system, but independent of it and comprehensible as a symbol without it:

In this book and elsewhere I have used towers, and one tower in particular, as symbols and have compared their winding stairs to the philosophical gyres, but it is hardly necessary to interpret what comes from the main track of thought and expression.  Shelley uses towers constantly as symbols....

A Note to The Winding Stair and Other Poems, 1933 (VP 831)

Dust jacket of The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), designed by Thomas Sturge Moore

The West Coast Tarot Reading

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 how 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.