Plotinus and "A Vision", Part III

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).

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.

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.

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.

(Ennead V.1.4, MacKenna vol. 4, p. 5; a different translation is given vol. 1, 136, as part of the conspectus summarizing the Plotinian system)

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).

Plotinus and "A Vision", Part II

'Plotinus for a friend'

Writing in 1926 Yeats counted Plotinus as part of the philosophical background in A Vision A, noting that 'it is mainly Plotinus & the pre­Socratics that separate me from Spengler & so far as I am separate' (30 July 1926, CL InteLex 4904). Yet, he also told Thomas Sturge Moore that he had only really started reading philosophy after A Vision was completed: 'When it was written (though the proofs had yet to come) I started to read. I read for months every day Plato & Plotinus' (14 March [1926], CL InteLex 4850). He repeated this claim in A Packet for Ezra Pound in 1929 (PEP 26–27; AVB 19–20, CW14 15–16). Searching to see if George Yeats's automatic script might have been inspired by her reading, he first set out to explore these writers:

I read all MacKenna's incomparable translation of Plotinus, some of it several times, and went from Plotinus to his predecessors and successor whether upon her list or not. And for four years now have read nothing else except every now and then some story of theft and murder to clear my head at night. Although the more I read the better did I understand what I had been taught, I found neither the geometrical symbolism nor anything that could have inspired it except the vortex of Empedocles. (PEP 26–27; AVB 20, CW14 15–16)

Plotinus, the isolated figure in ruddy brown, in Raphael's The School of Athens

Recognizing Plotinus as writing in the primary tradition of Platonism—'Plotinus' ecstasy' is after all the 'ecstasy of the Saint' (AVA 215, CW13 177)—Yeats does not always find him a congenial influence. In his poem 'The Tower' (written 1925–26), he complains about 'this caricature /Decrepit age that has been tied to me / As to a dog's tail":

It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,
Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend
Until imagination, ear and eye,
Can be content with argument and deal
In abstract things....                               (VP 409)

Apparently further study of Plotinus made him realize that the philosophy was not so abstract. Some two years later, Yeats wrote a note on this poetic complaint:

When I wrote the lines about Plato and Plotinus I forgot that it is something in our own eyes that makes us see them as all transcendence. Has not Plotinus written: 'Let every soul recall, then, at the outset the truth that soul is the author of all living things, that it has breathed the life into them all, whatever is nourished by earth and sea, all the creatures of the air, the divine stars in the sky; it is the maker of the sun; itself formed and ordered this vast heaven and conducts all that rhythmic motion—and it is a principle distinct from all these to which it gives law and movement and life, and it must of necessity be  more honourable than they, for they gather or dissolve as soul brings them life or abandons them, but soul, since it never can abandon itself, is of eternal being'?—1928. (VP 826, citing Ennead V.1.2, MacKenna, vol. 4, p. 2)

This passage comes from the opening tractate of the Fifth Ennead, which Yeats had probably not read when he wrote 'The Tower'. As MacKenna himself reported, Yeats had announced that he intended to spend the winter of 1926–27 studying Plotinus seriously (see Part I) and the volume that had just come out was devoted to the Fifth Ennead, dealing particularly with the Divine Mind or Intellectual-Principle.

The first tractate that Yeats quotes emphasizes the human starting point of enquiry: 'the seeker is soul and it must start from a true notion of the nature and quality by which soul may undertake the search'. However, it is dedicated to the 'The Three Initial Hypostases', the loftiest elements of Plotinus's system. From the human soul, Plotinus proceeds to Soul, but 'Soul, for all the worth we have shown to belong to it, is yet a secondary, and image of the Intellectual-Principle' and then in turn 'The Intellectual-Principle stands as the image of The One' (V.1.1, 3, & 7).

Plotinus's Three Hypostases were indeed one of the elements in his reading that helped Yeats better 'understand what [he] had been taught', and he used them to reframe how he saw the Principles and their relation to the Daimon and the Thirteenth Cone.

Stephen MacKenna's translation of Plotinus's Fifth Ennead (London & Boston: The Medici Society, 1926).

The Three Hypostases

A 'hypostasis' is an 'underlying substance' or 'ultimate reality', and MacKenna gives summaries of Plotinus's conception of the Three Hypostases in volume 1. The One 'transcends even the quality of Being' but is the cause of existence, for 'without its Supra-Existence nothing could be' (vol. 1, 118-19). Existence is manifested in the Nous, Intellectual-Principle, or Divine Mind, which

contains, or rather is, ta Noeta—the Intellectual-Universe or Intelligible Universe.... the Totality of the Divine-Thoughts, generally known, in the phrase familiar in Platonism, as The Ideas' or Forms. (vol. 1, p. 119) 

Within this Second Hypostasis, Plotinus differentiates a contemplative state of Being and a state of Act: Nous looks upwards in contemplation of the One, its act generates the All-Soul towards which it looks downwards at the moving image in time of its own unmoving eternity. The Third Hypostasis, the All-Soul, 'is the eternal cause of the existence, eternal existence, of the Kosmos, or "World," or material, or sense-grasped Universe, which is the Soul's Act and emanation, image and "shadow"' (vol. 1, p. 120).

MacKenna translates 'what is usually conveyed by the English philosophical term Real-Being' (vol. 1, 124) as 'Authentic-Existent', 'Authentic-Existents' or 'Authentic-Existence', applicable to the Intellectual-Principle itself and to the Divine Thoughts or Ideas. In a misreading of MacKenna, Yeats appears to take this term 'Authentic Existent', which properly applies to the Nous and its Divine Ideas, and use it to mean 'Hypostasis', applying it to all three hypostases (while also spelling it 'Existant', a mis-spelling that has persisted through all editions).

In so far as the 'Three Initial Hypostases' are the true origins of all that exists, this misprision of a term that is largely confined to MacKenna's translation is not particularly problematic. And in using the word 'misprision', I am thinking in terms of Harold Bloom's seminal idea of the 'anxiety of influence' and his concept of a 'strong misreading': there is a sense in which Yeats is asserting his reading Plotinus through his own system and his own thought. He evidently prefers the more immediate impact of 'authentic existent'—evoking both authenticity and being—over the more remote and technical term 'hypostasis', while 'emanation' might evoke a complementary status to a mind steeped in Blake, who uses the term for  female counterparts of his living beings. If this is the case, however, Yeats's choice of usage still raises some questions about how he understood statements such as those that the Intellectual-Principle 'is the seat of authentic Existents' (V.5.3, vol. 5, p. 50), or that 'the Intellectual-Principle is the authentic existences and contains them all—not as a place but as possessing itself and being one thing with this its content' (V.9.6., vol. 4, p. 95).

Rescuing Yeats

A number of writers have tried to explain that Yeats's use of 'Authentic Existant' is more subtle than simply misapplying the term to the Three Hypostases.

The first major treatment of Yeats's use of Plotinus was Rosemary Puglia Ritvo's 1975 examination 'A Vision B: The Plotinian Metaphysical Basis'. A key part of the argument relates to analysis that will come in Part III of this blog-essay, but Ritvo argues that Yeats's usage of 'Authentic Existant' is confined to the realms of the Intellectual-Principle and the All-Soul, because 'MacKenna's term "authentic existence"... is predicated of the Second and Third Hypostases but not of the First, he clearly excludes the Absolute', i.e., The One (38).

The difficulty here lies in understanding Yeats's distinctions into First, Second, and Third Authentic Existants, which are his own invention. He tells us that we should identify his Third Authentic Existant with Plotinus' Third Hypostasis, the All-Soul. How are we to understand the relationship between Yeats's first two Authentic Existants and Plotinus' metaphysics? Since Plotinus' First Hypostasis is excluded from Yeats's discussion, Yeats's First and Second Authentic Existants clearly are not to be identified with Plotinus' First and Second Hypostases.

This leads to a ingenious and completely plausible explanation, though it is one that has no foundation in anything that Yeats writes:

I propose that Yeats's first two Authentic Existants correlate to the two aspects of Plotinus' Second Hypostasis: the First Authentic Existant, Celestial Body, is Plotinus' Second Hypostasis considered as Being; the Second Authentic Existant, Spirit, is the Second Hypostasis considered as act, or using MacKenna's term, the Intellectual-Principle. (38)

This dual understanding of the Nous is entirely consistent with Plotinus's conception of the Second and Third Hypostases looking upward and downward.

Ritvo's reading has been persuasive, and Brian Arkins follows Ritvo in Builders of My Soul (1990), and a similar scheme is proposed by Matthew Gibson in 'Classical Philosophy' (W. B. Yeats in Context, 2010). Gibson's outline of 'the Intellectual Realm or nous' notes that 'Here reside the Authentic Existents: what Plato had called the Ideal Forms' (281). He then states that:

Yeats appears to have matched the two parts of the Second Hypostasis—Being and Act—with the Celestial Body and Spirit respectively, calling them erroneously the First and Second 'Authentic Existants': effectively dividing the dyadic Intellectual Realm into two hypostases with the contemplation of the Spirit (mind) constituting that 'which holds the First in it s moveless circle' (AV 194), and confusing the term 'Authentic Existant' with Hypostasis itself. (281)

After considering other aspects as well, Gibson goes on to comment that 'Not only does Yeats appear to read erroneously, but he also appears to collapse macrocosm into microcosm', though adding that 'Yeats's misreading stems from very intelligent observations' about Plotinus's system (282).

To someone as versed as Yeats in Cabala and Hermetism, collapsing microcosm and macrocosm is all but inevitable, as they are seen as reflections of each other, and desirable too. The Emerald or Smaragdine Tablet attributed to Hermes Trismegistus contains the dictum 'as above, so below; as below, so above', or as Yeats phrases it: 'For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said' ('Ribh Denounces Patrick', VP 556, CW1 290). As such the human microcosm will be a miniature of the macrocosm. In many respects this coincides with the concept that the physical world is a copy of the Ideal Forms within Nous.

Yeats's intentions and reading are made a little clearer in the drafts for A Vision B (though elements of discarded thinking add a layer of complexity too)*:

I identify the moment where the antinomy is resolved with Plotinus 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. (NLI 36,272/15)

In other words, by the term 'First Authentic Existant' Yeats did mean the One, by 'Second Authentic Existant', the Intellectual-Principle, and by 'third Authentic Existant', the All-Soul. This is not to say that Yeats misunderstood Plotinus to any significant degree, even if he was mixed up over one of MacKenna's terms, but it does mean that he was not really distinguishing between the Intellectual-Principle's Being and Act.

NLI 36,272/15, transcribed above.

 In Part III, I'll look at the way that Yeats used Plotinus's framework to structure his understanding of the Principles and the Thirteenth Cone and to try to resolve his uncertainties about the Daimon and the Ghostly Self.



*The categories of Celestial Body in Spirit and Spirit in Celestial Body are connected with the Beatitude and the Beatific Vision, and are examined at some length in 'The Thirteenth Cone' in W. B. Yeats's A Vision: Explications and Contexts, available here, especially pages 175–79.

Plotinus and "A Vision", Part I

An important element of Yeats's understanding of the spiritual elements of the system, including the Principles and the Thirteenth Cone, came through his reading of Plotinus. Yeats read The Enneads as they came out in the translations of Stephen MacKenna, an Irish nationalist and great friend of John Millington Synge. Yeats had a copy of the first translation, Plotinus on the Beautiful (YL 1594, WBGYL 1606), which appeared from A. H. Bullen's Shakespeare Head Press in 1908, the same year as his own Collected Works. The Medici Society started to publish translations of the Enneads in order in 1917 (see YL 1589-93, WBGYL 1601-5)—the copy of Vol. 1 in the Yeats's library has George Yeats's bookplate (she already had copies of Thomas Taylor's early nineteenth-century selected translations.) The Yeatses also bought Dean Inge's Gifford Lectures on Plotinus in 1919 (YL 954, WBGYL 964).

By the time that A Vision A appeared, the first three volumes of MacKenna's translations, containing the first four Enneads, had been published. Yeats refers specifically to Plotinus's hypostases in "The Four Principles and Neo-Platonic Philosophy":

I have not considered the ultimate origin of things, nor have my documents thrown a direct light upon it. The word Anima Mundi frequently occurs and is used very much as in the philosophy of Plotinus. I am inclined to discover in the Celestial Body, the Spirit, the Passionate Body, and the Husk, emanations from or reflections from his One, his Intellectual Principle, his Soul of the World, and his Nature respectively. The Passionate Body is described as that which links one being to another, and that which rescues the Celestial Body from solitude, and this is part of the office of the Soul of the World in Plotinus. As actually used in the documents Anima Mundi is the receptacle of emotional images when purified from whatever unites them to one man rather than to another. The 13th, 14th and 15th cycles are described as Spheres, and are certainly emanations from the Soul of the World, the Intellectual Principle and the One respectively, but there is a fundamental difference, though perhaps only of expression, between the system and that of Plotinus. In Plotinus the One is the Good, whereas in the system Good and Evil are eliminated before the Soul can be united to Reality, being that stream of phenomena that drowns us. (AVA 176, CW13 143-44)

Yeats's schema is therefore relatively clear:  the three supernatural cycles or Spheres are seen as expressions of Plotinus's three hypostases, The One, The Intellectual Principle, and The Soul of the World. There is a more tenuous relationship to the Four Principles, and this also presents the perennial problem of adapting a trinity to a quaternity or vice versa (one that he had encountered when writing on The Works of William Blake), but Yeats introduces a fourth term that probably owes as much to his work on Blake as reading of Plotinus: Nature. (In the WWB, Yeats had treated Nature as the mirror of the Holy Ghost, see YeatsVision.com.)

It is difficult from this simple set of correspondences to say how clear an idea Yeats actually had of Plotinus's hypostases or how far he saw the parallels as going.  Part of the attraction of Neoplatonism in this context appears to be that it enabled Yeats to include elements of the automatic script that dealt with the Christian Trinity but within a form of pagan language. Plotinus's philosophy is eminently primary in most respects—"Plotinus' ecstasy" is after all the "ecstasy of the Saint" (AVA 215, CW13 177)—but his vision retains enough of antithetical Greek paganism to make it palatable to Yeats. The Trinity of Christian faith is given as the One (the Father), the Nous, Logos, or Intellectual Principle (the Son), and the Soul of the World (the Holy Ghost). While Yeats, writing as himself, identifies his Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Cycles beyond physical incarnation with Plotinus’s hypostases (AVA 176, CW13 142–43), he has the  character of Owen Aherne identify them with the Christian Trinity (AVA 236, CW13 194).

Importantly, though, Yeats continued his study of Plotinus as he rewrote A Vision. Stephen MacKenna wrote to his patron Ernest Debenham in October 1926 reporting his pleasure at an article by AE and added:

Another little encouragement: Yeats, a friend tells me, came to London, glided into a bookshop and dreamily asked for the new Plotinus, began to read there and then, and read on and on till he'd finished (he really has a colossal brain, you know), and now is preaching Plotinus to all his train of attendant Duchesses. He told my friend that he intended to give the winter in Dublin to Plotinus. (Journals and Letters of Stephen MacKenna, 235)

What appears in the drafts of the late 1920s certainly shows increased attention given to Plotinus and his thought. (Continued in Part II.)

Confessions of an English Literature student

I was lucky to have many great teachers at school and university, but one of the most important for me was Stephen Gill at Lincoln College, Oxford. His academic interests were communicated with passion and they included George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and D. H. Lawrence, novelists of realism and social commitment. But foremost, at least in my impression, was his expertise in and love of William Wordsworth. He could quote with facility from throughout Wordsworth's work, but did so most frequently from The Prelude. It no doubt helped that he had been one of the joint editors of the Norton parallel text of the two full versions of that epic, along with its earlier proto-type.

     I'm aware that certain passages have half-consciously informed my reading of some themes in Yeats's A Vision. Such associations are probably inevitable for the Eng. Lit. student, sometimes because they reflect perennial concerns and sometimes they are just capriciously personal connections. I hope that these examples will resonate for others as well as for me and that they have illuminated my reading of Yeats, not sidetracked it.

     Two in particular stick in my mind. The first is the account of crossing of the Alps in Book VI of The Prelude, where Wordsworth addresses the power of Imagination which is compared to "an unfather'd vapour", showing the "invisible world" in flashes, intimating that:

Our destiny, our nature, and our home
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be. (The Prelude [1805], VI: 538–42)*

This final line in particular seems to me to intimate something of the divine nature that Yeats imagines in the Thirteenth Cone, or rather in the Sphere—that all being and becoming tends to "infinitude",and that if the goal were ever reached it would be a stasis. Certainly this passage also seems to echo Yeats's conception of the nature of life—that, as spirits reflected into time and space, the goal is the timeless and spaceless, but that effort and desire driving us on is more important than the goal (in contrast to Buddha's Four Noble Truths, which aim to eliminate striving and desire).

[And this recalls, in turn, T. S. Eliot's Burnt Norton, with its vision of "the still point of the turning world" and the statement that "the world moves / In appetency, on its metalled ways / Of time past and time future"—that word "appetency" being a slightly more pedantic but precise and concise version of hope/effort/expectation/desire/becoming. Such chains of association are probably also inevitable for the Eng. Lit. student.]

    The second passage is connected and, as I copy it here, even more connected than I had probably realized. In Book II, Wordsworth writes of "the visionary power" imparted by his solitary communion with nature and the "fleeting moods / Of shadowy exultation", because:

                … the soul,
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not, retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity, whereto
With growing faculties she doth aspire,
With faculties still growing, feeling still
That whatsoever point they gain, they yet
Have something to pursue. (The Prelude [1805], II: 334–51)**

I cannot but recall this passage when I read Yeats's description of the basis of the Faculties in terms of incarnations, "the four memories of the Daimon or ultimate self", such that:

His Body of Fate, the series of events forced upon him from without, is shaped out of the Daimon's memory of the events of his past incarnations; his Mask or object of desire or idea of the good, out of its memory of the moments of exaltation in his past lives; his Will or normal ego out of its memory of all the events of his present life, whether consciously remembered or not; his Creative Mind from its memory of ideas—or universals—displayed by actual men in past lives, or their spirits between lives. (AVB 83, CW14 61–62)

Yeats places the memories of exaltation (or sublimity) within the framework of reincarnations, so that the sublime moments of former lives are distilled into the Mask of this life, the goal and focus of our being or Will, but always with the sense that the goal is more important for the direction that it gives than for the possibility of actual attainment. Will is the appetent Faculty, moving always towards Mask, seeking and desiring it. Importantly, the actual memories of past lives are unimportant as the essence is contained within the current Faculties, and it is not "what [the soul] felt" but "how she felt" that matters.

[And this recalls, in turn, the close of Alfred Tennyson's poem "Ulysses", where an ageing Odysseus, chafing at life on Ithaca after his return, proposes a final voyage to his companions:

              ... my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

....

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are:

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.]

All these are connected by the importance of striving and thus with the physical world of the tinctures and Faculties, which only "mirror reality but are in themselves pursuit and illusion" (AVB 73, CW14 53). In a draft, Yeats writes that "the Principles are value and attainment, the Faculties process and search" (cited ARGYV 96) but the Faculties are the tools or interfaces by which the Principles interact with the world and may attain the value that they represent.

In the section on crossing the Alps, Wordsworth is close to Yeats's beloved Shelley in seeing the Alps as  symbols of "The everlasting universe of things..." ("Mont Blanc"). The scene of the mountains, waterfalls, winds, and sublime nature are seen as "Characters of the great Apocalypse, / The types and symbols of Eternity, / Of first and last, and midst, and without end" (The Prelude [1805], VI, 570–72). These intimate the world of the Principles, in the final objective spiritual reality of Thirteenth Cone:

But the 13th Cone, enters in some measure into all Spirits we must then expect some image of it in all things. Primar[il]y it is in those things which Blake called in Heaven & Hell too great for the eye of man. It is there where the painters & poets find it, storm, the starlit sky, spring abundance...

The 13 Cone is reflected in those parts of external nature uncontrolable by us—sea, sky, growth & so on. As an internal experience the 13th Cone is the spiritual reality [that] transcends experience, but is touched by all at the highest moment.… We enter in the Beatitude an experience that can only enter our embodied experience when symbolized by all that is most tremendous in nature… 

(Yeats, 1930 Diary)

Maybe Yeats and Wordsworth have more in common than may appear at first glance.

———————————————————————
There do not seem to be any good recordings of The Prelude readily available. The following links should take you to the relevant passages in a reading of the complete poem. They are less than ideal as they give the 1850 version of the poem and are read by amateurs of varying strength.

*Book VI: "Imagination... like an unfathered vapour..." 



**Book II: "I deem not profitless those fleeting moods of shadowy exultation..."

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.

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* 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)