The Daimon, the Sexes, and Androgyne Unity of Being

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

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

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

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

Ideas of Gender 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hermetic Principles 

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

Human and Daimon 

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

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

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

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

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


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

 'a great mind must be androgynous'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

W. B. Yeats tells Stephen Spender of the coming times

It seems slightly incredible that Stephen Spender should have decided to write an autobiography when he was just 40, but he had seen so much and met so many people that there was already plenty to fill it. Among his encounters he recalled a meeting with W. B. Yeats at Lady Ottoline Morrell's London house in 1934.

Yeats, at the age of seventy, had something of the appearance of an overgrown art student, with shaggy, hanging head and a dazed, grey, blind gaze. On the occasion of our first meeting he look at me fixedly and said: "What, young man, do you think of the Sayers?" This took me aback and I murmured that I had not read any. "The Sayers," he repeated, "the Sayers." Lady Ottoline then explained that he was speaking of a certain troupe of speakers who recited poetry in chorus. I knew even less of these than of detective fiction and had to admit so. Lady Ottoline, who had arranged for us to have tea with very few people present, saw that I was a failure. She left the room and telephoned Virginia Woolf to get into a taxi and come round from Tavistock Square at once. Virginia, highly amused, arrived a few minutes later. (World Within World, 179)

If you have to be rescued from WBY, being rescued by Virginia Woolf isn't too bad. (Knowing WBY's taste for detective fiction as distracting entertainment, my first thought was also that Yeats was referring rather archly to Dorothy L. Sayers novels or to her translation of Dante, and I have been unable to discover anything else about these choric reciters.)

Yeats apparently went on to explain to Woolf "that her novel, The Waves, expressed in fiction the idea of pulsations of energy throughout the universe which was common to the modern theories of physicists and to recent discoveries in psychic research." Though Spender himself was out of sympathy with Yeats, particularly his philosophical and esoteric interests, he was interested enough to try to record what Yeats had said. Later on:

he spoke about the political views in the writing of my friends and myself, contrasting it with his own interest in spiritualism. "We are entering," he said, "the political era, dominated by considerations of political necessity which belong to your people. That will be bad enough, but there will be worse to come. For after that there will be an age dominated by psychologists, which will be based on the complete understanding by everyone of all his own motives at every stage of his life. After that, there will be the worst age of all: the age of our people, the spiritualists. That will be a time when the separation of the living from the dead, and the dead from the living, will be completely broken down, and the world of the living will be in full communication with that of the dead.

          Yeats expressed these ideas in a half-prophetic, half-humorous vein, and I may have distorted them in recording them. But certainly he spoke of the three ages to come, of the political, the psychological, and the spiritual: and he affirmed that the last would be "the worst". It is difficult to understand how to take such a prophecy. What is clear though, is that he saw spiritualism as a revolutionary social force as important in its power to influence the world, as politics, psychology, or science. (World Within World, 180–81)

There probably is some distortion or at least confusion over spirituality and spiritualism, but it is clear that Yeats was telling Spender about the last gyres of the current age. In general he breaks a millennium down into twelve gyres, corresponding to the cardinal phases and eight triads of phases. He had speculated about those of the near future at the end of "Dove or Swan" in the 1925 version of A Vision, a section that was cut from the later version. The "political era" that he spoke of to Spender is the culmination of the eleventh gyre, the "moral" triad of phases (23, 24, 25), which he saw already starting in 1925, when he discovered "the first phase—Phase 23—of the last quarter in the certain friends of mine, and in writers, poets and sculptors admired by these friends" (AVA 210). The zeitgeist he discerned in the work and attitudes of Pound, Eliot, Joyce and Pirandello involved engagement with the present moment of actuality and being "absorbed in some technical research to the entire exclusion of the personal dream" (AVA 211), as primary fact comes to dominate the inner truth. It does not exclude imagination but  eliminates the element of inventive fantasy. He then foresaw Phase 24 as offering "peace—perhaps by some generally accepted political or religious action, perhaps by some more profound generalisation" (AVA 212), while Phase 25 might "give new motives for obedience" or "an enthusiastic acceptance of the general will conceived of as a present energy" (AVA 213), which seems to be what he perceived in the politically engaged attitude of Spender and his contemporaries.

The ages of psychology and spirit seem to fall under the twelfth gyre, the "spiritual" triad of phases (26, 27, 28). Except that Phase 26 is spiritual in a strange way, so that psychological might be an appropriate term for the phase described as the Hunchback. One of the dominant characteristics in the description of the phase is the analysis of action and motive, and the way that these are isolated from their contexts:

His own past actions also he must judge as isolated and each in relation to its source; and this source, experienced not as love but as knowledge, will be present in his mind as a terrible unflinching judgment. Hitherto he could say to primary man, “Am I as good as So-and-so?” and when still antithetical he could say, “After all I have not failed in my good intentions taken as a whole”; he could pardon himself; but how pardon where every action is judged alone and no good action can turn judgment from the evil action by its side? He stands in the presence of a terrible blinding light, and would, were that possible, be born as worm or mole. (AVA 112; AVB 179)

This phase of psychology is however related to the psycho-spiritual, as A Vision B clarifies in a paragraph added to the treatment of Phase 26: "From Phase 22 to Phase 25, man is in contact with what is called the physical primary, or physical objective; from Phase 26 and Phase 4, the primary is spiritual. . . . Spiritual, in this connection, may be understood as a reality known by analogy alone. How can we know what depends only on the self? In the first and in the last crescents lunar nature is but a thin veil; the eye is fixed upon the sun and dazzles" (AVB 179). This may be what lies behind the idea that the spiritual gyre will be the worst: lunar nature, the basis of civil life, is overwhelmed by the solar, spiritual side, which is in some ways inimical to life. The Faculties are what produces history, and in human lives these are the phases where "the Faculties 'wear thin' " and "the Principles . . . shine through" (AVB 89).

In Spender's account, Yeats seems to have imagined that the worldly counterpart would be a thinning of the boundaries between the world of the living and the world of those outside incarnate life (whom we commonly call "the dead"). Although this seepage between worlds sounds like the scenario of a new Hollywood film or the latest TV pilot, it is difficult to see why Yeats of all people would be so negative about communication with the dead, having pursued such communication in séances, automatic writing, and "sleeps". It is also hard to discern in what senses it would be the worst, except that it must soon pass into the final phase of the wheel, that of the Fool, where control is gone.

Then with the last gyre must come a desire to be ruled or rather, seeing that desire is all but dead, an adoration of force spiritual or physical, and society as mechanical force be complete at last.

Constrained, arraigned, baffled, bent and unbent
    By those wire-jointed jaws and limbs of wood
Themselves obedient,
    Knowing not evil or good.  (AVA 213)

This vision of the twelfth gyre was written ten years before the meeting with Spender and Yeats had put a lot of thought into the coming years, drafting a number of versions before deciding that he could not see clearly enough. The prophecy of mechanical society, with the lines from "The Double Vision of Michael Robartes" describing Phase 1, seems to foresee a totalitarian world. This in turn seems to be at odds with the age of either spiritualism or spirituality he spoke of in 1934, but may not be so opposed as it seems at first. Halfway between the two, in 1929, Yeats had written:

Europe is changing its philosophy. Some four years ago the Russian Government silenced the mechanists because social dialectic is made impossible if matters is trundled about by some limited force. Certain typical books—Ulysses, Mrs. Virginia Woolf's Waves, Mr. Ezra Pound's Draft of XXX Cantos—suggest a philosophy like that of the Samkara school of ancient India, mental and physical objects alike material, a deluge of experience breaking over us and within us, melting limits whether of line or tint, man no hard bright mirror dawdling by the dry sticks of a hedge, but a swimmer, or rather the waves themselves. In this new literature announced with much else by Balzac in Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu, as in that which it superseded, man in himself is nothing.
          ("Introduction to Fighting the Waves": Wheels and Butterflies 73; Explorations 373; Variorum Plays 568–69)

Perhaps the equality of mental and physical objects in experience, and humanity as both "the waves themselves" and "nothing" in itself, points to a loss of identity and individuality that truly would be the worst imaginable world for the antithetical lyric poet who values the sincerity of his personal truth and experience above the truth of fact and shared experience.

This might even offer a clue to the otherwise baffling and gnomic comments that Spender recorded:

Of all that Yeats said, I remembered most his words about Shakespeare. "In the end," he said, "Shakespeare's mind is terrible." When I asked him to expand this, he said, "The final reality of existence in Shakespeare's poetry is of a terrible kind." (World Within World, 181)