Jaff Seijas: Images for the Emblems of the 28 Phases

The artist Jaff Seijas recently contacted me, drawing my attention to a group of paintings he has created for the 28 phase emblems that the Yeatses drew up from the automatic script. There is plenty more to be said about these, and I hope to get round to it, but want to share the paintings on their own first. I've added some of the pictures to the webpage where I touch on the emblems—Phase Symbols—and am posting a different selection here, with Jaff Seijas's kind permission. Go to his website at jaffseijas.com to see the full set of images. I know from writing about the phases and preparing web materials that going through all twenty-eight of them can sometimes become a little tiring, and realize that some of the images are probably less inspiring than others, so I can only add thanks that he has taken pains to illustrate the full set. Most of the emblems have relatively brief summaries, but a few have fuller descriptions, either  in the card index (S66), or in a workbook that sadly does not seem to be published (a short section on Phase 1 is quoted in George Mills Harper's The Making of Yeats's "A Vision" and passages are supplied to fill in gaps in other manuscripts).

Phase 3: "Eagle over sea with one foot caught on back of sea lion one foot caught by Dolphin. Eagle drags both"

Phase 13: "Man hanging over pond head down just touching water. Reflection on surface of pool at which he looks but another image going down. Surface image primary that in depth anti. Stagnant water & weeds. A third image from back of head which is the subconscious"

Phase 17: "Crystal arrow going through golden crescent. arrow cut so as to reflect all colours. Colours in crystal show how much energy has passed into anti"

Phase 27: "more or less [? easter] figure. in left hand holds a mans soul in a simulacrum of man temptation to put it in. He stands on globe."

Phase 15: "Beautiful Man in pool holds stone of wrath & arrow of wisdom. arrow reaches crescent."

Phase 1: "naked man at North with outstretched hands tied to branch of tree swinging. Could not get rid of it--'an obsessing figure' not luminous like the tree images. Snake coiled once round feet & tail touching ground. Head looking to place of Initiate. a good deal to left at N a figure weeping into a cup & opposite on opposite side of figure a boar drinking from cup. feet on cup pulling it towards him. on other side towards E a figure whirling a leather thong with stone at end, in a fury. He stands on back of eagle. someway past boar. think on right hand side east but not sure."

For Phase 1 itself, this last image would probably be rather simpler, since, as Harper notes, "this confusing exposition combines imagery from several Phases". The paragraph is quoted without context in The Making of Yeats's "A Vision" and is not included in Yeats's "Vision" Papers, so it is difficult to be sure exactly what Yeats was doing, but it appears to be an attempt to evoke a vision of Phase 1 within the context of the Wheel.
• The figure of Phase 1 is that of the man hanging from the tree, probably with the snake included. Yeats notes that the evocation is not luminous as true visions tend to be, and not easy to move  or develop from but obsessive.
• Phase 1 is located at cardinal North, and the man looks towards "the Initiate": this term came into the script very early and is ambiguous, as it may refer to the last phases, (especially Saint and Fool), or go beyond cycles to the centre of the Wheel (linked to avatars and Christ).
• It is difficult to see how the "figure weeping into a cup" can be both at N and a good deal to left of a figure at North. It could well be a misreading of the rather N-like glyph for Capricorn (♑), which would make sense, since this is the marker for "Loins" placed in the fourth quarter, usually shown between Phases 25 and 26. (This ties in with the description of Phase 18 on card S66, where it is noted that the "Legs go to ♈" i.e. Aries, the zodiac sign marked on the Wheel between Phases 18 and 19.)
• The elements of the weeping woman with the cup and the boar with cup both seem to come from Phase 24, even though they are referred to as being opposite one another.
• Whether these are left or right seems moot, and it is probably best not to place too much emphasis on this aspect.
• East is identified in the normal arrangement with Phase 22 and the other figure with the whirling leather thong appears to be the emblem associated with Phase 22.

•The "back of an eagle" does not tie in exactly with any symbol, though eagles figure in the emblems for Phases 3 and 9, and a "bird of prey" in Phase 8. The figure of Phase 22 may therefore be standing on an "opposite" figure.

Without more context, it is difficult to tease out exactly what the vision communicates. As it stands, it seems like a rather cluttered hybrid of Odin sacrificing himself on the World-tree and Alice in Wonderland. Yet the imagery is clearly part of Yeats's phantasmagoria, with descriptions of these images recurring in the description of Speculum Angelorum et Hominum and the woman with the cup figuring in Yeats's own bookplate.

The Unicorn and the Lightning-Struck Tower I

Part I

KALON KAGATHON, and Marengo,
                This aura will have, with red flash,
                the form of a diamond, or of crimson,
Apollonius, Porphery, Anselm,
                 Plotinus EN THEORIA 'ON NOUS EXEI
had one vision only, and if the stars be but unicorns. . .
or took the stars for those antilopes.

 Ezra Pound, Canto CI

George Yeats’s bookplate, designed by Thomas Sturge Moore in 1920, shows a unicorn bounding from a lightning-struck tower. The image is a complex symbol of the soul’s release, which draws on imagery from the Golden Dawn, Yeats’s writing and the symbols of the automatic script.

As has happened before, what I thought would be a relatively brief piece lightly touching on a few topics has grown rather unwieldy as I start to write and keep adding a detail here and there. So this will now be a series of posts, exploring a few  of the implications of this image in the areas mentioned, starting with Yeats's writing, then considering the automatic script, and finally the Golden Dawn's magical system. In most respects the Golden Dawn material comes first in terms of how the symbols evolved and entered Yeats's art, but it makes more sense to set out how Yeats used them before examining their roots.

Though “The Adoration of the Magi” (1897) features a unicorn, that element actually dates from a revision of the 1920s, and Yeats's first use of the unicorn is in Where There is Nothing (1902), where the Tolstoyan visionary Paul Ruttledge recounts a vision where he is beset by beasts symbolizing "the part that builds up the things that keep the soul from God":

Then suddenly there came a bright light, and all in a minute the beasts were gone, and I saw a great many angels riding upon unicorns, white angels on white unicorns. They stood all round me, and they cried out, 'Brother Paul, go and preach; get up and preach, Brother Paul.' And then they laughed aloud, and the unicorns trampled the ground as though the world were already falling in pieces. (Variorum Plays 1131-32)

Here the angels and unicorns come to break down what builds the barriers to God, and the unicorns are associated therefore with the angelic, but also with destruction. The play itself indicates this destruction of barriers and its title alludes to an earlier story, "Where there is Nothing, there is God". The axiom says both that God is even where there is nothing, but more deeply that, as for the Cabalists, God lies behind the veils of the Negative as the seeker finds "the nothing that is God" ("Where there is Nothing, there is God", Mythologies 190). In a similar way in the play, Paul Ruttledge claims to "have learned that one needs a religion so wholly supernatural, that is so opposed to the order of nature that the world can never capture it" (VPl 1133). This austere absolutism was never congenial to Yeats himself, but he recognized its validity, and in some ways it also lies behind the formulation of the Sphere and the Thirteenth Cone in A Vision: a God so alien that it cannot be conceived in normal terms.

Yeats rejected Where There is Nothing for a variety of reasons, mainly because it had been a collaboration with George Moore, whom he came to dislike and distrust. He rewrote the play's central theme with the far more congenial Augusta Gregory in 1908 as The Unicorn from the Stars. Rather than a gentleman becoming a monk, the new central character is a working man and militant, Martin Hearne. He too has a similar vision of unicorns:

Martin: There were horses—white horses rushing by, with white shining riders. . . . Then I saw the horses we were on had changed to unicorns, and they began tramping the grapes and breaking them. I tried to stop them, but I could not.
Father John: That is strange, that is strange. What is it that brings to mind? I heard it in some place, monoceros de astris , the unicorn from the stars.
Martin: They tore down the wheat and trampled it on stones, and then they tore down what were left of the grapes and crushed and bruised and trampled them. . . . it was terrible, wonderful! I saw the unicorns trampling, trampling, but not in the wine-troughs. O, I forget! Why did you waken me? 
Father John:....The unicorns--what did the French monk tell me?--strength they meant, virginal strength, a rushing, lasting, tireless strength. 
Martin: They were strong. O, they made a great noise with their trampling. 
Father John: And the grapes, what did they mean? It puts me in mind of the psalm, Et calix meus inebrians quam praeclarus est. It was a strange vision, a very strange vision, a very strange vision.

(VPl 659-661)

Here the association of the unicorns with destruction is even more pronounced, though  they also seem to echo Julia Ward Howe's "trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored" ("The Battle Hymn of the Republic"), words of course themselves echoing the Biblical Isaiah and Revelation. That echo of Revelation is also in the angelic figure with the vessels of wrath that Martin remembers later:

I saw a bright many-changing figure; it was holding up a shining vessel holds up arms ; then the vessel fell and was broken with a great crash; then I saw the unicorns trampling it. They were breaking the world to pieces—when I saw the cracks coming I shouted for joy! And I heard the command, 'Destroy, destroy, destruction is the life-giver! destroy!'  (VPl 669)

"Destruction is the life-giver!" is the recognition of Siva's place in the Hindu trimurti as destroyer and transformer, as well as the alchemical dictum that generation proceeds out of corruption. The Latin phrase recalled by the priest, "Monoceros de astris", is taken up in revolutionary fervour by Martin and directed against the English lion by others:

We will go out against the world and break it and unmake it. Rising. We are the army of the Unicorn from the Stars! We will trample it to pieces.—We will consume the world, we will burn it away.... (VPl 686)

Yeats was well aware of the interpretations place on the work of Joachim of Fiore, and there seems to be some of this millennial and prophetic strain in the burning of the world. This ecstatic conflagration is directed on a wider scale than that envisaged by Paul Ruttledge, but the theme of creative destruction is common to the two, and apparently linked in Yeats's mind with the heavenly unicorns.

Later on, after the automatic script had started, Yeats began to use the unicorn to symbolize the  new dispensation, still representing destruction and purity: the clearing away of the old and the instauration of the new order, alongside an uncompromised absoluteness. This is seen in The Player Queen (1922), where Septimus announces, 

the end of the Christian Era, the coming of a New Dispensation, that of the New Adam, that of the Unicorn; but alas, he is chaste, he hesitates, he hesitates.... I will rail upon the Unicorn for his chastity. I will bid him trample mankind to death and beget a new race. (VPl 745)

The unicorn is aloof through its chasteness, and if not inimical to humanity, at least pitiless towards it. It is another version of the "Rough Beast" that symbolizes the coming dispensation in "The Second Coming" with its "gaze blank and pitiless as the sun".

When Yeats revised “The Adoration of the Magi” (1897) in 1925, he included a series of allusions to the system of A Vision and substituted for the revelation of secret names of the gods a miraculous or spirit birth of a unicorn to a dying whore:

that which she bore has the likeness of a unicorn and is most unlike man of all living things, being cold, hard and virginal. It seemed to be born dancing; and was gone from the room wellnigh upon the instant, for it of the nature of the unicorn to understand the shortness of life... When the Immortals would overthrow the things that are to-day and bring the things that were yesterday, they have no one to help them, but one whom the things that are to-day have cast out. (Mythologies 312)

These three magi, simple peasants from the west of Ireland, are placed in counterpoint to the magi of the St Matthew's Gospel, who the god Hermes in a vision scorns for abandoning the Magian wisdom of the stars for "The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor" ("The Magi," 1914). In their befuddled adoration, they fail to see the new avatar (if it exists), and they seem closer to the shepherds than the magi, yet such is the reversal of the ages: virgin and whore, magi and shepherds, compassionate and pitiless, Christ mourning "over the length of time and the unworthiness of man's lot to man" while "his successor will mourn over the shortness of time and the unworthiness of man to his lot" (A Vision B, 136-37).

Only one poem by Yeats features unicorns, "I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness", the seventh part of "Meditations in Time of Civil War", where they are rather more conventional in their iconography, "Their legs long, delicate and slender, aquamarine their eyes / Magical unicorns bear ladies on their backs" (Variorum Poems 426). The atmosphere is far more reminiscent of a painting by Gustave Moreau than the harder traits in the plays, yet even these "cloud-pale unicorns" nod to this aspect when they "give place / To brazen hawks", implacable and pitiless. These hawks also recall the "brazen winged beast which I associated with laughing, ecstatic destruction" that haunted Yeats's imagination in the early 1900s, and which he said was "Afterwards described in my poem 'The Second Coming'" (Explorations 393, VPl 932).

In contrast with the unicorn, the place of the tower in Yeats's personal symbolism is far larger and more complex but also far better known and better covered more generally. It stands, among other things, as a symbol of personal achievement, isolation, and historical continuity, deliberately given worldly presence as Thoor Ballylee and creative presence in such collection titles as The Tower and The Winding Stair.

Towers also figure recurrently in the automatic script, the subject of the next part, as do lightning flashes and a few unicorns.

Illustrating A Vision 

When we were thinking about a cover image for the book of essays Yeats's "A Vision": Explications and Contexts, the editors were casting around for a suitable picture that would not incur too much copyright payment. Though the obvious image would be Dulac's illustration of the Great Wheel, it has been used quite a few times already and probably appeals more to the symbolically minded—one of the editors found that type of image off-putting, though I recognize that I myself am a sucker for a mandala! However, there is separate problem here, that Dulac's estate, handled through a publishing company, has been slow to process requests for other writers, and of course we had left the matter slightly late... There is also the Charles Ricketts (1866-1931) plate of hawk, unicorn, fountain and moon that was used for the pastedown on the inside boards of Macmillan editions during the 1920s.

In part this appeals to my sense of the importance to Yeats of the unicorn for the symbolism of A Vision—as I noted in an earlier post, he had originally placed a unicorn at the centre of the Great Wheel.

Publishers regard the most commercial option as a portrait of W. B. Yeats himself, as a more instant form of "branding" and this has plenty of virtues, though we would have wanted a picture of both George and W. B. at the very least. In the end, there were not so many of these that appealed, and we started looking at the work of other artists who had worked with Yeats.

One was W. T. Horton (1864-1919), whose work is out of copyright, in particular his Book of Images, for which Yeats wrote the introduction, and The Way of the Soul, which echoes the fictional title of Kusta ben Luka's work, The Way of the Soul between the Sun and the Moon. A few seemed quite possible, though a little stretched perhaps.

The moon presiding over a split landscape—primary and antithetical?—seemed possible, as did the rocky path to the moon, both from The Way of the Soul, but I also have a certain reluctance to emphasize the moon's place in the system more than it already is. It is such a potent symbol that it slightly overwhelms the concepts it represents, as much for Yeats as for us readers.

Images with sun-moon imagery are visually very appealing, but they also tend to run the risk of feminizing the moon—something that Yeats certainly does in his poetry, but actually goes against to some degree in the system. (Though the Graeco-Roman imagery that dominates Western understanding makes sun masculine and moon feminine, and tends to be viewed as "natural," Germanic, Middle-Eastern, Japanese and other mythologies have a male moon and female sun, and in A Vision the antithetical lunar Tincture, is the one associated more with the masculine.)

John Trinick's designs for A. E. Waite's meditation Tarot, at the British Museum

(I realize that I am taking advantage of a kind of apophasis—including all these images by saying that I couldn't include them...). We considered other artists who had collaborated with Yeats or been associated with him such as Althea Gyles (1868-1949) whose work features in the excellent section on Crafting the Book in the National Library of Ireland's online exhibition on Yeats (and there is also a Japanese gallery featuring her work). Here, there did not seem to be an eminently suitable image, and the situation with her estate was unclear.

To get to this section of the National Library of Ireland's online exhibition,
you need to get to the appropriate part of the exhibition "floor":
probably the simplest way is by Searching on "Crafting the Book,"
then going to "view": this display is on the left-hand side.

This led to Thomas Sturge Moore (1870-1944) who created book covers, book plates and other designs for the Yeatses. His work is in copyright, but with clear family holders, and we hoped that it would not be too expensive. In this case, we ended up favouring the plate created for George Yeats, which is directly inspired by elements associated with A Vision as well as a range of other Golden Dawn associations. In many ways the slightly mandala-ish rose on the cover of Per Amica Silentia Lunae might have been the most appropriate, but it has been used by the Yeats Annual, so might have led to some confusion.

Both of the Yeatses' book plates are rather gnomic, and the big question is whether either of them would attract a browsing reader, or please a reader who had a copy of the book. Yeats's book plate is particularly cryptic, including heraldic elements (the goat's head and the gates=Yeats) as well as personal emblems such as the candle in the waves.

George's is more striking and memorable. Though it is not immediately connected with A Vision, it is relevant to anyone who is interested: I've already commented to some extent on the unicorn and I shall go into the symbolism more in the next post.

Sturge Moore's estate, two grand-daughters, was very generous in giving us permission to use the images for a small sum, and we are all very pleased with the outcome. That said, someone involved in publishing criticized it to me as confusing, for including the name of George Yeats on the cover, and as unlikely to attract any readers. I, for one, am delighted to have George's name on the cover, albeit in an odd way, and do not really think that this is the type of book someone is going to stumble upon--if you come upon it, you are probably looking for it or at least have an interest in A Vision and the Yeatses. But I may be wrong, or at least thinking rather uncommercially: I'd love to hear any comments one way or the other, for future reference, and of course I'd be delighted to hear any further suggestions that anyone might have, either for a later edition of this book, or more likely for the next one on A Vision.