Yeats and the Stars 5

Yeats and the Stars 1; Yeats and the Stars 2; Yeats and the Stars 3; Yeats and the Stars 4

I referred earlier to the precession of the equinoxes. Along with the movement of the North Pole, the sun’s position relative to the zodiac at a given season also shifts. This is usually reckoned by looking at key moments in the sun's annual cycle, the equinoxes, hence the name. At the spring or vernal equinox the sun used to be in the constellation of Taurus until about 2000 BCE, when it drifted into Aries, and around the beginning of the Christian era it shifted into Pisces.

The sun’s position at the spring equinox is currently moving from Pisces into Aquarius. One writer in the 1830s thought that it had already happened and nowadays some people still put the transition many centuries in the future (constellations are vague things and had no clear boundaries until 20^th-century astronomers needed to create them).* However, the opinion of the Theosophists placed it in the early 20^th century. George Russell (Æ) wrote to Yeats in 1896 that, “I agree with you that we belong to the coming cycle. The sun passes from Pisces into Aquarius in a few years. Pisces is phallic in its influence. The waterman is spiritual so the inward turning souls will catch the first rays of the New Aeon” (W.  B. Yeats, Collected Letters, vol. 2, pp. 6–7 n3).

Map from Emmeline Plunket, Ancient Calendars and Constellations (1903). I am not using the illustration for its original purpose, but to show the (hazy) boundary between Pisces on the left of the central line and Aquarius on the right of the central line.

And as the spring equinox moves from Pisces into Aquarius, the autumn equinox moves from Virgo into Leo. Several theosophical writers at the beginning of the twentieth century were speaking of the coming time when the head of Virgo, the virgin, and the body of Leo, the lion, would meet and the sphinx would tell her secret. 

“I am the Sphinx. . . . I am the fabled monster of the desert, having the head of Virgo and the body of Leo. . . . When the finger of time points into the Cycle of Aquarius, then will the Sphinx of the heavens arrive at the Autumnal Equinox. I am the Sphinx and the key to time in the heavens, and thus do I unlock the cycles of time. . . .”

Charles Hatfield, “The Mystery of the Sphinx; or, The Shiloh,” Part II,
The Sphinx 4:2 (February 1902)

Such a “Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw" (“The Double Vision of Michael Robartes") is said to be personification of the forces presiding over the incoming age in A Vision (A Vision B 207–08; Collected Works, vol. 14, 153). She also presided over the age that started over four thousand years ago with the heroic age of Ancient Greece: the Argonauts' quest for the Golden Fleece and the Trojan War (an antithetical dispensation, in Yeats's terminology). This age was replaced when the Roman Empire was in the ascendant, with the rise of Christianity (a primary dispensation), as the autumnal equinox had shifted from Libra into Virgo.

Another Troy must rise and set,
Another lineage feed the crow,
Another Argo’s painted prow
Drive to a flashier bauble yet.
The Roman Empire stood appalled:
It dropped the reins of peace and war
When that fierce virgin and her Star
Out of the fabulous darkness called.

Song from The Resurrection.

Hevelius's Firmamentum Sobiescianum sive Uranographia (1687). The Virgin's star refers to Spica, which marks the sheaf of wheat in the Virgin's hand and is one of the principal stars of the zodiac.

Other theosophically minded writers wrote of a fusion of spring and autumn equinoxes, the water-carrier and the lion, a sphinx with a man’s head. One of these writers was represented in the Yeatses’ library:

The Egyptian Sphinx combines in its form the pictorial symbols of Aquarius and its opposite sign Leo.. . . . The Egyptian colossus has the body of a lion with a bearded man’s head (not a woman’s as in Greece), and upon the forehead is placed the uraeus serpent. . . . In the power and strength of the lion’s body controlled by the human intelligence . . . the Sphinx is seen to be the personification of Aquarius-Leo. The potentialities of Leo, which in their higher aspect, are very great, become manifested in the polar opposite, Aquarius.

J. H. Van Stone, The Pathway of the Soul: A Study of Zodiacal Symbology (1912)†

And just as the GD’s card of the Lovers seems to lie behind the scene in “Her Triumph", it’s possible that J. H. Van Stone’s symbol of the coming age of Aquarius remained in Yeats's memory and informed the “shape with lion body and the head of a man" in “The Second Coming". This figure announces the coming new era, the antithetical dispensation in terms of A Vision (A Vision B 207–08; Collected Works, vol. 14, 153), and like the Polar Dragon is shaking off long sleep.

Note how the symbols of the constellations take on their own autonomy and mix and merge as symbols rather than anything objectively in the heavens. There is no sphinx in the sky—the lion’s body points away from the virgin’s head and the water-bearer is on the other side of the sky, but the symbols make their own combinations.

Stellarium

 

* Godfrey Higgins, in Anacalypsis: An attempt to draw aside the veil of the Saitic Isis; or, An inquiry into the origin of languages, nations, and religions (1836), builds on earlier theorists about the precession of the equinoxes. He takes it as given that the equinox in his time was entering Aquarius, commenting on several occasions to the effect that “any one may see by looking at our common globes, where he will find the Vernal equinox fixed to the 30th of Aquarius" (vol. 2, 139), i.e. entering the sign of Aquarius from Pisces.

Using the International Astr0nomy Union's boundaries, Jean Meeus puts the equinox's transition into Aquarius at 2597 (see “When will the Age of Aquarius begin?").

† This book is in a listing of the Yeatses' books from the 1920s, but is not in the library now held at the National Library of Ireland. See Edward O'Shea, “The 1920s Catalogue of W. B. Yeats's Library", Yeats Annual 4, 289.

Yeats and the Stars 4

Yeats and the Stars 1; Yeats and the Stars 2; Yeats and the Stars 3

The Precession of the Equinoxes relates to the very slow wobble of the Earth’s axis, which moves the poles in a circle and, with that motion, the sun’s position relative to the stars at a given season. This would not happen if the Earth’s axis were not tilted, and as Yeats notes, in Paradise Lost Milton actually uses the tilt to illustrate the consequences of the Fall (AVA 149–50). The idea is that in the unfallen world, the sun’s apparent path—the ecliptic and the constellations of the zodiac —would run along the equator and the seasons would not change. The Earth's axis—“the axle. . . That keeps the stars in their round" (“Aedh Hears the Cry of the Sedge")—would point not towards the star that marks the North Pole—now Polaris at the end of the Little Bear’s tail— but towards the ecliptic pole, a point encircled by the constellation Draco, “the Polar Dragon".* Thus the prelapsarian “tentpole of Eden" mentioned in “Veronica's Napkin" would point to the dragon rather than the bear.

Albrecht Dürer's map of the northern heavens is centred on the ecliptic pole, surrounded by Draco. (N.B. The perspectives of celestial maps often reverse each other, depending on whether they are taken as “inside looking up" or “outside looking down". )

Many Arab and Renaissance views of the heavens actually put this “different pole" as the true centre of their schemes—in a plan, it has the advantage of putting the zodiac as a circle round the circumference—and the Golden Dawn used this arrangement too.  

The Tree of Life as Projected in a Solid Sphere: Though the constellations are unclear in this reproduction of the northern hemisphere, the Tree of Life is mapped on to the heavens. The small circle at the centre is the Tree's highest sephirah, Kether, surrounded by Draco. Below are Chokmah and Binah, each duplicated across the centre, and below them Chesed and Geburah, also duplicated. Tiphareth is on the central axis, but appears in notional form at four points on the ecliptic, the circumference of this circle, once at the position of Regulus, the heart of Leo, and the other three at ninety-degree intervals (in Taurus, Aquarius, and Scorpio). (Regardie, The Golden Dawn, vol. 4, 219).

MacGregor Mathers superimposed a spherical form of the cabalistic Tree of Life onto the heavens, with Kether the highest point of the Tree surrounded by the dragon’s coils.*  The central pillar from Kether down to Tiphareth, Yesod, and Malkuth is the axis, so only highest and lowest—Kether and Malkuth—are on the surface of the sphere. The pillars on either side—Chokmah, Chesed, and Netzach on the Pillar of Mercy, and Binah, Chesed, and Hod on the Pillar of Severity—are placed on the surface, but doubled across the central axis.

As divine influence pours from higher levels, down into the lower Tree of Life, it is inverted through the double cone of the hour glass (see YeatsVision.com on the Tree), arriving at Kether of the lower Tree, but convoluted through the coils of the dragon and thence to the zodiac. (Regardie, The Golden Dawn, vol. 4, 252.)

 

The paths between the sephiroth are also mapped onto the celestial globe, and each path is associated with a Tarot card. The path down from Binah to the central sephirah Tiphareth is attributed to The Lovers. Traditionally that often depicts the force of love or choice, particularly a young man choosing between two women.

Trump VI, The Lovers: (left) is a Marseille version of the type George Yeats owned and (right) an Italian one of the type W. B. Yeats owned. See the Yeats exhibition at the National Library of Ireland; unfortunately the online virtual tour is no longer available, but this shot shows the case displaying the Yeatses' Tarot packs.

Like constellations, Tarot cards are subject to some reinterpreation but generally change fairly little. The Lovers is an exception. This card was given a radically different form by the Golden Dawn,  depicting Perseus and Andromeda and a sea dragon, apparently drawing on the constellations.†

Bode, Uranographia (1801)

 

The Golden Dawn Tarot, painted by Robert Wang

In the explanation of “The Tarot Trumps", an unofficial Golden Dawn paper, Harriet Felkin explains that The Lovers shows “The impact of inspiration on intuition, resulting in illumination and liberation—the sword striking off the fetters of habit and materialism, Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the Dragon of fear and the waters of Stagnation” (Regardie, The Golden Dawn, vol. 4, 211).‡ And the Golden Dawn's version of the card and its meaning seem to be influences behind “Her Triumph”:

I did the dragon's will until you came
Because I had fancied love a casual
Improvisation, or a settled game
…. And then you stood among the dragon-rings.
I mocked, being crazy, but you mastered it
And broke the chain and set my ankles free,
Saint George or else a pagan Perseus;
And now we stare astonished at the sea,
And a miraculous strange bird shrieks at us.

Giorgio Melchiori and David Clark have explored the sources in western art—the drafts show references to Bellini, Carpaccio, and Titian—and Phillip Marcus has worked on the poem’s genesis and dynamics.  

Edward Burne-Jones, The Doom Fulfilled (Perseus Series), Southampton City Art Gallery.

In Yeats at Songs and Choruses, Clark favours Burne-Jones's paintings of the Perseus legend as the key inspiration because of the monster's coils—but the coils are there in the celestial pictures, as well as the Golden Dawn's cabalistic ones.

Bayer, Uranometria (1603)

Perseus strikes “off the fetters of habit and materialism"—and though Yeats's dragon may not be fear, stagnation may well be part of the “dragon’s will”. The use of “will” is also significant—in Hodos Chameliontos, Yeats uses Perseus and Andromeda to represent the artist’s Mask and Image, respectively, while the sea-dragon is Body of Fate. And all is under the control of “personifying spirits that we had best call but Gates and Gate-keepers” (Autobiographies 272–73) or in Yeats’s terminology, Daimons.

And we may christianise Perseus as St George and Andromeda as a later princess—the shift between pagan hero and Christian knight is similar to the transition of the focus in “Veronica’s Napkin", where Berenice’s Hair is transformed into Veronica’s Napkin by taking “a different pole".

 

———————

* The sea dragon of the myth is usually taken as the constellation Cetus, but the coils involved here imply that it is Draco. Note that Yeats made a similar association with the “Polar Dragon" in “Aodh Pleads with the Elemental Powers", where the dragon uncoils in its sleep:

The Powers whose name and shape no living creature knows
Have pulled the Immortal Rose;
And though the Seven Lights bowed in their dance and wept,
The Polar Dragon slept,
His heavy rings uncoiled from glimmering deep to deep:
When will he wake from sleep?

Yeats added a note in The Dome (1898): “The Seven Lights are the seven stars of the Great Bear, and the Dragon is the constellation of the Dragon, and these, in certain old mythologies, encircle the Tree of Life, on which is here imagined the Rose of Ideal Beauty growing before it was cast into the world".

† A completely different take on the Lovers card appears in Pamela Colman Smith’s design for A. E. Waite—does this perhaps reference the tent-pole of Eden?

Pamela Colman Smith's design for the Rider Tarot, conceived by A. E. Waite.

 (Note also a possible influence from Cecil French's Fountain of Faithful Lovers in Colman Smith's Green Sheaf.)

‡ In the manuscript book that Maud Gonne gave him in 1908, Yeats summarised a visionary ritual he conducted alone, noting that he saw “two forms side by side float up as spirits to top of Abiegnus & garden. The influences that lift the initiate above Tiphareth are five – the five paths & the five corresponding Tarot Trumps but it seems as if the [Gemini] Trump [=The Lovers] is the one when two souls ascend." (July 21 [1908], 4r). (The Golden Dawn used the symbols of the astrological elements associated with each Trump as a shorthand for the Tarot cards, so the symbol of Gemini stood for The Lovers. Tiphareth at the centre of the Tree is connected to all the sephiroth except Malkuth, and this path runs from Tiphareth up to Binah in the GD's scheme.)

    Possibly because the card is associated with breaking out of habit and stagnation, the GD design does not give Perseus his most famous weapon, the head of Medusa, which turned anyone who gazed on it to stone.