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.

Conjunctions II

Venus and Mars in conjunction over Lake Superior, October 2017 (Bob King)

After Yeats has established the basis of the Aries-Taurus conjunction of Mars-Venus and the Aquarius-Pisces conjunction of Saturn-Jupiter, he goes on to elaborate a complex series of ideas based on this pair of pairings. The associations might recall at best Hermann Hesse's ultra-cerebral Glass Bead Game or at worst the ragbag eclecticism and strained connections that are not uncommon in occult tracts, where analogies rapidly become equivalents and substitutes.

Pompeian fresco of Mars and Venus

Venus and Mars

The planets have many possible associations, ranging from the mythological to the psychological, and their "conjunctions … express so many things", but Yeats singles out for Venus-Mars, "the outward-looking mind, love and its lure", and for Jupiter-Saturn, "introspective knowledge of the mind's self-begotten unity, an intellectual excitement" (AVB 207), though which is which is not spelt out and it is only the word "love", clearly linked to Venus, as well as more general astrological symbolism from elsewhere that makes the identification clear.

In a poem written "in the first excitement of discovery I compared one to the Sphinx and one to Buddha"— the link to the conjunctions would not necessarily be very clear had Yeats not added that the Buddha should have been substituted for Christ, as "Buddha was a Jupiter-Saturn influence" (AVB 207), i.e. the Buddha in the poem represents a Venus-Mars influence, even though it shouldn't. Many years later on in the pair of couplets titled "Conjunctions," Yeats made the identification of Christ and Venus-Mars explicit.

The sword's a cross; thereon He died:
On breast of Mars the goddess sighed.
                                (VP 562)

The Sword-Cross of Santiago

Astrologically Venus and Mars are very much the principles of love and sex; harmony and aggression; comfort and adventure; union and separation. Yet they work at almost exactly the same personal level and are a very much a polar and complementary pair. The signs ruled by Venus are Taurus and Libra, opposite which stand the signs ruled by Mars, Scorpio and Aries. As mythological figures they are known for their adulterous affair, since Aphrodite-Venus was married to the smith god Hephaistos-Vulcan, who famously trapped her in the act with Ares-Mars under a net.

Mars and Venus entrapped by Vulcan, Antonio Bellucci, ca. 1700.

Jupiter and Saturn

Saturn devouring one of Jupiter's siblings
Peter Paul Rubens (1636)

The symbolism of Saturn and Jupiter is more complicated. In their Greek forms as Kronos and Zeus, though they are father and son, there is really only one story that connects them. Forewarned that he would be overthrown by his own child, Kronos (Saturn) ate his children, until his wife, Rhea, replaced the last one, Zeus (Jupiter), with a stone. Zeus grew to maturity and led a revolt against his father, dethroning him as foretold.

The planets are slow moving and astrologically work at a similar, more impersonal level than Mars or Venus, and are sometimes referred to as the "social" planets. Their domiciles are grouped together in the wintery signs, Saturn's Capricorn and Aquarius bracketed by Jupiter's Sagittarius and Pisces. Jupiter's influence is expansive and optimistic, while Saturn's is restrictive and  melancholy. Rudolf Steiner posited two versions of Satan, the tempter, Lucifer the Jovian over-reacher on the one hand, and, the denier, Ahriman the Saturnine mechanistic desiccator on the other. However, just as for Steiner the Christ principle balances the two forces, so here the balance of the two, exploration and concentration, offers "introspective knowledge of the mind's self-begotten unity".

Yeats symbolizes them by the Sphinx in "The Double Vision of Michael Robartes", which represents the triumph of intellect:

One lashed her tail; her eyes lit by the moon
Gazed upon all things known, all things unknown,
In triumph of intellect
With motionless head erect.    (VP 383)

The focus on knowing, recalls the pairing of the Knower and the Known, Creative Mind and Body of Fate. And similarly Yeats characterizes the antithetical revelation that starts "under Saturn-Jupiter" as "the vivification of old intellect" (AVB 208). This revivification of the old is symbolized cryptically by wheat from the pharaoh's tombs germinating (a popular nineteenth-century myth), in the companion couplet to the one quoted above:

If Jupiter and Saturn meet,
What a crop of mummy wheat! 
                  (VP 562)

The second vision of "The Double Vision of Michael Robartes" is an image of the Full Moon, with a dead spirit dancing between the Sphinx and the Buddha (who should be Christ). She is dead because the Full Moon is too pure to be alive in mortal and on either side are the two conjunctions: Aries-Taurus, Mars-Venus, or Christ (the Buddha in the poem), and Aquarius-Pisces, Saturn-Jupiter, or the Sphinx, which "stand, so to speak, like heraldic supporters guarding the mystery of the fifteenth phase" (AVB 207) (see McDowell, " 'Heraldic Supporters': Minor Symbolism and the Integrity of A Vision", YA10 [1993]).

These conjunctions also preside over the beginning of each revelation or religious dispensation (for a complication about the layout of the signs, see "Conjunctions I"). As the solar Creative Mind moves away from the Full Moon is moves from Aries into Taurus, hence the conjunction of Mars and Venus presiding over the first stages of this cycle. As this cycle draws to an end, Creative Mind is moving from Aquarius into the sign of Pisces, the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter. And since the "influx that dominates a primary dispensation comes a little after the start of the dispensation itself" when Will is at Phase 16, a primary dispensation is ushered in by Mars-Venus; and "that which dominates an antithetical dispensation [comes] a considerable time before the close of the preceding primary dispensation" it comes under the influence of Saturn and Jupiter (AVB 208).

Sculpture of Zeus striking Kronos, Temple of Artemis, Corfu

In a further complication of symbolism, the Yeatses' two children were seen to embody each of them one of these conjunctions, which featured at the moment of the their birth. As Yeats wrote to Olivia Shakespear on 25 August 1934:

I was told you may remember that my two children would be Mars conjunction Venus, Saturn conjunction Jupiter respectively; & so they were — Anne the Mars Venus personality. Then I was told that they would develop so that I could study in them the alter­nating dispensations, the Christian or objective, then the Antithetical or subjective. The Christian is the Mars Venus. It is democratic. The Jupiter Saturn civilization is born free among the most cultivated, out of tradition, out of rule.

Should Jupiter and Saturn meet
What a crop of mummy wheat!

The sword's a cross; thereon He died.
On breast of Mars the goddess sighed.

I wrote those lines because some days ago George said it is very strange that whereas Michael is always thinking about life Anne always thinks of death. Then I remembered that the children were the two dispensations. Anne collects skeletons.... When she grows up she will either have some passionate love affair or have some close friend that has — the old association of love and death. (CL InteLex 6087; cf. L 827-28)

Connected with this was the possible belief that Michael was in some way connected with the avatar of the new antithetical age, but that is a story for another day. 

Jupiter and Saturn are approaching their conjunction on 21 December 2020

 

Conjunctions I

The earlier post on The Track of the Whirling Zodiac tried to set out some of the basics — and basic problems — related to the different ways in which the zodiac can be set against the circle of the phases, or actually any cycle against any other cycle. At the simplest level of A Vision, this entails quite a lot of thinking and work for not much reward, as the aspects where these various arrangements affect the material in A Vision are often unclear.

However, one place where the subject of zodiacs and phases running counter to one another does surface, albeit rather cryptically, is in A Vision's discussion of the "heraldic supporters" of the Full Moon. These are the influences on either side of Phase 15, the point where new religious dispensations start, and Yeats is dealing here in with cycles of about 2,150 years. These are measured according to phases for Will and, for Creative Mind, backward through phases or forwards through the Zodiac.

When Will is passing through Phases 16, 17 and 18 the Creative Mind is passing through the Phases 14, 13 and 12, or from the sign of Aries to the sign of Taurus, that is to say, it is under the conjunction of Mars and Venus. When Will on the other hand is passing through Phases 12, 13 and 14 the Creative Mind is passing through the Phases 18, 17 and 16, or from the sign of Pisces to the sign of Aquarius [actually Aquarius to Pisces], it is, as it were, under the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. (AVB 207)

If you know your traditional astrology, you will remember that Aries is ruled by Mars, so that the two are to some extent interchangeable, and that the same goes for Taurus and Venus, Pisces and Jupiter, and Aquarius and Saturn (Yeats sticks with the classical planets in this case). The animation below concentrates on the process of Will from Phase 12 to Phase 18, starting each time at Phase 12: first through phases and Zodiac, then focusing on just Will and Creative Mind, then substituting the planetary rulers for the signs, first with astrological glyphs and second in words, for clarity. It may help to view the animation a few times, concentrating each time on one aspect.

The passage of Will forwards through the phases 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18,
and of Creative Mind through the zodiac Aquarius, Pisces, Aries, Taurus.

Since, therefore, a primary dispensation is said to start when Will is passing through 16–17–18 (i.e., a little after the mathematical point of Phase 15), its inception falls under the influence of Mars and Venus, taken from Creative Mind's passage through Aries and Taurus—religion is intrinsically more allied to the solar zodiac than the lunar phases. Similarly, an antithetical dispensation is said to start a little before the mathematical marker, while Will is passing through Phases 12–13–14, so its solar influence is Saturn and Jupiter from Creative Mind's passage through Aquarius and Pisces.

These two conjunctions which express so many things are certainly, upon occasion, the outward-looking mind, love and its lure, contrasted with introspective knowledge of the mind's self-begotten unity, an intellectual excitement. They stand, so to speak, like heraldic supporters guarding the mystery of the fifteenth phase. In certain lines written years ago in the first excitement of discovery I compared one to the Sphinx and one to Buddha. I should have put Christ instead of Buddha, for according to my instructors Buddha was a Jupiter-Saturn influence. (AVB 207–8)

The outward-looking mind (Mars-Venus) is fundamentally objective and primary, while the introspective mind (Jupiter-Saturn) is fundamentally subjective and antithetical. Yeats's main purpose in introducing these conjunctions is to characterize two dispensations, the primary dispensation typified by Christianity and the antithetical dispensation typified by the classical pantheons and due to return in the twenty-first century.

Strictly speaking Yeats thought that the primary dispensation had started maybe ten generations before Christ's birth—about two centuries. This would place the Phase 15 point at 200 B.C.E., so that at the time of Christ's birth the cosmic Creative Mind was passing through the Mars-Venus influence. (Buddha was the wrong choice not just from his character, but also from his dating.) And he gathered that all primary dispensations take a while to gain momentum in this way, so always fell under this influence.

In contrast, antithetical dispensations start before the preceding cycle is truly finished, i.e., while Creative Mind is still passing through Aquarius and Pisces, under Saturn and Jupiter. In other words, even if the antithetical era is not yet starting its cycle at Phase 15, it is fading in before the fact, maybe by a hundred years or more.

If Yeats took the length of a dispensation as 2,200 years, then the primary era beginning in 200 B.C.E. would be finishing in 2000 C.E., and the antithetical advent might be starting in 1900. This all means that primary dispensations are significantly shorter than antithetical ones, and also meant that Yeats himself might be living in the pre-dawn glow of the coming antithetical era. Even if the antithetical only starts a hundred years before Phase 15 is reached, the two hundred years off the beginning of the primary goes to the preceding antithetical, and the one hundred years of fade in of the new antithetical is taken off the preceding primary, so it could mean that an antithetical era is almost 600 years longer than a primary.

In the poem "Michael Robartes and the Dancer" Yeats chose to symbolize the Saturn-Jupiter conjunction that presides over the beginning of an antithetical era with the Sphinx. Given this association of the sphinx with the antithetical, it is no accident that the enigmatic "rough beast" that stirs in "The Second Coming" is appears like the sphinx at Giza—though a brilliant touch that it is described rather than named—as it ushers in the coming antithetical dispensation.

.... somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The beast is not necessarily the age's avatar, nor the anti-Christ, except inasmuch as it heralds the antithesis to Christ's era (see Notes on "The Second Coming" on my website). However, it has many characteristics that Yeats found a variety of ways to explore. It leaves us with questioning and foreboding.

I'll look further at the symbolism and the complicated resonances that Yeats creates — which include making his two children representatives of the two combinations — later on, in a second part "Conjunctions II".