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.

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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)

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.

The Unicorn and The Lightning-Struck Tower II

Part II

Alexandria's was a beacon tower, and Babylon's
An image of the moving heavens, a log-book of the sun's journey and the moon's;
And Shelley had his towers, thought's crowned powers he called them once.

I declare this tower is my symbol; I declare
This winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair;
That Goldsmith and the Dean, Berkeley and Burke have travelled there.

'Blood and the Moon' (VP 480–81)

It needs no great familiarity with Yeats's work to recognize the importance of towers as a recurrent symbol in his work. There are many influences that contribute to this:

The Round Tower at Glendalough, Co. Wicklow

the towers of myth, legend and history—whether Nimrod's tower at Babel or Babylon's ziggurats for watching the heavens, the lighthouse at Alexandria, one of the wonders of the ancient world, or the round towers in Ireland's historic landscape, such as those at Glendalough and Cashel.

Added to these are also important literary influences, most notably Shelley's poetry, as well as Milton's 'Il Penseroso', which inspired a series of engravings by Samuel Palmer. All of these are evoked when Yeats has his fictional characters of Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne arrive at the foot of Yeats's own tower-house at Thoor Ballylee, Gort.

We are on the bridge; that shadow is the tower,
And the light proves that he is reading still.
He has found, after the manner of his kind,
Mere images; chosen this place to live in
Because, it may be, of the candle-light
From the far tower where Milton's Platonist
Sat late, or Shelley's visionary prince:
The lonely light that Samuel Palmer engraved,
An image of mysterious wisdom won by toil;
And now he seeks in book or manuscript
What he shall never find. 

'The Phases of the Moon' (VP 372–73)

Samuel Palmer, 'The Lonely Tower'

With the purchase of Thoor Ballylee, Yeats was deliberately embodying a symbol in stone and mortar with a title deed. The first property Yeats had ever owned, it stood close to Augusta Gregory's house, Coole Park, and though he had bought it before his marriage to Georgie Hyde Lees, it became a sort of present to her and a statement of their marriage. He sees it as a representation of friendship and love, when he notes how he:

For an old neighbour's friendship chose the house
And decked and altered it for a girl's love,
And know whatever flourish and decline
These stones remain their monument and mine.

'Meditations in Time of Civil War' V (VP 423)

Ezra Pound viewed it with less romantic embellishment, referring to as Yeats's 'phallic symbol on the Bogs. Ballyphallus or whatever he calls it with the river on the first floor' (in a letter to John Quinn, 24 March 1920, in Reid, The Man from New York, 419).

Ironically, therefore, when Yeats has Robartes and Aherne talking on the road next to his house, he makes Robartes a liar, for if they had seen a light at the window, Mr. Yeats was almost certainly not alone and seeking wisdom in a 'book or manuscript' but rather engaged with his wife in the strange form of inspired communication involved in the Automatic Script. This new wisdom may be expressed in geometrical terms but it comes not from the mysteries of ancient texts, rather from the wisdom of the body:

             The signs and shapes;
All those abstractions that you fancied were
From the great Treatise of Parmenides;
All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight things
Are but a new expression of her body
Drunk with the bitter sweetness of her youth.

("The Gift of Haroun Al-Raschid", A Vision A 126-27)

The tower occurs with some frequency in the script and it kept recurring in complex sketches along with birds, butterflies, cliffs, hands, water and trees. Apparently, at one point the Instructors prompted a stay in Glendalough, and Yeats asked if this was because of the round tower, to be told gnomically that it was there 'To put in your mind for a purpose' (20 March 1918, YVP1 395). While there, the Instructors agreed when Yeats asked if the tower was a symbol of the Passionate Body (YVP1 394) and antithetical (YVP1 396, though this may refer only to the Glendalough tower). This makes a good deal of sense, insofar as the tower is a natural symbol of isolation and the antithetical is what seeks to divide the individual from others, and is founded at the level of the Principles in the Passionate Body, the vehicle of emotion and love (developed further in Oxford the following year, YVP3 50–51). In A Vision B, Yeats writes of how 'the Celestial Body is a prisoner in a tower rescued by the Spirit' (AVB 189), while in a draft for A Vision B, he contrasts the divine dimension, 'the sphere itself, that which only contradiction can express,' saying that it is'not "the lone tower of the absolute self" but its shattering, "the absolute self" set free, that unknown reality painted or sung by the monks of Zen' (NLI 36,272/12; & cf. 36,272/22). Here the tower represents very much the antithetical separation of the individual soul, while the Sphere is its opposite, the shattered tower, where the absolute self, probably the Ghostly Self, is freed of the tower of the 'lower self': the body, the personality and the emotions.

7 January 1919, cf. YVP2 163: Cashel with symbolic objects

On a personal level, however, both Yeatses were in antithetical incarnations, so it was their natural mode, and the tower also hints at the structure they were building both in terms of the system and their marriage. While they were in Glendalough, they were told that 'The tower is incomplete' with advice to love the natural life, and that 'the tower is not joined' followed by a picture of a tower with a crack down the middle (24 March 1918, YVP1 399). At one stage, one of the Instructors opened a session with the admonition: 'Do not forget that the Tower is still your symbol | In all lives', though even Yeats seems to have wondered 'In what way am I in danger of forgetting' (15 September 1919, YVP2 427)? However, at other times they were told that, possibly as a protective symbol, the tower was more George's emblem than his (15 January 1918, YVP1 257; 28 October 1918, YVP2 102).  'You', of course, is ambiguously singular or plural, and in many ways the tower often seems to represent the relationship or partnership.

November 24, 1919, viz. YVP2 492

There also seem to have been personal rituals involved, as when Yeats was told 'tower tower you' (expanded by the editors of YVP to 'you[r thought]' for no obvious reason; 19 March 1918, YVP1 391) or one Instructor signed off, 'Goodnight | Yes | tower symbol over her' (6 November 1919, YVP2 475). Another evening they were counselled to ask only 'a few questions but build the tower & gild the sun | the moon is cold and worried and nervous and needs plenty of sun and quiet — nervous' (the part about the moon is in mirror-writing, which seems to have been used mainly when the message was meant to by-pass George; 2 November 1918, YVP2 108). Whether this was esoteric ritual or simply conjugal advice couched in symbolic language, it is clear that there is much to the Automatic Script that was a private language and involved at least as much that was unwritten as was written.

19 August 1920, Notebook 6, cf. YVP3 36

One sketch from 19 August 1920 brings together a tower with water, apple trees and flowering trees as well as birds and a unicorn (labelled, on the right-hand side), said to be carrying a mask from a tree with its horn and “Rushing” (YVP3 37). The two sets of trees are labelled apple trees and flowering trees, which may represent the same contrast of flower and fruit that Dulac used in his woodcut of the Great Wheel. But elsewhere in the Automatic Script, the tree is the symbol of the primary and the mask of the antithetical, so that the unicorn's carrying away may represent a temporary triumph of the antithetical or rescue for the antithetical Yeatses, as they build the tower of their antithetical system.

I do not know what my book will be to others — nothing perhaps.  To me it means a last act of defense against the chaos of the world; & I hope for ten years to write out of my renewed security. (letter to Edmund Dulac, 23 April [1924]).

The important thing is the meaning of the tower, both in building and destruction, is also key to the Tarot image as seen by the Golden Dawn, and therefore, I think, to the image used for George Yeats's bookplate. But before moving on to that, in the next post I shall look at the Daimon and the Lightning Flash.

The tower remains probably Yeats's most public and amongst his most recognized symbols, and he regarded it as linked to the system, but independent of it and comprehensible as a symbol without it:

In this book and elsewhere I have used towers, and one tower in particular, as symbols and have compared their winding stairs to the philosophical gyres, but it is hardly necessary to interpret what comes from the main track of thought and expression.  Shelley uses towers constantly as symbols....

A Note to The Winding Stair and Other Poems, 1933 (VP 831)

Dust jacket of The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), designed by Thomas Sturge Moore

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.