The Daimon, the Sexes, and Androgyne Unity of Being

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

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

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

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

Ideas of Gender 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hermetic Principles 

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

Human and Daimon 

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

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

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

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

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


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

 'a great mind must be androgynous'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plotinus and "A Vision", Part II

'Plotinus for a friend'

Writing in 1926 Yeats counted Plotinus as part of the philosophical background in A Vision A, noting that 'it is mainly Plotinus & the pre­Socratics that separate me from Spengler & so far as I am separate' (30 July 1926, CL InteLex 4904). Yet, he also told Thomas Sturge Moore that he had only really started reading philosophy after A Vision was completed: 'When it was written (though the proofs had yet to come) I started to read. I read for months every day Plato & Plotinus' (14 March [1926], CL InteLex 4850). He repeated this claim in A Packet for Ezra Pound in 1929 (PEP 26–27; AVB 19–20, CW14 15–16). Searching to see if George Yeats's automatic script might have been inspired by her reading, he first set out to explore these writers:

I read all MacKenna's incomparable translation of Plotinus, some of it several times, and went from Plotinus to his predecessors and successor whether upon her list or not. And for four years now have read nothing else except every now and then some story of theft and murder to clear my head at night. Although the more I read the better did I understand what I had been taught, I found neither the geometrical symbolism nor anything that could have inspired it except the vortex of Empedocles. (PEP 26–27; AVB 20, CW14 15–16)

Plotinus, the isolated figure in ruddy brown, in Raphael's The School of Athens

Recognizing Plotinus as writing in the primary tradition of Platonism—'Plotinus' ecstasy' is after all the 'ecstasy of the Saint' (AVA 215, CW13 177)—Yeats does not always find him a congenial influence. In his poem 'The Tower' (written 1925–26), he complains about 'this caricature /Decrepit age that has been tied to me / As to a dog's tail":

It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,
Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend
Until imagination, ear and eye,
Can be content with argument and deal
In abstract things....                               (VP 409)

Apparently further study of Plotinus made him realize that the philosophy was not so abstract. Some two years later, Yeats wrote a note on this poetic complaint:

When I wrote the lines about Plato and Plotinus I forgot that it is something in our own eyes that makes us see them as all transcendence. Has not Plotinus written: 'Let every soul recall, then, at the outset the truth that soul is the author of all living things, that it has breathed the life into them all, whatever is nourished by earth and sea, all the creatures of the air, the divine stars in the sky; it is the maker of the sun; itself formed and ordered this vast heaven and conducts all that rhythmic motion—and it is a principle distinct from all these to which it gives law and movement and life, and it must of necessity be  more honourable than they, for they gather or dissolve as soul brings them life or abandons them, but soul, since it never can abandon itself, is of eternal being'?—1928. (VP 826, citing Ennead V.1.2, MacKenna, vol. 4, p. 2)

This passage comes from the opening tractate of the Fifth Ennead, which Yeats had probably not read when he wrote 'The Tower'. As MacKenna himself reported, Yeats had announced that he intended to spend the winter of 1926–27 studying Plotinus seriously (see Part I) and the volume that had just come out was devoted to the Fifth Ennead, dealing particularly with the Divine Mind or Intellectual-Principle.

The first tractate that Yeats quotes emphasizes the human starting point of enquiry: 'the seeker is soul and it must start from a true notion of the nature and quality by which soul may undertake the search'. However, it is dedicated to the 'The Three Initial Hypostases', the loftiest elements of Plotinus's system. From the human soul, Plotinus proceeds to Soul, but 'Soul, for all the worth we have shown to belong to it, is yet a secondary, and image of the Intellectual-Principle' and then in turn 'The Intellectual-Principle stands as the image of The One' (V.1.1, 3, & 7).

Plotinus's Three Hypostases were indeed one of the elements in his reading that helped Yeats better 'understand what [he] had been taught', and he used them to reframe how he saw the Principles and their relation to the Daimon and the Thirteenth Cone.

Stephen MacKenna's translation of Plotinus's Fifth Ennead (London & Boston: The Medici Society, 1926).

The Three Hypostases

A 'hypostasis' is an 'underlying substance' or 'ultimate reality', and MacKenna gives summaries of Plotinus's conception of the Three Hypostases in volume 1. The One 'transcends even the quality of Being' but is the cause of existence, for 'without its Supra-Existence nothing could be' (vol. 1, 118-19). Existence is manifested in the Nous, Intellectual-Principle, or Divine Mind, which

contains, or rather is, ta Noeta—the Intellectual-Universe or Intelligible Universe.... the Totality of the Divine-Thoughts, generally known, in the phrase familiar in Platonism, as The Ideas' or Forms. (vol. 1, p. 119) 

Within this Second Hypostasis, Plotinus differentiates a contemplative state of Being and a state of Act: Nous looks upwards in contemplation of the One, its act generates the All-Soul towards which it looks downwards at the moving image in time of its own unmoving eternity. The Third Hypostasis, the All-Soul, 'is the eternal cause of the existence, eternal existence, of the Kosmos, or "World," or material, or sense-grasped Universe, which is the Soul's Act and emanation, image and "shadow"' (vol. 1, p. 120).

MacKenna translates 'what is usually conveyed by the English philosophical term Real-Being' (vol. 1, 124) as 'Authentic-Existent', 'Authentic-Existents' or 'Authentic-Existence', applicable to the Intellectual-Principle itself and to the Divine Thoughts or Ideas. In a misreading of MacKenna, Yeats appears to take this term 'Authentic Existent', which properly applies to the Nous and its Divine Ideas, and use it to mean 'Hypostasis', applying it to all three hypostases (while also spelling it 'Existant', a mis-spelling that has persisted through all editions).

In so far as the 'Three Initial Hypostases' are the true origins of all that exists, this misprision of a term that is largely confined to MacKenna's translation is not particularly problematic. And in using the word 'misprision', I am thinking in terms of Harold Bloom's seminal idea of the 'anxiety of influence' and his concept of a 'strong misreading': there is a sense in which Yeats is asserting his reading Plotinus through his own system and his own thought. He evidently prefers the more immediate impact of 'authentic existent'—evoking both authenticity and being—over the more remote and technical term 'hypostasis', while 'emanation' might evoke a complementary status to a mind steeped in Blake, who uses the term for  female counterparts of his living beings. If this is the case, however, Yeats's choice of usage still raises some questions about how he understood statements such as those that the Intellectual-Principle 'is the seat of authentic Existents' (V.5.3, vol. 5, p. 50), or that 'the Intellectual-Principle is the authentic existences and contains them all—not as a place but as possessing itself and being one thing with this its content' (V.9.6., vol. 4, p. 95).

Rescuing Yeats

A number of writers have tried to explain that Yeats's use of 'Authentic Existant' is more subtle than simply misapplying the term to the Three Hypostases.

The first major treatment of Yeats's use of Plotinus was Rosemary Puglia Ritvo's 1975 examination 'A Vision B: The Plotinian Metaphysical Basis'. A key part of the argument relates to analysis that will come in Part III of this blog-essay, but Ritvo argues that Yeats's usage of 'Authentic Existant' is confined to the realms of the Intellectual-Principle and the All-Soul, because 'MacKenna's term "authentic existence"... is predicated of the Second and Third Hypostases but not of the First, he clearly excludes the Absolute', i.e., The One (38).

The difficulty here lies in understanding Yeats's distinctions into First, Second, and Third Authentic Existants, which are his own invention. He tells us that we should identify his Third Authentic Existant with Plotinus' Third Hypostasis, the All-Soul. How are we to understand the relationship between Yeats's first two Authentic Existants and Plotinus' metaphysics? Since Plotinus' First Hypostasis is excluded from Yeats's discussion, Yeats's First and Second Authentic Existants clearly are not to be identified with Plotinus' First and Second Hypostases.

This leads to a ingenious and completely plausible explanation, though it is one that has no foundation in anything that Yeats writes:

I propose that Yeats's first two Authentic Existants correlate to the two aspects of Plotinus' Second Hypostasis: the First Authentic Existant, Celestial Body, is Plotinus' Second Hypostasis considered as Being; the Second Authentic Existant, Spirit, is the Second Hypostasis considered as act, or using MacKenna's term, the Intellectual-Principle. (38)

This dual understanding of the Nous is entirely consistent with Plotinus's conception of the Second and Third Hypostases looking upward and downward.

Ritvo's reading has been persuasive, and Brian Arkins follows Ritvo in Builders of My Soul (1990), and a similar scheme is proposed by Matthew Gibson in 'Classical Philosophy' (W. B. Yeats in Context, 2010). Gibson's outline of 'the Intellectual Realm or nous' notes that 'Here reside the Authentic Existents: what Plato had called the Ideal Forms' (281). He then states that:

Yeats appears to have matched the two parts of the Second Hypostasis—Being and Act—with the Celestial Body and Spirit respectively, calling them erroneously the First and Second 'Authentic Existants': effectively dividing the dyadic Intellectual Realm into two hypostases with the contemplation of the Spirit (mind) constituting that 'which holds the First in it s moveless circle' (AV 194), and confusing the term 'Authentic Existant' with Hypostasis itself. (281)

After considering other aspects as well, Gibson goes on to comment that 'Not only does Yeats appear to read erroneously, but he also appears to collapse macrocosm into microcosm', though adding that 'Yeats's misreading stems from very intelligent observations' about Plotinus's system (282).

To someone as versed as Yeats in Cabala and Hermetism, collapsing microcosm and macrocosm is all but inevitable, as they are seen as reflections of each other, and desirable too. The Emerald or Smaragdine Tablet attributed to Hermes Trismegistus contains the dictum 'as above, so below; as below, so above', or as Yeats phrases it: 'For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said' ('Ribh Denounces Patrick', VP 556, CW1 290). As such the human microcosm will be a miniature of the macrocosm. In many respects this coincides with the concept that the physical world is a copy of the Ideal Forms within Nous.

Yeats's intentions and reading are made a little clearer in the drafts for A Vision B (though elements of discarded thinking add a layer of complexity too)*:

I identify the moment where the antinomy is resolved with Plotinus first Authentic Existant or the One, the Celestial Body in Spirit with the Second Authentic Existant & the Spirit in Celestial Body with the third Authentic Existant or Soul of the World. (NLI 36,272/15)

In other words, by the term 'First Authentic Existant' Yeats did mean the One, by 'Second Authentic Existant', the Intellectual-Principle, and by 'third Authentic Existant', the All-Soul. This is not to say that Yeats misunderstood Plotinus to any significant degree, even if he was mixed up over one of MacKenna's terms, but it does mean that he was not really distinguishing between the Intellectual-Principle's Being and Act.

NLI 36,272/15, transcribed above.

 In Part III, I'll look at the way that Yeats used Plotinus's framework to structure his understanding of the Principles and the Thirteenth Cone and to try to resolve his uncertainties about the Daimon and the Ghostly Self.



*The categories of Celestial Body in Spirit and Spirit in Celestial Body are connected with the Beatitude and the Beatific Vision, and are examined at some length in 'The Thirteenth Cone' in W. B. Yeats's A Vision: Explications and Contexts, available here, especially pages 175–79.

Pronouncing Michael Robartes and the gyre

I am asked with some regularity about two pronunciation questions that seem to nag at readers of later Yeats, neither of them to do with Irish names or recondite terms such as 'congeries', all of which can be checked relatively easily. (Apparently it's 'con-jérry-ez', by the way, with elements of variation.)

The questions are: How do you pronounce the name Robartes? And is the 'g' of  'gyre' hard or soft?

Though it has been a while since I learnt that the surname Robartes is generally pronounced as two syllables with the stress on the first, being a variant spelling of Roberts or Robards, I still find it hard to shake a preference for the pronunciation that I first adopted of three syllables with the stress on the second (a little like Pilates as opposed to Pontius Pilate). I don't think that there are any recordings of Yeats reading a poem that names him (U Penn has, I think, as full an archive as is possible from the few extant recordings), nor have I come across any record of what he said, but I accept that robarts is probably the best pronunciation.

The problem is a little different with 'gyre'. Here, the standard accepted pronunciation for the word is with a soft 'g', and it is given by the dictionary as jīr (I'm using Chambers). Many Irish accents, like most Scottish and US accents, would normally pronounce a retroflex 'r' at the end — /dʒaɪɹ/ or /dʒaɪɻ /— while most English and some New England accents would have an open ending— /dʒaɪə/ .

However, Richard Ellmann states that the whirling symbol 'was a spiral, which Yeats preferred to call a gyre (and pronounced with a hard "g")' (Yeats: The Man and the Masks, p. 231). Although he gives no reason for this statement, he had probably heard it from George Yeats's own lips.* (Apparently Lewis Carroll also expected a hard 'g' for 'gyre' in 'The Jabberwocky', as the basis for this word, 'gyroscope', was pronounced with a hard 'g' in his day.)

Further confirmation comes from a typescript that Yeats dictated, where the word is misspelt as 'guyers', which indicates that the typist heard a hard 'g'. The word has been corrected in later occurrences.

NLI MS 36,272/24, p. 7

 (A similar instance elsewhere has the seventeenth-century theosophist Jakob Boehme typed up as 'Burmah'.)

Listening to Yeats's own readings of poetry, for instance 'The Lake Isle of Inisfree', the final 'r' sounds of 'there' and 'core' are strong, so that if one wants to follow what Yeats himself said, it would probably be /gaɪɻ / .

But do we adopt Yeats's pronunciation? Even if it goes against our own accent or region?  

How should the falcon and falconer of 'The Second Coming' be pronounced—long or short 'a'? with or without an 'l' sound? (fawk'n is a traditional pronunciation, as is fol-kon, but făl-kon has become general nowadays).
Does the philosopher George Berkeley echo London's Berkeley Square (barkly) or California's Berkeley University (birkly)? 
How close did Yeats intend a rhyme such as 'work' and 'clerk' to be in 'At Galway Races'? ('clerk' rhymes with bark in most British accents, but the rhyme implies clurk).

Do we keep an early-twentieth-century pronunciation in the twenty-first century? We know that Wordsworth and Byron rhymed water and matter, while Pope rhymed line and join. Do we keep the rhyme in order to preserve the internal sound patterns and music—and risk sounding ridiculous—or do we accept that time and place may erode some of these sound elements?  

As neither 'Robartes' nor 'gyre' is in any danger of being misunderstood if we pronounce it either way, we may prefer accepted standard usage or to heed what Yeats himself said, but there is nothing to stop our Robartes being trisyllabic if we choose and our gyres from being soft.

 

*Note (added May 2023): Curtis Bradford, in his article 'George Yeats: Poet's Wife', confirms that she would have been the source: 'Her verbal memory was astonishing and, in spite of the difference of sex and hence of vocal quality, I found her by far the most convincing imitator of Yeats talking or reading poetry.... She could always suggest the right Yeatsian stress: 'My fànatic hèart"; recollect Yeatsian peculiarities of pronunciation: "Bỳ zàn ti um", "gyres" with a hard "g", "gyrate" with a soft, "demesne" as though spelled domain, and so on.' (written in 1955; published in The Sewanee Review, 77: 3 (Summer, 1969), 385-404, at 398; https://www.jstor.org/stable/27541741 ).

 



 

Plotinus and "A Vision", Part I

An important element of Yeats's understanding of the spiritual elements of the system, including the Principles and the Thirteenth Cone, came through his reading of Plotinus. Yeats read The Enneads as they came out in the translations of Stephen MacKenna, an Irish nationalist and great friend of John Millington Synge. Yeats had a copy of the first translation, Plotinus on the Beautiful (YL 1594, WBGYL 1606), which appeared from A. H. Bullen's Shakespeare Head Press in 1908, the same year as his own Collected Works. The Medici Society started to publish translations of the Enneads in order in 1917 (see YL 1589-93, WBGYL 1601-5)—the copy of Vol. 1 in the Yeats's library has George Yeats's bookplate (she already had copies of Thomas Taylor's early nineteenth-century selected translations.) The Yeatses also bought Dean Inge's Gifford Lectures on Plotinus in 1919 (YL 954, WBGYL 964).

By the time that A Vision A appeared, the first three volumes of MacKenna's translations, containing the first four Enneads, had been published. Yeats refers specifically to Plotinus's hypostases in "The Four Principles and Neo-Platonic Philosophy":

I have not considered the ultimate origin of things, nor have my documents thrown a direct light upon it. The word Anima Mundi frequently occurs and is used very much as in the philosophy of Plotinus. I am inclined to discover in the Celestial Body, the Spirit, the Passionate Body, and the Husk, emanations from or reflections from his One, his Intellectual Principle, his Soul of the World, and his Nature respectively. The Passionate Body is described as that which links one being to another, and that which rescues the Celestial Body from solitude, and this is part of the office of the Soul of the World in Plotinus. As actually used in the documents Anima Mundi is the receptacle of emotional images when purified from whatever unites them to one man rather than to another. The 13th, 14th and 15th cycles are described as Spheres, and are certainly emanations from the Soul of the World, the Intellectual Principle and the One respectively, but there is a fundamental difference, though perhaps only of expression, between the system and that of Plotinus. In Plotinus the One is the Good, whereas in the system Good and Evil are eliminated before the Soul can be united to Reality, being that stream of phenomena that drowns us. (AVA 176, CW13 143-44)

Yeats's schema is therefore relatively clear:  the three supernatural cycles or Spheres are seen as expressions of Plotinus's three hypostases, The One, The Intellectual Principle, and The Soul of the World. There is a more tenuous relationship to the Four Principles, and this also presents the perennial problem of adapting a trinity to a quaternity or vice versa (one that he had encountered when writing on The Works of William Blake), but Yeats introduces a fourth term that probably owes as much to his work on Blake as reading of Plotinus: Nature. (In the WWB, Yeats had treated Nature as the mirror of the Holy Ghost, see YeatsVision.com.)

It is difficult from this simple set of correspondences to say how clear an idea Yeats actually had of Plotinus's hypostases or how far he saw the parallels as going.  Part of the attraction of Neoplatonism in this context appears to be that it enabled Yeats to include elements of the automatic script that dealt with the Christian Trinity but within a form of pagan language. Plotinus's philosophy is eminently primary in most respects—"Plotinus' ecstasy" is after all the "ecstasy of the Saint" (AVA 215, CW13 177)—but his vision retains enough of antithetical Greek paganism to make it palatable to Yeats. The Trinity of Christian faith is given as the One (the Father), the Nous, Logos, or Intellectual Principle (the Son), and the Soul of the World (the Holy Ghost). While Yeats, writing as himself, identifies his Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Cycles beyond physical incarnation with Plotinus’s hypostases (AVA 176, CW13 142–43), he has the  character of Owen Aherne identify them with the Christian Trinity (AVA 236, CW13 194).

Importantly, though, Yeats continued his study of Plotinus as he rewrote A Vision. Stephen MacKenna wrote to his patron Ernest Debenham in October 1926 reporting his pleasure at an article by AE and added:

Another little encouragement: Yeats, a friend tells me, came to London, glided into a bookshop and dreamily asked for the new Plotinus, began to read there and then, and read on and on till he'd finished (he really has a colossal brain, you know), and now is preaching Plotinus to all his train of attendant Duchesses. He told my friend that he intended to give the winter in Dublin to Plotinus. (Journals and Letters of Stephen MacKenna, 235)

What appears in the drafts of the late 1920s certainly shows increased attention given to Plotinus and his thought. (Continued in Part II.)

Confessions of an English Literature student

I was lucky to have many great teachers at school and university, but one of the most important for me was Stephen Gill at Lincoln College, Oxford. His academic interests were communicated with passion and they included George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and D. H. Lawrence, novelists of realism and social commitment. But foremost, at least in my impression, was his expertise in and love of William Wordsworth. He could quote with facility from throughout Wordsworth's work, but did so most frequently from The Prelude. It no doubt helped that he had been one of the joint editors of the Norton parallel text of the two full versions of that epic, along with its earlier proto-type.

     I'm aware that certain passages have half-consciously informed my reading of some themes in Yeats's A Vision. Such associations are probably inevitable for the Eng. Lit. student, sometimes because they reflect perennial concerns and sometimes they are just capriciously personal connections. I hope that these examples will resonate for others as well as for me and that they have illuminated my reading of Yeats, not sidetracked it.

     Two in particular stick in my mind. The first is the account of crossing of the Alps in Book VI of The Prelude, where Wordsworth addresses the power of Imagination which is compared to "an unfather'd vapour", showing the "invisible world" in flashes, intimating that:

Our destiny, our nature, and our home
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be. (The Prelude [1805], VI: 538–42)*

This final line in particular seems to me to intimate something of the divine nature that Yeats imagines in the Thirteenth Cone, or rather in the Sphere—that all being and becoming tends to "infinitude",and that if the goal were ever reached it would be a stasis. Certainly this passage also seems to echo Yeats's conception of the nature of life—that, as spirits reflected into time and space, the goal is the timeless and spaceless, but that effort and desire driving us on is more important than the goal (in contrast to Buddha's Four Noble Truths, which aim to eliminate striving and desire).

[And this recalls, in turn, T. S. Eliot's Burnt Norton, with its vision of "the still point of the turning world" and the statement that "the world moves / In appetency, on its metalled ways / Of time past and time future"—that word "appetency" being a slightly more pedantic but precise and concise version of hope/effort/expectation/desire/becoming. Such chains of association are probably also inevitable for the Eng. Lit. student.]

    The second passage is connected and, as I copy it here, even more connected than I had probably realized. In Book II, Wordsworth writes of "the visionary power" imparted by his solitary communion with nature and the "fleeting moods / Of shadowy exultation", because:

                … the soul,
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not, retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity, whereto
With growing faculties she doth aspire,
With faculties still growing, feeling still
That whatsoever point they gain, they yet
Have something to pursue. (The Prelude [1805], II: 334–51)**

I cannot but recall this passage when I read Yeats's description of the basis of the Faculties in terms of incarnations, "the four memories of the Daimon or ultimate self", such that:

His Body of Fate, the series of events forced upon him from without, is shaped out of the Daimon's memory of the events of his past incarnations; his Mask or object of desire or idea of the good, out of its memory of the moments of exaltation in his past lives; his Will or normal ego out of its memory of all the events of his present life, whether consciously remembered or not; his Creative Mind from its memory of ideas—or universals—displayed by actual men in past lives, or their spirits between lives. (AVB 83, CW14 61–62)

Yeats places the memories of exaltation (or sublimity) within the framework of reincarnations, so that the sublime moments of former lives are distilled into the Mask of this life, the goal and focus of our being or Will, but always with the sense that the goal is more important for the direction that it gives than for the possibility of actual attainment. Will is the appetent Faculty, moving always towards Mask, seeking and desiring it. Importantly, the actual memories of past lives are unimportant as the essence is contained within the current Faculties, and it is not "what [the soul] felt" but "how she felt" that matters.

[And this recalls, in turn, the close of Alfred Tennyson's poem "Ulysses", where an ageing Odysseus, chafing at life on Ithaca after his return, proposes a final voyage to his companions:

              ... my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

....

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are:

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.]

All these are connected by the importance of striving and thus with the physical world of the tinctures and Faculties, which only "mirror reality but are in themselves pursuit and illusion" (AVB 73, CW14 53). In a draft, Yeats writes that "the Principles are value and attainment, the Faculties process and search" (cited ARGYV 96) but the Faculties are the tools or interfaces by which the Principles interact with the world and may attain the value that they represent.

In the section on crossing the Alps, Wordsworth is close to Yeats's beloved Shelley in seeing the Alps as  symbols of "The everlasting universe of things..." ("Mont Blanc"). The scene of the mountains, waterfalls, winds, and sublime nature are seen as "Characters of the great Apocalypse, / The types and symbols of Eternity, / Of first and last, and midst, and without end" (The Prelude [1805], VI, 570–72). These intimate the world of the Principles, in the final objective spiritual reality of Thirteenth Cone:

But the 13th Cone, enters in some measure into all Spirits we must then expect some image of it in all things. Primar[il]y it is in those things which Blake called in Heaven & Hell too great for the eye of man. It is there where the painters & poets find it, storm, the starlit sky, spring abundance...

The 13 Cone is reflected in those parts of external nature uncontrolable by us—sea, sky, growth & so on. As an internal experience the 13th Cone is the spiritual reality [that] transcends experience, but is touched by all at the highest moment.… We enter in the Beatitude an experience that can only enter our embodied experience when symbolized by all that is most tremendous in nature… 

(Yeats, 1930 Diary)

Maybe Yeats and Wordsworth have more in common than may appear at first glance.

———————————————————————
There do not seem to be any good recordings of The Prelude readily available. The following links should take you to the relevant passages in a reading of the complete poem. They are less than ideal as they give the 1850 version of the poem and are read by amateurs of varying strength.

*Book VI: "Imagination... like an unfathered vapour..." 



**Book II: "I deem not profitless those fleeting moods of shadowy exultation..."

A note on the Golden Dawn

It is common nowadays to use "Golden Dawn" to refer to all the orders that share the bulk of the original Golden Dawn material, starting from the Cipher Manuscript "discovered" by William Wynn Westcott and most of it assembled or created by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers.

We have books, blogs, web sites, tarot packs, and modern versions that blazon the name, including George Mills Haper's Yeats's Golden Dawn. However, during Yeats's lifetime "Golden Dawn":

(1) was never used outside their own circle and was almost always presented as unexplained initials "G. D." or "G∴ D∴";
(2) was properly applied only to the "outer" part of the order (the inner was the Order of the R.R. & A.C.—variously expanded as Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis or Rubidae Rosae et Aureae Crucis, both meaning "red rose and golden cross");
(3) was dropped in 1902 following the scandalous Horos court case* and replaced with M.R. (the German Morgenröthe, "dawn", lit. "morning redness"); and
(4) disappeared when the renamed order dissolved over the next few years into several schismatic groups, including the Stella Matutina, the successor group that WBY was involved with into the 1920s.

     Confusion can arise if all the successors are referred to casually as "Golden Dawn", so that Charles Williams's involvement with the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross can be conflated with Dion Fortune's involvement in the Alpha et Omega or George Yeats's in the Stella Matutina.

     A fuller form of the name now widely used is the “Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,” but Nick Farrell, who has both scholarly authority and practical interest in the history of the order, maintains in his biography of MacGregor Mathers, King over the Water,† that:

the Golden Dawn was never called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (HOGD). That name was invented by Regardie for his book. The First Order was called the Golden Dawn in the Outer (GDO) although on some letterheads it was called the Esoteric Order of the Golden Dawn. Hermetic Order does appear on some letter heads and course material but it was never the Order's name.

(King over the Water, 17, [referring to this blog posting].)

     Certainly the form of "Order of the G. D. in the Outer" is what appears on Yeats's invitation "To initiate you"—where he was also told to "Ask for Mr Mathers, & the Hermetic Students' Meeting", and the "Hermetic Students" was the name that Yeats used for the group in his autobiographical writing (Au 575, CW3 453):

The invitation to WBY's initiation (pasted into NLI MS 36,276/2). Though his autobiography  states that he joined “in May or June of 1887” ( Au 183, CW3 160), the order was not formed until 1888 and the date here is 7 March 1890. Click on the image for a clearer version.

As Farrell indicates, course material kept by WBY and his uncle George Pollexfen contains ownership plates with “Hermetic Order of the G. D.,” often with the “G. D.” overwritten with “M. R.” (i.e., "Morgenröthe").¶

Click on the images for clearer versions (though still poor resolution—apologies).

     In the end, however, it seems impossible to fight for too much accuracy over a name that was possibly even hazy to those who used it at the time—when we only ever use initials, they take over from the full name. Though it entails major caveats, less explanation is required and it is almost accurate to say that Georgie Hyde Lees joined the Golden Dawn on 24 July 1914, sponsored by W. B. Yeats (Saddlemyer, Becoming George, 66-68).

      The name "Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn" is probably a modern invention, but is succinct and has become standard. In a similar way Yeats's project for "Celtic mysteries" at the Castle of Heroes in Lough Key are often now referred to as the "Celtic Mystical Order", a term that had no currency at the time (see Collected Letters 2, 663-69), .




 * For the Horos case, see chapter 1 of R. A. Gilbert's, The Golden Dawn Scrapbook: The Rise and Fall of a Magical Order (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1997).

† Nick Farrell, King over the Water; Samuel Mathers and the Golden Dawn (Dublin: Kerubim Press, 201); see also Mathers' Last Secret (revised): The Rituals and Teachings of Alpha et Omega (Rosicrucian Order of the Golden Dawn, 2011).

¶ See items passim in groups NLI MSS 36,276–36,280, listed in National Library of Ireland's Collection List No. 60, “Occult Papers of W. B. Yeats”, compiled by Peter Kenny.