4 - Esoteric Yeats

Summary

THE ANTI-SELF

There used to be a tendency to try to play down the importance of Yeats's esoteric beliefs to his writing. Increasingly, however, this is recognized to be an artificial endeavour, in keeping with a reading of ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’. Rightly understood, it can be hard to tell whether the occult or the aesthetic has priority in Yeats's thinking, so profoundly are they intertwined. This becomes clearer from a consideration of the development of his own occult thinking, to which both spiritualism and magic have something to contribute.

The Golden Dawn should not be thought of as a spiritualist organization in the proper sense. It did not involve seances, but rather ritual magic. Yeats had attended seances in the 1890s, but only rarely. However, a series of seances which he attended between 1909 and 1914 was to have a formative effect on the mature development of his thought, and ultimately, combined with influences from Rosicrucianism, magic, and theosophy, was to feed into Yeats's great occult synthesis, A Vision. (There are two versions of A Vision, one published in 1926 – though it bears the date 1925 – and the other, very different from the first, in 1937.) One qualification is necessary, however: it was automatic writing produced by his wife George which led directly to the system described in that extraordinary work; and, unless we wish publicly to subscribe to the doctrines of spiritualism, we must assume that her own considerable reading in esoteric philosophy, as well as her own powers of imagination and synthesis, had a decisive effect on it.

In 1912, at one of these seances with Mrs Eta Wriedt, Yeats came to the conclusion that a spirit called ‘Leo’, who had communicated with him before, was in fact ‘Leo Africanus’ – that is, Al Hassan Ibn-Mohammed al-Wezar Al-Fasi, a fifteenthcentury Moor of Spain. As a result of this seance, he began to engage in automatic writing so as to permit ‘Leo’ to communicate with him. Yeats believed that Arab and Moorish societies had at that time nurtured considerable occult learning: he writes to Leo about ‘the Alchemists of Fez’ (Morocco).