11 - The Circles of Life: Wheels and Rebirth

Summary

Overview

This chapter and the following three turn to the processes that the elements discussed in the previous chapters are involved in and their meaning.

In the system of A Vision all cycles are seen as analogous to each other, so springtime and daybreak, for instance, are comparable metaphors for a beginning, interchangeable to some extent, and each appropriate to illustrate a particular aspect of that state: “Death … is symbolised as spring or dawn; and birth … as autumn or sunset. Incarnate life is night or winter, discarnate life is day or summer” (AVB 201, CW14 148). Each human life is a symbolic day of the great year that makes up a soul's destiny. Just as a “day” comprehends both day and night, light and dark, a “life” comprises both life and interlife. From the human or “natural” point of view, light is considered to come from the moon, so that nighttime is illuminated, while daytime is dark, as if blinded by the light of the sun. After death, nature recedes, and spiritual thought takes over, so that what was dark is now light, and the lunar light is now dark, embodying a version of one of Yeats's favorite fragments from Heraclitus: “Mortals are immortals and immortals are mortals, the one living the other's death and dying the other's life.”

The cycles of analogy can also be transposed, and in a different metaphor each life is also a year, where the months of spring and summer correspond to the period from death to birth and the months of autumn and winter correspond to the period from birth to death. In practice, Yeats makes little of the months during incarnate life, as the markers of normal life are more familiar and more adequate. After death, where he deals with unfamiliar territory, the months provide a useful structure or means of marking out the various stages, although their length varies hugely and one or two of them are “beyond time,” so that the labeling is symbolic. A given incarnation starts at Phase 1 on the wheel, nature's lowest ebb and the dark of the moon but full sun.