10 - The Divine: One and Many

Summary

Overview

Most readers of A Vision notice the apparent absence of a divine dimension to the system that is presented. While it certainly incorporates a large supernatural element with spirits and spirituality, and those whose incarnations fall in the last quarter are often focused on religion, morality, and God, the system itself seems to keep the divine to one side.

Within A Vision, the symbol of the divine is the Sphere, perfect and unknowable. When trying to comprehend this, the human mind is so irredeemably dualistic that the Sphere becomes seen as the cone that opposes the cone of human life. Human life is symbolically encompassed in the twelve cycles of incarnation, so this opposite is viewed as beyond these, the Thirteenth Cycle or the Thirteenth Cone. And it is in this illusory guise that the divine appears most frequently in A Vision, though it is non-phenomenal, outside human logic, and defies category. Yeats writes of it at different times in terms that evoke a place, an abstraction, a state, a force, a being, a community, deity, or eternity, but there is little sustained treatment of the Thirteenth Cone, and readers are left to piece together the references scattered through A Vision to find how far this concept fits with their ideas of divinity. For most it falls short, being too impersonal, too mechanical, too unliving.

Part of the explanation goes back to the ideas Yeats had met before the automatic script and A Vision. Both the Theosophists and the Cabalists of the Golden Dawn place true godhead at an immense distance from humanity, veiled from direct knowledge, mediated through a hierarchy of emanations, and symbolized in a variety of forms (§3.1). These mediating beings and forms include the single deity of monotheism as much as the many deities of polytheism or animism, for they are all personalized versions brought closer to human comprehension with human faces and personal pronouns. In this area, at least, Yeats seeks to demythify, removing obvious character and motivation from his ultimate reality and its illusory form as the Thirteenth Cone, which it is almost impossible to conceive of as a personal god.