12 - The Twenty-Eight Incarnations: Lives and Phases

Summary

Overview

The delineation of the twenty-eight incarnations was among the first material that Yeats tackled with a view to publication and it is the part of A Vision that readers tend to remember most clearly, not least because of the associated poem “The Phases of the Moon.” Yeats started his first exposition, as in the poem, a dialog between Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne, only one or two months after the automatic script first began.1 His writing in the descriptions—“The Twenty-Eight Embodiments” in A Vision A and “The Twenty-Eight Incarnations” in A Vision B—remains among the most crafted and refined of the whole, and it is often correspondingly dense in terms of meaning and detail.

The descriptions involve several approaches:

• synthesizing the keyword descriptions of the Faculties according to the rules presented;

• considering the phase within the sequence and in relation to other phases on the Wheel as a whole;

• examining people and lives known to belong to the phase;

• interpreting archetypal names or associations;

• interpreting fragments extracted from the automatic script.

There is also interpolation between these elements, use of fictional characters, and inspired elaboration.

In the early phases, where there are said to be few historically celebrated examples, Yeats relies almost entirely on synthesis of Faculties and the place in the sequence, with some archetypes from fiction. The first historical figure appears with Phase 6 and is taken, like most of Yeats's examples, from the world of the arts and letters. Effectively, this means that Yeats creates a pageant of artists, within which he places himself, by which and against which he defines himself and them. This pantheon of creative talent is also a spectrum, moving from what Yeats regards as writing that expresses the collective voice of a people (Phases 6, 7) to more personal emphasis (8–11), moving to emotion and sensuousness (13, 14), then lyric sincerity and symbolism (16, 17), tragic sensibility (18, 19), and dramatization (20), then greater objectivity (21, 22), with recognition of what lies beyond the individual (23, 24), and then greater spirituality (25–26), with recognition of what lies beyond humanity (27).