Overview

Expressed in its simplest form, Yeats's view of the cosmos is idealist in the philosophical sense, holding that reality exists “essentially as spirit or consciousness,” also termed mind. His conception is at odds with modern scientific thinking, in which mind and consciousness are the product of the brain's functions, since he views mind not only as separate from the physical body but existing before it, even before physical reality and perception. For Yeats, this independent mind is “spirit” and the universe is a community of spirits, existing outside space and time and perceiving each other. Space-time is a product of these spirits and their perceptions, an expression of their reflection into sensation, in particular the aspects of emotion and intellect. When the spirits reflect into time and space, “each sees the others as the visible universe” or “as thoughts, images, objects of sense,” which means that all phenomenal reality is the product of living perception (§5.1). Mountains, buildings, trees, and chairs are all seen as the expression of spirits and perception. Some of the concepts of A Vision are difficult to grasp because elements can simultaneously be an inherent part of the individual soul and also manifested external phenomena; the phenomena are in turn the effects of other beings.

A proportion of these spirits are human souls and born into this world, though Yeats never raises the question of what proportion makes up humanity, or indeed many other fundamental questions about origins and process. However, human souls are continually reincarnated on earth in a series of lives that evolve and repeat at a higher level, in a form of upward spiral. Through the progressive incarnations, different aspects of the being’s essence can be expressed, until, at the end of this series, all that is within the archetype of its essential being has been expressed in time and space. The soul is then ready to enter into a whole new dimension beyond the (twelve) cycles of time and space called the Thirteenth Cycle or Thirteenth Cone (§10.4).

During its passage through the cycles, each human soul passes through three states—incarnate physical life, interlife, non-physical incarnation (see Ch. 11)—its abilities, nature, and purposes determined by its current state.

Overview

In A Vision the human being is a complex system of interrelated aspects and “bodies.” Some religious traditions recognize two components to the human being: a mortal body and an immortal spiritual aspect, termed soul or spirit. Others distinguish three elements: along with the body, there is an immortal aspect—usually termed the spirit—and between the two an impermanent but immaterial aspect—usually the soul. The Theosophical traditions that Yeats had studied also teach of mortal and immortal spiritual aspects, analyzing them further, so that there are seven elements of the human in total: four impermanent aspects and three permanent ones. The Cabalistic systems adopted by the creators of the Golden Dawn posit different but impermanent aspects and immortal ones, ranging from three to six elements, depending on how they are viewed or how far they are broken down.

A Vision posits four elements, called Principles, one of which is linked to the body but is not the same. The immortal aspect is made up of two Principles, Spirit and Celestial Body, and these remain the same from one incarnation to the next. These are accompanied in each lifetime by a freshly regenerated pair of transient Principles, Husk and Passionate Body. The table below outlines the Four Principles, with summaries that are my own condensations of Yeats:

There is a clear hierarchy of the Principles, with Celestial Body the most fully spiritual and Husk the least. The ultimate spiritual being is the union of Celestial Body and Spirit, and as this core prepares for a new incarnation the other two Principles emerge—in Yeats's terms, “appear”—and Spirit, rather than looking upward to Celestial Body, looks downward towards the new Passionate Body. This is the impetus to incarnation. As in the more general scheme, the solar Principles are the more spiritual, and the lunar Principles are connected with human life, becoming more active and dominant as incarnation approaches—“Husk and Passionate Body taken together are Nature, Spirit and Celestial Body are pure intellect.”

In the stage before birth, when the coming life is known, the Four Principles are all in play. At birth, or just before, these Principles are reflected into the human psyche and the reflected forms are the Four Faculties.

Overview

The Faculties dominate the waking life of the human being and they dominate A Vision. They were the first major part of the system that Yeats mastered, and he wrote “The Phases of the Moon” and the delineations of the phases’ characteristics that became “The Twenty-Eight Embodiments” of A Vision in “my first excitement when it seemed that I understood human nature for the first time… .” For readers too, they are one of the more accessible aspects of the system, although the geometry and “rules for finding” that Yeats uses to expound their development and variations can appear arbitrary, too complex for ready understanding and too simplistic to describe the human psyche.

As explained in the previous chapter, the Faculties, existing within the psyche and experience, are reflections of aspects of the spiritual human being, the Principles, products of their incarnation. The Faculties are acquired, in the sense that they are not part of the individual essence and are specific to a single incarnation, though their characteristics follow inevitably from previous lives.

One of the problems facing readers is grasping what these Faculties represent and what that representation implies. They are roughly similar to the traditional “trilogy of mind”—the cognitive, affective, and conative faculties— plus immediate environment. The fact that they are four rather than three is fundamental to the dynamics of Yeats's system, part of its intrinsic duality and emphasis on antithesis.

Yeats's clearest single description of the Faculties probably comes in the first version of A Vision:

In all, the Yeatses assigned roughly 120 historical people, family, and personal friends to a phase at some point in the automatic script, the notes, or in A Vision itself, along with a dozen groups of people (e.g., grammarians, travelers, journalists), and another dozen fictional, mythological, or artistic figures (e.g., the Idiot of Dostoyevsky, Giraldus, Cuchulain, Rodin's Eternal Idol). A few of these changed over the course of the script or were revised by the Yeatses. Ezra Pound, for instance, was moved from the heroic Phase 12, when Yeats saw his pity for the stray cats of Rapallo.

In A Vision, Yeats attributes almost fifty historical personages to their phases in the headnotes for the phase descriptions. Added to these, there are vague multitudes of beautiful women and one fictional character, Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, from Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. Yeats further refers to a number of people and fictional characters in the text of these descriptions, adding almost ten more names and more beautiful women.

Over fifty further names were mentioned in the automatic script, mainly in scripts from December 1917 and early January 1918. In separate notes, the Yeatses put the names into an ordered list bringing together most of these attributions, together with cycle of incarnation in many cases, introducing a few changes. Most of the cancelled names, however, seem to be caused by copying a name to the wrong phase number in the first instance.

The list is on two loose leaves. I consulted the first on the microfilm of Yeats manuscripts from the State University of New York, Stony Brook. The top part of the page lists the attributions of “E[vil] G[enius]” given on January 3, 1918 (see YVP1 192), with the numbers from 18 to 28, but filled in only as far as 20 where the automatic script stopped. The list of people starts halfway down the page and is headed “Phases.” with names for Phases 2 to 9 in George Yeats's hand. The second sheet, also in George Yeats's hand, covers Phases 10 to 25; it was filed with the automatic script of June 2, 1918, and is published in Yeats's “Vision” Papers (YVP1 549n5) and also in The Making of Yeats's “A Vision,” Appendix B (MYV2 418).

Overview

A Vision is a fascinating book and the system that it expounds has a richness and a variety that rewards study. It is also written in a way that gradually yields more meaning as the reader understands more, and the symbolic system opens up with a level of detail and completeness that is impressive. The preparatory work and drafts reveal the hours of thought and labor that Yeats expended on formulating the ideas as well as possible and explaining his subject without too much length.Yeats himself wrote of the need to simplify, but readers have often found that the presentation lacks clarity. If I have mentioned the frustrations and problems of A Vision, it is partly because they stop the book having the readers it deserves and because certain weaknesses in Yeats's approach or style have led to unnecessary misunderstandings or unwillingness to pursue questions raised. Readers are drawn to A Vision by its intimation of symbolic truths that the book too often fails to communicate.

Every interested reader of A Vision is likely to find their own reasons for its value, and different people may well disagree radically on the criteria. It is true that some readers want something that A Vision cannot offer, whether a key to Yeats's poetic symbolism or an astrological key to life. It gives part of both, providing a context for Yeats's symbolism—but his poetry keeps to tradition, history, culture, and the common tongue, not the categories and abstractions of the system—and offering a tool for thinking or understanding experience. To me, A Vision's value lies in the flexibility and strength of its symbol system and in its fundamental attitude to life, which is modern as well as ancient. The system offers a myth that acknowledges its myth, and has a profound humanism that is based on genuine humanity rather than abstract doctrine.

In Further Detail

“There are many symbolisms and none exactly resembles mine”

In his review of A Vision A, George Russell remarked on how “the metaphysical structure [Yeats] rears is coherent, and it fits into its parts with the precision of Chinese puzzle boxes into each other.” For Yeats the consistency of what emerged from the automatic script was confirmation of the validity of the system, and, despite the pruning and revision required to make the fragments yield that coherence, the symbol system is remarkably unified.

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.

Overview

Understanding the backgrounds from which both Yeatses came and the occult frame of mind that they shared helps in approaching A Vision. Husband and wife were both influenced by Theosophy and the Rosicrucian Cabala of the Order of the Golden Dawn and its successor the Stella Matutina. Importantly, these occult systems share, first, belief in a supernatural dimension outside the accepted supernatural of conventional religion and, secondly, organized symbol systems that work through correspondence and analogy.

Unable to accept either Christian belief or the “scientism” of his day, Yeats searched in the works of poets such as Shelley and Blake, and of theosophists such as Boehme and Swedenborg; in the esoteric teachings of Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, and of the Golden Dawn's Cabala and Rosicrucianism; in Indian religion and thought, and in Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy; in traditional Irish folklore, and in spiritualism. Born some thirty years after her husband, George Yeats felt similar attractions, reading about early Christianity and Neoplatonic philosophy, translating Renaissance Hermetic texts, and studying astrology, as well as joining the Anthroposophical Society (briefly) and, most significantly, the Stella Matutina, with W. B. Yeats as her sponsor.

Though these influences cover a huge range and there is much variation, the Yeatses were both familiar with a group of ideas and brought them to their project. Therefore, the automatic script launches into many areas with a host of assumptions, as the script is almost a form a private conversation set down on paper. Many such topics as the nature of spirits, of immortality, of reincarnation, or of astrology, enter the automatic script without question.

Concepts and ideas that the Yeatses took almost for granted include the existence of:

• non-physical aspects of the universe that interpenetrate the material world and what is perceived by the senses;

• a “soul” in the human being that survives death;

• that soul viewed as an immortal fragment of the divine that becomes incarnate in material form;

• that soul's reincarnation through successive lives to gain experience and perfect itself, returning eventually to its source in the divine;

• soul experience, which brings certain biases and aptitudes from previous existence to its new life and particular purposes or aptitudes in this life;

Overview

Yeats's account of the genesis of A Vision is evidently more or less what happened, though some details may need amplification or qualification. The system was revealed through George Yeats's automatic writing, during sessions where W. B. Yeats would ask questions and her hand would write answers. After some years, there followed sessions of a different kind where the sleeping George would speak and Yeats would note and summarize what she said, sometimes questioning as well. The Yeatses organized the material in notebooks and a card file, piecing the ideas together into a coherent whole, and W. B. Yeats spent over seven years drafting expositions that became the first edition of A Vision.

The earliest drafts are dialogs couched in fictions, as Yeats immediately decided to embed or veil the revelations in a confection involving a Renaissance European and an Arab tribe, with these elements further filtered through characters from stories he had written in the 1890s, Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne. By July 15, 1918, he had written poems based on the material—“The Double Vision of Michael Robartes” and “The Phases of the Moon”—and was also “at the 30th page of my prose dialogue expounding this symbol & there will be 3 dialogues of some 40 pages each, full of my sort of violence & passion” (CLX 3461). Yeats elaborated the fictional framework significantly and many of the earliest and often clearest explanations of fundamental principles come in notes or introductions to poems and plays, usually expressed in terms of these fictions. Their role in the more sustained presentation that he planned gradually diminished as the scope and complexity of the material continued to develop.

Overview

As a symbol of complete opposition, the Daimon expresses the system’s fundamental duality but does so with a mythic vividness and autonomous life that is lacking elsewhere. Perhaps because of this, it does not quite fit into the same categories as the Faculties and Principles, or even the Thirteenth Cone, and, though Yeats at various stages attempted to identify it with one or other element, such neat assignments were never satisfactory. Furthermore, it developed over time to be viewed as the essence or archetype which the human being only partially expressed, opposite because it contains all the rest that is not expressed in this incarnation.

As the concept of the Daimon changes over the course of the years, it is not always easy to discern what Yeats is envisaging in a given context. Yeats was fully aware of the term's complex, classical antecedents, and he adopted the concept of the “Daemon” as part of his own thought in Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917), as a form of the anti-self linked to the spirit of a dead person. This evolves in the automatic script into a reconfiguration of the human Faculties in a different dimension, a reflected inversion, yet the Daimon is also a supernatural spirit guide, becoming in A Vision the human's amoral “guardian angel,” the stage-manager of human life that presides over the critical moments that shape a person's destiny, particularly affecting human passion and sexual love. It is also an expression of the soul's higher or ultimate self, and elsewhere Yeats writes of it as the archetype or Leibniz's monad. All these ideas overlap to some degree, but not all of them pertain at the same time or work within the same framework.

To summarize and over-simplify slightly, in both versions of A Vision, the Daimon is a supernatural being, paired with its human counterpart, paradoxically both the human's opposite in every respect and also an expression of the soul's more complete essence. The dualistic aspect dominates in A Vision A, while the archetypal aspect dominates in A Vision B, but many of the problems that Yeats struggled with in trying to understand the Daimon come from the tension and frequent incompatibility of these two elements.

Overview

The Principles are shadowy presences during waking life and therefore less easily characterized and handled than the Faculties; they come to the fore after death, when we have no real points of reference. Readers tend to come to them with some fatigue, having absorbed a barrage of new terms and the movements of the gyres with respect to the Faculties; the processes assigned to the Principles appear more abstract, the movements are involved and even more barren, and there is little of the vivid writing that makes “The Twenty- Eight Incarnations” rewarding. Yet in most respects the Principles are probably more easily grasped than the Faculties.

The spiritual being is an iceberg, in that most of it is submerged during incarnate life. The reflected forms, the Faculties, dominate (see Ch. 6), but these are like the shadows on the walls of Plato's cave, just the images of the spiritual aspects and with no real substance. The Principles remain the unconscious foundation for the Faculties, which produce the conscious waking state of the human being, the visible part of the iceberg. The Principles are more active in dream where we inhabit the same dimension as the dead, who exist only in the Principles.

The Spirit is the link between the immortal and the transient aspects of humanity. The Celestial Body, divine selfhood, is effectively isolated and the Spirit seeks connection beyond itself but needs the Passionate Body as vehicle, so that the Passionate Body saves the Celestial Body from solitude, a phrase from the automatic script that Yeats repeats. In an unpublished poem, Yeats portrays Spirit as the bridegroom of two sisters: Beauty or Passionate Body and Truth or Celestial Body. With the Beauty his name is Imagination, and with Truth Reason:

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.

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).