At this point in our exploration of Yeats’s great occult synthesis A Vision, it will help to step back and glance at an earlier work of his that provided that synthesis with many of its core ideas. That essay is “Per Amica Silentia Lunae,” and we’ll explore the first half of it here, titled “Anima Hominis,” the Human Soul. (If you haven’t read it yet, you can download it free of charge here.) It originally saw print in 1917, just before Yeats’s marriage and the experiment in automatic writing that provided the raw material for A Vision, but it presents many of the core concepts of the later work in a simpler and somewhat more straightforward way.
“Somewhat” is the relevant term here, however, because Yeats used language like a poet even when he was writing prose—and “like a poet” meant considerably more in his day than it does today, when poetry has decayed into little more than an odd habit of taking stray sentences and breaking them up into lines of uneven length. Yeats paid close attention to the sound as well as the sense of each word he wrote, and the music of his prose is as important a part of it as its meaning. What’s more, he wrote at a time when ordinary schooling covered ground that most university graduates don’t encounter today, and that raises certain obstacles to modern readers that will have to be dealt with as we proceed.
The title of the essay is a case in point. In Yeats’s time, if you went to school at all, and most people in the English-speaking world did, you learned at least a little Latin, and hit at least a few of the high points of classic Latin literature. When this essay first saw print, in other words, nearly every one of its readers could translate the title at a glance—“By the friendly silence of the Moon”—and knew that it refers to a memorable passage early in Vergil’s Aeneid, in which the Greeks sail by moonlight to the unsuspecting city of Troy, counting on the warriors inside the famous wooden horse to open the gates and let them take the city by surprise. Notice the implication of the passage: we are dealing with a conflict in which one side remains unaware and hopelessly vulnerable while the other moves silently through the darkness. That imagery recurs more than once in the essay, and in the broader landscape of thought we are exploring.
Yeats begins with a brief personal dedication—“Maurice” is Iseult Gonne, the adult daughter of Maud Gonne—and then, in his usual way, sets out the issues to be discussed in poetic form. Hic and Ille are also Latin words, meaning “This” and “That.” (Ezra Pound, with his raw American humor, referred to these two characters as “Hick” and “Willy.”) They represent what, in A Vision, Yeats will call the primary and antithetical tinctures. The “this” that Hic defends is the world of ordinary life, the subject of realistic literature and the focus of the ordinary man of action; the “that” whose claims Ille defends is whatever is furthest from ordinary life, and in particular, from the everyday personality of the genuine poet or artist.
That opposition between the creative imagination and the reality it tries to express is at the heart of Yeats’s essay. He uses himself as his first example. Geeky and socially awkward in everyday life, and especially in his romantic affairs—that throwaway line “sometimes even after talking to women” throws his insecurities on that score into high relief—he flees from his own limitations into an imagined world of poetry and drama where the perfect self-possession he could never achieve in his life was an ordinary state. Readers who are familiar with his poetry may notice that he achieved his most powerful poems precisely when he reached that state for a moment, and the self-centered emotionalism and preciousness that disfigured too much of his early verse gave way to a more than Olympian clarity.
The three other examples he gives are just as relevant. The first two, unnamed in the text, are his good friend Lady Augusta Gregory and his fellow Golden Dawn initiate, the actress Florence Farr, both of whom were still living when he wrote, as the playwright John Millington Synge unfortunately was not. How well Yeats’s characterizations fit the actual persons involved will have to be weighed by those familiar with their biographies; what matters for our purpose is that each of the three created great art when they attempted something as far from themselves as they could possibly manage.
The reference to Synge’s play The Playboy of the Western World is just as carefully chosen. It’s an astonishingly funny play about patricide. The main character, Christy, comes staggering into a rural Irish pub, convinced that he’s just killed his father. The initial reaction of the others in the pub gives way to shocked admiration, and as Christy tells the story in ever more colorful terms, he becomes the hero of the village, chased by all the pretty girls. Then it turns out that Christy’s father isn’t actually dead, and the villagers promptly turn against their erstwhile hero. (There’s more, but I’ll leave off any further spoilers.) It’s brilliant and utterly Irish, and yes, it caused full-blown riots for a week during its first Dublin run.
Yet the theme is the one Yeats has begun to develop in his essay. It’s by breaking character and doing something as far as possible from the expectations of his culture and his age that Christy achieves a certain madcap greatness. In the same way, Synge achieved artistic greatness by breaking with his own character and having the characters in his plays do the things he himself wouldn’t or couldn’t do. The same thing is true of each of the other writers, artists, and creative figures Yeats describes. They achieved what they did by trying to embrace their own opposites, and to the extent that they succeeded in fleeing from themselves, they made great art.
Not all creative works come from that process, as Yeats points out. Realists—those who draw the raw materials for their work from their close observation of everyday life—veil their flight from themselvesand their quest for their own antithesis in a cloud of prosaic detail. That’s less true now than it used to be, but Yeats was thinking of the late 19th and early 20th century fad for an almost photographic realism that wallowed in the grittiest possible details of ordinary life, the movement that gave rise to works such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. (It apparently didn’t occur to Yeats that this in itself was quite often a flight, on the author’s part, from a personality that had the habit of hiding from the rough dimensions of everyday life.)
Then there are the sentimentalists. That term doesn’t pack the punch it once did, and it may be worth reviving it in its original force. The writers and artists Yeats has in mind are those whose art consists of the deployment of conventional emotional triggers to bring out familiar responses in the audience. You know you’re in the presence of sentimentalism when you ask yourself, “Where have I seen this before?” and your memory promptly serves up a lavish buffet of examples. Sentimental art and literature are industrial crafts; they produce items for sale, often very profitably; some of their practitioners are very competent at their trade. Everything they do, however, will be completely forgotten fifty years down the road, replaced by the latest shipment of commercial product from some other factory.
While Yeats doesn’t mention it—he apparently never had to contend with examples of it—there’s at least one more alternative to the approach to creativity he wants to discuss. It still awaits its proper name; the makeshift term used for it these days is “Mary Sue.” A Mary Sue, for those of my readers who haven’t encountered the label, is a character in fiction whose sole purpose for existence is to serve as a vehicle for its author’s wish-fulfillment fantasies. Thus a Mary Sue is always a portrait of the author as she (it’s usually, though not always, a she) wishes she was, and the story revolves around how the character gets everything that the author’s own personality and behavior prevent her from getting in real life.
That is to say, Mary Sue stories are inevitably as unconvincing as they are dull. I mention them here to make sure readers don’t think that Yeats is arguing that Mary Sues make great art. Quite the contrary, a Mary Sue is everything its author wishes she could be. The challenge Yeats is flinging down before his creative contemporaries, and of course before himself as well, is to create characters who are everything their authors know, in those moments of terrible clarity that seize all of us from time to time, that they can never be.
It’s a harsh and bracing creed. It applies, in Yeats’s vision, to all of humanity, but only those who have begun to grapple with the deeper side of life have to deal with the presence of “the other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self” in any conscious manner; the rest of our species are still fumbling blindly in the dark, “out of phase” in the terminology of the developed myth. (All this will become clearer when we return to A Vision and the symbolism of the 28 phases.) Yet if Yeats is right, this is where greatness comes from, and not merely literary or artistic greatness. He sketches out three such paths, that of the poet, the hero, and the saint.
Each of these paths starts by embracing a mask that is the opposite of the personality. Yeats imagines that mask being found hanging from one of the oaks of Dodona. This is another bit of classic lore that most people would have grasped instantly in Yeats’s time and next to nobody understands today. Dodona is the location of one of the oldest oracles in ancient Greece, far older than the more famous oracle of Delphi. There, in ancient times, vast ancient oaks rose in a walled compound, and priestesses who went barefoot and slept on the bare ground in all weathers listened to the voice of the wind in the oak leaves and interpreted their messages to seekers. Yeats’s point here is clear enough: the mask is not purely personal. It has a dimension that, as we will see, extends into the realms of collective history.
In this essay, however, Yeats focuses on the personal dimension, and especially on the three paths he has sketched out already. For the poet (which includes all the arts—the Greek word poetes, the source of our word “poet,” literally means “maker”), the mask once found is then expressed in artistic form: characters in a drama or novel, figures in a painting or sculpture, or what have you, who embody what the poet cannot. For the hero, the mask is expressed in action: the hero chooses or is chosen by a task that is beyond human capacity and tries to accomplish it anyway, until he crumples in surrender or until the world destroys him. For the saint, finally, the mask is expressed in renunciation: the saint refuses everything that is not the mask, and achieves greatness at the cost of constant temptation.
All three of these are ways that lead beyond ordinary humanity, and ultimately beyond humanity itself, though no incarnate person can actually follow them that far. This is where they get their extraordinary power, but it is also where they get the theatrical quality that Yeats mentions. There’s always something just a little (or more than a little) artificial about them. The mask worn by poet, hero, and saint can never be lifelike, because their own lives are exactly what they are trying to overcome. What they are seeking is the Daimon.
When he wrote “Per Amica Silentia Lunae,” Yeats hadn’t yet figured out the nature of the Daimon, and he was still sufficiently caught up in his researches into popular Spiritualism that he thought that it could be the ghost of some person who had lived and died in the past. By the time he wrote A Vision, he identified the Daimon with the Individuality or higher self, the core of the self that survives from one incarnation to the next, as distinct from the personality or lower self, the temporary shell that lasts for only one incarnation. In the second edition of A Vision, in particular, he has a great deal to say about the Daimon and its Principles, and how these are reflected in the soul and its Faculties.
In the essay we’re examining now, though, Yeats hadn’t gotten that far. What he knew was that the self and the Daimon are partnered in the dance of existence, each one living the other’s death and dying the other’s life, each one in headlong flight from what they have and in equally passionate quest for what the other has. Yet there’s a crucial difference between them. The Daimon has considerable influence over the circumstances with which the self must contend in life, but it has no ability to choose or innovate. Only the self can do that. Here is foreshadowed one of the core distinctions of A Vision, the opposition between Will and Mask: the self has at least some capacity to will, although that varies depending on its symbolic lunar phase, while the Daimon can only provide the mask, the goal toward which the will strives, and shapes the circumstances through which the will struggles toward that goal.
The hero and the poet fling themselves into this striving in an attempt to make the real world (in the hero’s case) or the imagined secondary world of creative art (in the poet’s case) conform as perfectly as possible to the mask. Of course they fail, but in the process they have an effect on the world, and also on the Daimon, which is nourished by their experience. The saint is quite another matter. The path of the saint is far simpler and thus far more difficult: it demands not action in (and on) the world, but the sustained refusal to participate in any aspect of the world that does not correspond to the mask.
By refusing the world as it is, the saint pursues “the other self, the anti-self or antithetical self” of the world. This gives the saint extraordinary power over the world, which remains his as long as he does not use it—this is the source of the miracles that so often cluster around genuine saints. It also gives the saint power over the Daimon, who is starved for experience by the saint’s renunciation and so is drawn irresistibly to reveal itself to the saint in visionary states, granting supernatural experience to fill the void of natural experience. This, in Yeats’s vision, is the secret strength of asceticism, and it gives the saint a fulfillment that is denied to the hero and the poet. The world being what it is, these two latter paths must always fail to achieve complete fulfillment, but the saint need not fail.
Yeats’s explanation of these paths of hero, poet, and saint draws more directly from his Golden Dawn training than anything else in this essay, or for that matter in A Vision. In what he calls “the Christian Cabbala”—that is, the version of the venerable spiritual tradition of the Cabala that branched off from its Jewish version in the fifteenth century, and was adopted by most Western occult systems after Eliphas Lévi relaunched the occult traditions in the 1850s—the process of creation is symbolized by a lightning flash descending in order through the ten spheres of the Tree of Life, and the process of redemption is symbolized in turn by a serpent who winds its circuitous way up through the 22 paths of the Tree of Life in order.
Yet there is another, faster path that avoids the winding route of the serpent. This is the path of the arrow, which rises straight up the central axis of the Tree of Life from the sphere of ordinary material reality at its base to the sphere of the unconditioned Divine at its summit. To Yeats, while the hero and the poet wind their way along the serpent’s route from path to path, the saint follows the straight path of the arrow directly to his goal.
This last path is only for the few. As we will see in A Vision, it presents itself to those who have circled most of the way around the wheel of the 28 phases and are poised to leave the wheel behind once and for all. For the rest of us, some version of the hero’s path is the most common option—remember that any attempt to reshape the world into the form of some ideal qualifies as the hero’s path, even if it’s on the scale of an individual household—with the poet’s path of creating imagined secondary worlds as a less popular alternative. These follow the winding path of the serpent, and here (as Yeats cautions us) we get into deep waters.
The windings of the serpent, Yeats suggests to us, are far from arbitrary. Even in “Per Amica Silentia Lunae,” before he had encountered the wheel of 28 phases and its complicated geometry, Yeats had already guessed or intuited the presence of a mathematics underlying the process, and speculated that someone who knew that mathematics could predict in advance the arrival of one of the great figures of human history. Those mathematics would occupy a great deal of Yeats’s time and attention in the pages of A Vision.
Assignment: Next month’s essay in this sequence will deal with the second half of “Per Amica Silentia Lunae,” titled “Anima Mundi.” You’ll want to read it, and think about its portrayal of the afterlife. If you happen to be interested, some reading in traditional folklore about ghosts might also be helpful, and so might Yeats’s fascinating essay “Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places,” which was written a little before “Per Amica Silentia Lunae” but drawn from the same raw material.
There is actually a TV Tropes page for Mary Sue:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MarySue
JMG,
Thanks for the post. Why must the hero and poet always fail to achieve complete fulfillment? Especially if the change the hero seeks to make in the world is something simple such as losing 10 lbs or learning to ride a bike? Is it because the simple targeted changes are not the full scope of the mask? I obviously have a gap in my understanding, so thank you for your future response.
“each of the three created great art when they attempted something as far from themselves as they could possibly manage.” –perhaps my first practical take away from this study so far.
“those who draw the raw materials for their work from their close observation of everyday life—veil their flight from themselves and their quest for their own antithesis in a cloud of prosaic detail. ”
Having reread Dhalgren this year, his ear for language and writing dialogue is excellent, but I can see Delany was listening quite a bit to how people talked and putting it into his novel. I see this in Kerouach and Rucker too, with each of them drawing from their personal lives and putting people from them into their stories. Realist and Transrealist respectively…
Dodona — this makes me want to vote for a Robert Graves post next time we have an opportunity. The connection between the classical world and the druid revival vis a vis sacred groves. Robert Rich has great 43 min ambient piece called Oak Spirits, that might be a good soundtrack for envisioning Dodona. A good place to go when seeking the Daimon…
…a lot think on here with regards to the path of the Bard in Druidry.
Perhaps also, the three pillars of the tree of life could be mapped onto this scheme as :
Ovate = Pillar of Severity = Hero
Bard = Pillar of Mercy = Poet
Druid = Middle Pillar = Saint
That’s simplifying it much by trying to fit onto the Tree of Life, but perhaps useful in some areas. I guess the winding way is more common for all three.
[ https://robertrich.bandcamp.com/album/sunyata-inner-landscapes ]
This is so fascinating and I always enjoy reading these weekly posts. I feel I learn so much being moved along the various stories and topics. The contrast between the self and mask is something that never clicked until in this format. I had read about finding the True will popular in magickal circles but this seems something more practical and clear to me.
Thanks for this. I think I understood most of the essay when I read it, at least on some superficial level, but many of the more complex allusions and ideas went past me. (I remembered just enough Latin to guess the meaning of the title, but I hadn’t connected it to the Trojan War, which certainly puts those benign-seeming words in a different light!) It certainly is thought-provoking. I wonder if anyone has tried to use this framework to analyse authors based on their creations, following the assumption that they must be the opposite of what they wrote. Of course, there are many ways for this approach to fail, but it may be an interesting experiment.
One particular sentence still has me stumped, though: “The good, unlearned books say that He who keeps the distant stars within His fold comes without intermediary, but Plutarch’s precepts and the experience of old women in Soho, ministering their witchcraft to servant girls at a shilling apiece, will have it that a strange living man may win for Daemon an illustrious dead man.” I’d appreciate your and/or commenters’ help with figuring it out.
Oh, and your comment on the saint’s path reminded me of this, by Daniil Kharms (an eccentric avant-garde absurdist, but also a man of pronounced if hard to pin down religious interests and sympathies):
“Now I feel sleepy but I am not going to sleep. I get hold of a piece of paper and a pen and I am going to write. I feel within me a terrible power. I thought it all over as long ago as yesterday. It will be the story about a miracle worker who is living in our time and who doesn’t work any miracles. He knows that he is a miracle worker and that he can perform any miracle, but he doesn’t do so. He is thrown out of his flat and he knows that he only has to wave a finger and the flat will remain his, but he doesn’t do this; he submissively moves out of the flat and lives out of town in a shed. He is capable of turning this shed into a fine brick house, but he doesn’t do this; he carries on living in the shed and eventually dies, without having done a single miracle in the whole of his life. “
Great post JMG, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Do you think the path is strongest if we choose only one of the three paths, rather than a bit of all 3?
In the path of the poet, I am reminded of Hayao Miyazaki, who himself is a grumpy old man but whose art expresses a zeal for life, beauty and love that by all accounts he has not shown in his daily life. I do find in my art and writing that I like to work with characters that are at most 5% like me and 95% unlike me in critical capacities, but I haven’t yet consciously tried to make a character who is my antithesis in every way. I might have to think about that one for a while. Usually my method to make characters that aren’t like myself is to model them on people I know, which wouldn’t be adequate for the sort of project Yeats has in mind.
I can’t help but see the similarity between Yeats’ masks and Jung’s inferior function. Those masks are some pretty big archetypes and seem to cover all 16 inferior functions even if that coverage isn’t complete. Some definitely fit better than others.
I am, however, having a hard time separating the Poet from the Saint. There seems to be a lot of overlap. Both the artist and the shaman are figures of the margins. Both create visionary worlds that dissolve when they “look down to Camelot”. They are, by their very nature, always in retreat.
David, I know. There isn’t much in fiction the tropers haven’t tackled.
Luke, er, you’ve quite literally missed the entire point of the post. I’ll quote myself: “The hero chooses or is chosen by a task that is beyond human capacity and tries to accomplish it anyway.”. If you’re the kind of person for whom losing 10 pounds or learning to ride a bike is literally impossible, why, then trying to do those things would put you on the hero’s path. Otherwise, no: the mask is always what you are not and can never be.
Justin, most authors in the last century or so have been at least influenced by realism, so it takes a little more care to see how they’re trying to embody their opposite.
Kyle, stay tuned! We’ll have a lot more to say about this.
Daniil, what Yeats is talking about is the contrast between the claim in popular religion that God appears directly to the individual human soul, and the claim in Spiritualism that there is always a disembodied intermediary, using the spirit of a dead person. Does that help? As for Kharms, a person like that wouldn’t do any miracles, but miracles would constantly happen around him. If he used his powers to make miracles happen, he would lose them.
Sirustalcelion, as long as you’re trying to do more than one, you’re dabbling; to accomplish much, you have to commit to one. As for character creation, why, that depends — to the extent that you focus, even unconsciously, on the differences between your characters and you, they might be images of the mask.
Mark, well, most saints don’t write novels or poems, paint paintings, etc. Most poets, novelists, painters, etc. don’t renounce all material pleasures and retreat to hermitages where they can spend all their time in prayer and asceticism. Those differences might be good places to start!
“Daniil, what Yeats is talking about is the contrast between the claim in popular religion that God appears directly to the individual human soul, and the claim in Spiritualism that there is always a disembodied intermediary, using the spirit of a dead person. Does that help?”
Somewhat…
How can a strange living man win for the Daemon an illustrious dead man? Unless I’m missing something, this seems to separate the Daemon and the dead man – at least until a living man puts them together, delivering the latter to the former.
And the Daemon is not the same as God, I think – or is it enough that the Daemon plays a similar role vis-a-vis the living man in this case?
Yeats’s quoting Jakob Böhme in the first section of Anima Hominis led me to Böhme’s concept of Ungrund (a type of nothingness – https://shareok.org/items/fb002ffd-d1b5-4bb5-9a5b-6a641a7bcdea) which I’m almost sure influenced Dion Fortune’s concept of the Unmanifest.
The quote is from Answers to Forty Questions Concerning the Soul which seems to be about the soul’s journey.
Ah! Thank you for that. I see my error now. I don’t know what it is about Yeats..I enjoy reading him but I seem to understand him less than other occult philosophies.
Very intriguing, JMG.
One might choose to see “the mask” or the daimon not as the higher self, but as a psychic parasite that tempts us with earthly delights so it can feed off of our experiences (be they pleasurable or painful). This would explain why miracles seem to happen around those who practice austerities and asceticism: just as Mara tempted the Buddha as he sought enlightenment under the bodhi tree, the daimon tempts the saint with the power to fulfil some treasured wish or fantasy.
If the saint accepts this gift he indeed enjoys some satisfaction — though at the price of losing his power over the daimon. But if he instead refuses to give in, it would be expected that the daimon would become increasingly desperate in its solicitations, titillating its master with progressively more generous, more fantastic proposals like some desperate salesman eager to strike a deal — any deal being better than no deal. I wonder how far an enterprising saint might be willing to take this haggling. Surely, everyone — the saint included — has their price. Is this the truth behind all those legends of demonic pacts and faustian bargains?
Thanks for your helpful comments! I had read the essay a while ago and understood part of it, but the parts of it you elaborated on are now, on re-reading Yeats, much clearer. For example, the title was clear to me, but I didn’t remember it from the Aeneid and so didn’t even think of looking it up. Those parts you didn’t comment on, for example the last section, are as obscure to me as before!
“Poet”, in German, is “Dichter”, literally “condenser” or “densifier”, and that is certainly how Yeats writes even in prose: concepts that you start to explain in a paragraph, condensed into a single sentence!
OK… so Mary Sue got .. um, Harried?
I’m sorry … well, not really – I couldn’t resist!
Also, with regard to Synge’s play: Once had, twice vindictive!
As for Animus Hominis … I, at first glance, read that as – ‘Animae Humuculus’..
Take that as you will.
Oooouuu, Love Yeats ( Blake- Swedenborg) Never heard of the Swedenborg essay somehow – Thank You for THAT!
Okay I feel foolish about my last comment. I don’t understand Yeats as well because he writes like a poet which of course you said in the post. I knew this at the time of the comment but sometimes I act like I know less than I do, which is a bad habit.
Thank you for this, it’s very helpful in illuminating several important aspects I missed (and I’ve read Anima Hominis twice now!)
I’ve been on a sort of Hodos Chameliontos, reading “Touches of Sweet Harmoney” and wandering in a phantasmagoria of ideas and images turning and turning in a widening gyre in my head. This monthly post helps me focus.
I am blessed to live within walking distance of an Audubon Bird Sanctuary. There is a Great Blue Heron that hangs out there and I think of Yeats whenever I see it.
There is a pdf of Swedenborg, Mediums and the Desolate Places here:
https://dn790008.ca.archive.org/0/items/yeats-1920-desolate-places/Yeats%2C%201920%2C%20Desolate%20Places.pdf
JMG – are you sure of that though? Artists, by the very nature of their art, withdraw from the world. Not completely, no, but not all saints withdraw completely either. My own roshi’s roshi drank sake and watched horrible Japanese telenovellas for fricks’s sake! But even an artist as worldly as Hemmimgway stood and composed his madrigals each morning. He was definitely not completely of the world like a Gordon Gecko, for example. I’m also reminded of a quote by Thoreau – “oh the life I could have writ if only I chosen not to utter it.” There’s inevitably a tradeoff when one chooses to be an artist. And it’s a tradeoff the mirrors the saint.
And regarding the saint, I can’t even begin to count the number of ecstatic poets from the Muslim or Christian traditions. Then there’s the gathas of the Buddhists, and your Ryokans, Saigyos, Li Pos, and Han Shans. Saints and poets all of them. At the very least, to be a saint is to experience poetic consciousness.
There’s overlap here. A lot of it. Especially when either mask is compared to the hero.
The classical daimon was held to be a divine spirit that guides and protects mortals, much like the Zoroastrian fravashi. Socrates’ daimonion was more abstract, and it apparently served as his personal oracle, only ever commenting on what he should not do. Is Yeat’s daimon related to these ideas?
Hi JMG. Just to say this is one of the most enthralling articles I have ever read. Thanks, as usual, for a great deal to think about.
After a difficult divorce, i followed Buddhist practice for some years. In that time i saw miracles, evoked by my practice and others.’ So you are right about the path of the saint. So now in secular life i just benefit from the recall of that. But it changed everything.
Scotty, doubtless that’s correct — Fortune was drawing on a long history of Christian esotericism in her work.
Luke, he’s not easy. Take your time and work through what he writes word by word.
Sybok, sure, and you can also choose to see the Daemon as an unusually large hedgehog with pink feathers and a raucous sense of humor. So? The point of this essay is to explore what Yeats is saying, not to spin doctor it in the service of some dogma or other.
Aldarion, hmm! I hadn’t caught that implication of the German word. Thank you.
Polecat, funny.
Carl, you can find it here among other places:
https://sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/vbwi/vbwi21.htm
Goldenhawk, delighted to hear it!
Mark, sure, and red is not too far from orange, which is kind of yellow, which is part of green, which is next door to blue, and so red is blue. Sheesh.
Tengu, those are doubtless part of the backstory to Yeats’s concept.
Shadow Rider, very glad to hear this. Anything that makes someone think is a good thing from my point of view.
Dave, the boundary separating us from magic and miracle is very thin. More of us should consider crossing it.
Hey JMG
Out of curiosity, would the archetypal backyard inventor or mad scientist count as following the path of the artist since they are creating some expression of “the mask”, or the path of the Hero since their actions in some way embody “the mask”?
“…The Playboy of the Western World… caused full-blown riots for a week during its first Dublin run.”
Now that’s the kind of publicity I want! Stravinsky eat your heart out!
At this page is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, current to 8/11). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.
* * *
This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May DJ’s newborn granddaughter Marishka and daughter Taylor be blessed, healed, and protected from danger, and may their situation work out in the best way possible for both of them.
May
J Guadalupe Villarruel Zúñiga, father of CRPatiño’s friend Jair, who suffers from terminal kidney and liver damage, respond favorably to treatment and be cared for at home. May he also remain in as good health as possible, beat doctors’ prognosis, and enjoy with his wife and children plenty of love, good times and a future full of blessings.
May 12 year old Sebastian Greco of Rhode Island, who recently suffered a head injury, make a prompt and complete recovery with no lasting problems.
May MindWinds’ father Clem be healed of his spinal, blood and cardio infections and returned to good health and wholeness; and may he and his family keep up a robust sense of humor and joy in each others’ continued company.
May Marko’s newborn son Noah, who has been in the hospital for a cold, and Noah’s mother Viktoria, who is recovering from her c-section, both be blessed with good health, strength, endurance, and protection, and may they swiftly they make a full recovery.
May Brother Kornhoer’s son Travis‘s fistula heal, may his body have the strength to fight off infections, may his kidneys strengthen, and may his empty nose syndrome abate, so that he may have a full and healthy life ahead of him.
May Princess Cutekitten, who is sick of being sick, be healed of her ailments.
May Jack H.’s father John continue to heal from his ailments, including alcohol dependency and breathing difficulties, as much as Providence allows, to be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Audrey’s friend’s daughter Katie, who died in a tragic accident June 2nd, orphaning her two children, be blessed and aided in her soul’s onward journey; and may her family be comforted.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Pierre and Julie conceive a healthy baby together. May the conception, pregnancy, birth, and recovery all be healthy and smooth for baby and for Julie.
May SLClaire’s honorary daughter Beth, who is undergoing dialysis for kidney disease, be blessed, and may her kidneys be restored to full functioning.
May 1Wanderer’s partner Cathy, who has bravely fought against cancer to the stage of remission, now be relieved of the unpleasant and painful side-effects from the follow-up hormonal treatment, together with the stress that this imposes on both parties; may she quickly be able to resume a normal life, and the cancer not return.
May Kallianeira’s partner Patrick, who passed away on May 7th, be blessed and aided in his soul’s onward journey. And may Kallianeira be soothed and strengthened to successfully cope in the face of this sudden loss.
May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed and have a speedy and full recovery from cancer.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, and who is now able to be at home from the hospital, be healed of throat cancer.
(Healing work is also welcome. Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe)
May David Spangler (the esoteric teacher), who has been responding well to chemotherapy for his bladder cancer, be blessed, healed, and filled with positive energy such that he makes a full recovery.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be quickly healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery and drugs to treat it, if providence would have it, and if not, may her soul move on from this world and find peace with a minimum of further suffering for her and her family and friends.
May Liz and her baby be blessed and healthy during pregnancy, and may her husband Jay (sdi) have the grace and good humor to support his family even through times of stress and ill health.
May Debra Roberts, who has just been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, be blessed and healed to the extent that providence allows. Healing work is also welcome.
May Jack H’s father John, whose aortic dissection is considered inoperable and likely fatal by his current doctors, be healed, and make a physical recovery to the full extent that providence allows, and be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
May Open Space’s friend’s mother
Judith be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.
* * *
Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
The three paths through the Tree of Life reminded me of this bit from “Thomas the Rhymer”:
O see not ye yon narrow road,
So thick beset wi thorns and briers?
That is the path of righteousness,
Tho after it but few enquires.
‘And see not ye that braid braid road,
That lies across yon lillie leven?
That is the path of wickedness,
Tho some call it the road to heaven.
‘And see not ye that bonny road,
Which winds about the fernie brae?
That is the road to fair Elfland,
Whe[re] you and I this night maun gae
What about when the Daimon (or is it not a Daimon but something else?) takes a more active role in guiding your life? There’s a lot of cases, for example, where something (a job, a place, a person) no longer serves me, and then a series of coincidences will happen to separate me from that something. That consistently happens to me.
More recently, I went to my psychic, Sue, a fantastic channeler (maybe of the Daimon, I’m not sure), who told me that my job no longer served me, and, sure enough, despite my best efforts to hang onto it (and I thought I was out of the woods), a series of coincidences led to me getting laid off and then almost immediately getting guided into a new job. By guided, I mean, many of the other interviews were canceled at the last second, went poorly due to bizarre technical glitches, went poorly due to ill-advised advice, follow up meetings were sent to the spam folder, etc.
I’m not sure if this is a result of magical practice, the Daimon actively pushing me in certain directions, or something else.
The more I think about it, the more I suspect that my life is being guided to a point where I can then pursue the task that is beyond human capacity, and it’s actually comforting to know that the expectation is that I’ll fail and get destroyed by it.
Thank you for this book club, which I am only starting in on, but will be picking up over the next month or so.
I googled “Yeats” at an online Irish second hand bookshop, and got the following two hits, which struck my fancy, and which, for less than 15Eur for the pair, have arrived in the post, and are looking very interesting.
1. “W. B. Yeats: A Vision and Related Writings”, selected and edited by A. Norman Jeffares, 1989.
Just to let people know that this edition includes the entirety of the 1935 version of A Vision, but also includes many other pieces, including every bit of extra reading that you have assigned so far.
Table of Contents:
-Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places
-Per Amica Silentia Lunae
-A Vision (The Second Edition)
-From ‘A Vision’ (The First Edition) – Dedication, Introduction, Dance of the Four Royal Persons
-Pages from a Diary Written in Nineteen Hundred and Thirty
-Poems – a selection of 18 poems which I am presuming are relevant to the subject matter (I haven’t read any of them yet)
This seems to be an excellent edition in terms of this bookclub, covering all of the assigned material (to date), which may interest anyone who has not yet purchased their own copy of the book.
2. “Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W. B. Yeats,” Ann Saddlemyer, 2002. Very interesting biography!
The third book which has recently arrived in the post is your own “Revisioning the Tree of Life”, recently published. I have to tell you that through all of the years that I have been reading your posts, I always read closely and carefully, except when I come to a bit concerning the Cabala, and then I skim through quickly. For some unknown reason, I always had an inner prompt saying, “No, not that.” I have never examined this inner refusal, but it came to a head for me when doing the Modern Order of Essenes (MOE) practices… when the practice invoked the cabalistic Tree of Life, my inner voice said “no”, and I came to a stop.
And there it rested for a year or more. In any case, I decided to venture on this book of yours, since the description included a reference to John Gilbert, and I thought maybe if I found out more about the Cabala through teachings influenced by him, I might be able to return to the MOE. So, for this last book, I want to thank you. I have been able to read through the first part without encountering my inner “No”, and have begun working on the meditations. I think that this book will work! 🙂 For example, it enabled me to pick up Yeats’ reference to shooting a cabalistic arrow straight into the sun, which before that would have gone straight over my head.
Anyway, this is background material – relevant but not yet based on deep reading. When I have had a chance to do more catch up, ruminate and digest, in another month or so, I may have other comments to make on upcoming posts.
I’m focusing on other things at the moment and so I am not reading this book, but following along with these posts anyway. Obviously that means I will miss out on a lot.
1) What you outlined from Yeats about the saint reminds me a lot of what Levi hinted at in Doctrine and Ritual about how the mage can work best with the astral light by not having desires. I can’t recall the exact passages just now, but I remember him discussing renunciation in his typically allusive way.
2) Apologies for asking a question that Yeats may have answered in the text, but are there people who don’t have a mask? I can imagine those who might not have a mask in an unconscious manner, but I can also imagine the possibility of someone who might consciously choose to accept the world as it actually is without an ideal at all. I might be misunderstanding something though.
“The more insatiable in all desire, the more resolute to refuse deception or an easy victory, the more close will be the bond, the more violent and definite the antipathy.”
Do you know if Jung read Yeats?
The website archive.org offers not only a PDF of Yeats’ “Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places” (1920), but also a PDF of his much earlier essay “Magic” (1901), which is also worth a look:
https://archive.org/details/yeats-1904-magic
JMG, you chose the path of the saint, right? Have you felt pulled to it?
JMG, I ask because it is personal. I’ve felt drawn to spirituality since I was a child – the very first book I’ve asked my father to buy was a Bible – and time and time again I got pulled back into it no matter how many times I pretend to disengage or focus on something else. Many, many times over, over the last few decades – I’m near forty. I need to know how these things happen, if that’s…common, normal.
In regards to Mary sue: There is a genre of Japanese animation called isekai. This word literally means “other world”. They are usually about a modern Japanese person dying and then being reborn in a fantasy world with ridiculous magic powers. We have already passed the peak of this genre, though there are still some excellent entries. As an example of how played out this genre is: there is a second season this year of a show about a man being reincarnated as a vending machine in a fantasy world who can magically produce anything he has ever purchased from such a machine. The Mary sue is universal.
J.L.Mc12, an interesting question! Yeats doesn’t discuss that in his text, however.
Kevin, Synge was genuinely avant-garde at a time when that actually meant something; granted, Stravinsky gave it the old college try, but Paris was just too blasé by then! It would be fairly easy to write a play that would get full-blown riots these days but, er, it wouldn’t be avant-garde…
Quin, thanks for this as always,
Joan, hmm! A case could be made.
Dennis, I think Yeats would say that that’s not the Daimon, it’s one or more discarnate spirits getting involved. That said, these things do happen, and they are particularly common among those who practice magic — absurd coincidence, for example, is the way things generally work for me.
Scotlyn, delighted to hear it. The Jeffares edition is the one I like best, precisely because it has those earlier essays; I haven’t read the Saddlemyer bio, but the Rhode Island state library system has a copy and I’ve just put a hold on it; and I’m very pleased to hear that you find the new book of mine of interest.
Jbucks, (1) yes, there’s some definite similarity there. (2) We all have Masks, for the simple reason that not one of us can perceive the world as it is. Knowingly or not, we all construct the world we perceive, using a mix of biological, cultural, and personal frameworks to do so. Since the world is always the “not-I,” the sum total of everything that’s left when we subtract what we think of as ourselves, it’s always the opposite of the self.
Joel, I don’t happen to know if he did or not. It’s quite possible that he did, since they were contemporaries and Jung was a fluent reader of Englisj.
Robert M, thanks for this!
Bruno, good heavens, no. I follow the path of the poet; being somewhat nervous and socially awkward as Yeats was, and physically clumsy into the picture, I’m not well suited for the path of the hero, and I’m not espeically ascetic — my vices are just rather mild ones. As for your more personal question, yes, that’s quite common; I’d say anything up to a quarter of our species at any one time feel that pull.
James, it seems so utterly Japanese to take something like that, systematize it, develop a whole genre on that basis, and then run it into the ground!
The hero chooses or is chosen by a task that is beyond human capacity and tries to accomplish it anyway.
That, of course, reminds me of the Bodhisattva Vow:
Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to save them.
Desires are inexhaustible; I vow to put an end to them.
The Dharmas are boundless; I vow to master them.
The Buddha Way is unattainable; I vow to attain it.
Back when I was dabbling in Buddhism, it was fascinating how people would argue with the Vows; many seemed to have real trouble with the idea that striving toward an impossible goal was a valuable action. Such a mindset, I can’t help but think, would render everything from the ending of Beowulf to the Ride of the Light Brigade unintelligible…and maybe that’s why there’s such a dearth of heroes in the contemporary imagination, because the idea of sacrifice has become alien?
Thank you for this series. I reread ‘A Vision’ (ed. Norman Jeffares) in 2020, thirty years after buying it in secondary school (loved the diagrams the first time… but the text, eh…) – I’m not sure if I was prompted by a comment of yours at the time first, or whether it was a cultural e-newsletter that referenced Yeats – shock – treating poetry as a kind of magic (I made notes… but I was struggling still). This is a really fruitful way of approaching it you have, and I appreciate it – I may finally get my head around this by the end of the 35th anniversary!
If it may be of use to others (forgive me if you or anyone has posted these already), here’s a shortlist of online books that can give an insight into the culture that Willie-B and his circle were partaking of – a lot of these people knew or corresponded with one another as you have pointed out:
– ‘The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries,’ W. Y. Evans-Wentz [1911] – https://sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/ffcc/index.htm
(If you can get it – a newer edition with a foreword by the poet Kathleen Raine is worthwhile, because it usefully fills out more context – some understandable lapses of the work scope, as well as why it is valuable overall)
– ‘Gods and Fighting Men: The Story of the Tuatha De Danaan and of the Fianna of Ireland,’ Lady Augusta Gregory [1904] – https://sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/gafm/index.htm
– ‘Cuchulain of Muirthemne,’ Lady Augusta Gregory [1902] – https://sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/cuch/index.htm
There was a set of the above three books issued in the 70s/80s by Colin Smythe publishers, with gorgeous titles by Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick (think: Book of Kells meets Conan the Barbarian).
A brief anachronistic plug for the latter’s work on the theme: https://archive.org/details/bookofconquests0000jimf/mode/2up – sign up and log into the Internet Library to get a look at the world I was losing myself in during an otherwise bleak 1980s (for our American friends: warning – contains frankly sensuous nudity).
Most of us in Ireland learnt about the gods and heroes of Irish myth from stories in primary school or at home. Gregory was also collecting and compiling with a view towards also conserving the style of local English spoken dialect of the day in Kiltartan. Another good variety of the type which propogated in plain-English print volumes, the kind of sources of stories we learnt summarised in school-readers, would be by Yeats’ contemporary:
‘Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race,’ Thomas Rolleston [1911] – https://sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/mlcr/index.htm
Here is a kind of national treasure – a systematic collection of stories of all sorts (including what we regard as ancient mythology) from school children in 1930s Irish Free State (towards end of Yeats’ life – so these were living folk-stories from within and earlier beyond Yeats’ lifetime):
– Dúchas.ie – ‘The Schools’ Collection’ – https://www.duchas.ie/en/topics/cbes (I’ve linked to an index page to make it more manageable I hope).
This is by “AE”/George Russell – who I only ever remember learning about in history class, as an early founder/supporter of farmers’ co-ops! (For which we are grateful, by the way).
– ‘The Candle of Vision,’ AE (George William Russell) [1918] – https://sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/cov/index.htm
This isn’t long, it’s to the point, and it’s really interesting as an insight to an individual mystic’s development in Ireland at that time, and the experience more broadly. AE is also interviewed anonymously for a few pages in Evans-Wentz’s book.
It can be really helpful to have an interesting, accessible dictionary of people, places and things in Irish Mythology – I can recommend:
– ‘A dictionary of Irish mythology,’ Peter Berresford Ellis [1987] https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofiris0000elli
Thanks and all the best.
Is this also connected to “The two realities” or conditions, “The terrestrial, and the condition of fire?” (if I have the quote right. IIRC, it’s from the end of your “Shoggoth Concerto.”
I’m also thinking about the three paths from Thomas the Rhymer, being called along the fernie brea myself, but also the three paths you lay out of the occultist, the mage, and the mystic. Obviously the mystic is more like the saint, and the mage seems more like the hero, would then the occultist be the poet?
To a certain extent, the Mask has a “fake it til you make it” quality it seems. At least for the saint–the other two only come close.
This description has been very enlightening in understanding my own fiction. I have always liked to write and almost felt compelled to at periods in my life, including now. My current work is a long sweeping fantasy series (no Mary Sues I hope; I would hate to live even five minutes of what I put my poor characters through) that I write not for commercial tastes but for my own. I’ve noticed over the years that it inadvertently acts like a sort of pathworking. Through metaphor, synchronicity, etc. things bubble up and call attention to events in my everyday life in important ways, though the action of the story is as far from everyday life as possible. I even sustained a small injury that inexplicably left a scar when it should have healed easily, exactly where one of the characters got a prominent injury (and in almost the same fashion).
I’ve often wondered why I feel so compelled to write this story, and I come back to the fact that it seems to be important for my personal and spiritual development, even though I never wanted it to be. In fact I just aim to have fun and write a story that hits all the notes I wish I could find in other stories. After reading this essay, I think I might have stumbled onto the poet’s path of imagining a world and people I could never be and through that experience coming to be something very different than my habitual self.
I think rather than creating a Mary Sue it feels as if I’ve taken the vase of my personality, dropped it on the floor to shatter as it will, then taking each of the shards as a character or situation, from the most heroic to the most villainous, because it’s not possible to write what you can’t imagine in at least some distant, dark corner. Then I have to confront these exteriorized aspects in various arrangements and learn from them to reassemble the vase.
The note you make at the end of the hero and poet following the serpent’s path up the paths of the tree of life hits the nail on the head. It has always felt like a pathworking for me, and this seems to confirm it. Is the mage, then a type of hero’s path?
How would the conscious poet go about working with the Mask to the best effect?
#36 Bruno,
I have a friend named Jack who also described the pull of his faith in that way. He even went to law school and passed the bar, which he jokes was his attempt to run as far away from God as humanly possible. Soon after, he became a Franciscan friar. I relate this not to encourage you to adopt that path, because it’s irreducibly personal what fits your life, but to share an amusing anecdote and point out that a lot of people feel that pull in one direction or another, though we answer it in our own ways.
@Joel Jones (#33) and JMG (#38) in reply:
Jung had a copy of the 1925 edition of Yeats’ A Vision in his personal library. Since that very limited edition was never for sale to the general public, but only distributed by Yeats himself to his friends and select others, it seems quite likely that Jung and Yeats were in contact and therefore that Jung had read other, earlier works by Yeats.
See archive.org/details/jung-bibliothek-1967-katalog for the catalogue of the books in Jung’s personal library. (It’s a most valuable resource for questions of influences on Jung’s thought, and ought to be more widely known. I was able to get a hard copy from Zürich on inter-library loan, so I scanned it, and posted the scan. I couldn’t find a copy in any academic library in the USA.)
Sister Crow, I’ve long thought that the bodhisattva vow is one of the best things in Mahayana Buddhism, precisely because it so perfectly embodies the spirit of heroism, and harnesses it to the quest for enlightenment. As for the inability of people to grasp that these days, well, yes — that blindness to the value of heroic virtue is all too common in decadent societies.
Oisín, many thanks for this — and especially for the blast from the past re: Jim Fitzpatrick’s The Book of Conquests, which appeared here in the US in 1978 when my passion for heroic fantasy was at its peak. I really should read that again.
Patricia M, that quote is indeed from this essay of Yeats’s — it begins section X of the second half, “Anima Mundi” — and yes, it’s one of the central thematic statements of The Shoggoth Concerto and is quoted in that novel (as quoted in an imaginary eldritch tome) several times. Next month we’ll get to what he means by it.
Isaac, I’m not at all sure my three paths correspond so exactly to Yeats’s. The occultist doesn’t create an imaginary universe as the antithesis of this one, for example. I suspect this falls into the same category as J.L.Mc12’s comment earlier, and points to applications of Yeats’s thought that Yeats himself, at least at this stage of his work, didn’t discuss.
Kyle, I hope you finish and publish your series — the process you describe is very close to the one that JRR Tolkien described for his fiction. Since you’re writing it for yourself, following your own sense of what ought to be in a story such as this, it’s likely to be a refreshing change from the sentimental crap that’s churned out by so many authors these days, with one eye always on what they think publishers and audiences want. As for your question, the best way to work with the Mask is to pay no attention to it, and simply let each work unfold according to its own internal dynamics. The Mask works most powerfully when it’s allowed to function free of conscious tinkering.
Robert M, good gods. You’re quite correct, of course, that the 1925 edition of A Vision was privately published in an edition for subscribers only, and that does indeed indicate that Yeats and Jung were in contact, at least to the extent of having mutual friends — and that in turn makes the case for Jung’s involvement in occultism even more robust than it already was. I wonder if there’s any way to find out if Yeats read Jung… (In the meantime, I’ve downloaded the catalog, for which thank you.)
Hi JMG,
Thank you for your essay – Per AmicaSilentia Lunae is getting less dark 🙂
So Yeats describes three paths and contrasts them with the road more traveled—that of people “who are still fumbling in the dark.” I would like to clarify something. To my understanding, Yeats leaves out the category of people who “have begun to grapple with the deeper side of life” yet do not fall into the categories of the saint (not ascetic enough), the hero ( can’t do that, let’s say clumsy and awkward), or the poet (lacking talent). Yeats is just not interested in that group of people. Is that a correct understanding?
“There is a genre of Japanese animation called isekai. This word literally means “other world”. They are usually about a modern Japanese person dying and then being reborn in a fantasy world with ridiculous magic powers. ”
Substitute Canadian for Japanese and you have Beware of Chicken. Ha Qi turns to be good training for certain martial arts. 😉
I’m really trying hard to avoid the gravitational pull of Maud Gonne. I have too much on my plate already and don’t have the time to dive into her autobiography. There’s quite a few interesting Youtube videos on her and I learned she was formidable in all she did, though which of her efforts were ultimately successful and where she failed, I can’t say.
As it concerns W.B. Yeats and his unrequited love I’d say her rejection was not her only influence on A Vision. She may have been in Yeats’ thoughts when he was thinking of the hero path, a path that was anathema to him (see his unsolicited advice to Erza Pound) but which she pursed in all facets of her life (her affairs and marriages and even her artistic efforts were all for the cause).
Maud’s involvement in the occult was probably how her daughter Iseult were born but her magical were probably a failure. JMG always mentions one way to determine to see if a mage was successful or his / her works were effective was if the mage’s personal life was fulfilling or a disaster. A hint is that Maud Gonne did not recognize her own daughter, Iseult in her will, a failed marriage but remained in loved with the ex. Maud’s heroic efforts on behalf of Irish Nationalism were probably more successful.
Very interesting person and I’ll keep her in mind as I ponder the three paths, especially the hero path.
Hey JMG
I suppose that maybe “The path of the Inventor” is both a mix of the Poet and Hero, and a kind of externalisation of them in a way. The inventor essentially creates something that not only allows him to work with his “Mask”, but allows everyone else to work with their “mask” in ways that would not have been easy or possible beforehand. For example, much of the technological advances in Art have not only made creating art easier for more people, but have expanded the kinds of art that is possible. Thus, the inventors of these things have allowed more people to work with their mask via the poet’s path, at least potentially since most people just use these technologies for “sentimentalism”.
@JMG (#46):
You’re very welcome. That catalog should be much more widely known than it seems to be.
Yeats owned a copy of Jung’s Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (the 1916 edition, not the altered 1922 edition), which is an authorized English translation of a number of studies written by Jung in German. It’s now in the collection of Yeats’ own books housed in the National Library of Ireland. See https://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000641780
So it looks like the common academic opinion that they did not know one another’s work needs serious revision. (There are academics who really don’t like it when the towering figure whom they study turns out to have been influenced by some other towering figure whom other competitor-academics study. Humans gonna human. 🤷🏻 )
Joel #33, Robert M #45, and JMG,
Oh my, I had it backwards. While reading “Per Amica Silentia Lunae” I kept on thinking of Jung and wondered if Yeats had read Jung.
I wonder how many others have sensed a connection.
JMG,
I have already self-published the first two books and am nearly done with the third. No publisher would have touched it, and I don’t blame them. It’s a very saturnine work. But I recognized that it’s an important step for most creatives–and one I’ve tended to avoid until I thought things were perfect–to publish/perform/exhibit or otherwise bring the work to full fruition, even if no one notices or cares. In fact, dealing with a bad reception or a lack of reception at all can be transformative in its own way. A phrase I say to myself when thinking self-defeating thoughts like “what’s the point?” is “Fruition is the seed of next year’s crop” (sometimes uttered while looking at a 7 of pentacles from Pamela Colman Smith).
I won’t mention it to avoid self-promotion and because it won’t be most people’s cup of tea, but interested parties can probably find it by knowing my full name is Kyle Clayton.
Robert M (#45) and JMG (#46)!
Good research on Jung!
Thanks for the connection!
@Annette2 9#52):
It seems each of them had been reading the other. Wow!
Inna, I don’t think it’s that Yeats wasn’t interested in such people, just that this is a relatively brief essay and he’s trying to outline a very complex and challenging body of thought in a modest number of words. He’s not providing personal guidance to anybody — just a general overview within which each individual can find his or her way if they so choose.
Scotty, she’s a good example of the path of the hero, as much in her failures as in her successes. She wrote a vivid autobiography, A Servant of the Queen, which isn’t always accurate or complete but certainly shows how she saw herself.
J.L.Mc12, it may also be that there are more paths than the three Yeats outlined, and the path of the inventor is something all its own.
Robert M, it’s an astonishing catalog — it turns out, for example, that Jung subscribed to two of the most influential European occult periodicals between the wars, the Occult Review and Saturn-Gnosis. He was definitely up to date on occultism! As for Yeats, that’s just as fascinating. I shouldn’t be surprised — Yeats’s contemporary Dion Fortune studied Jung closely — but it’s intriguing to have his interest confirmed.
Kyle, there are plenty of small to midsized presses that might have been interested, but of course self-publishing is certainly also an option.
Wonderful essay JMG, packed with insight. I always liked Florence Farr’s definition of magic as the delimiting of experience. I first read about her in Mary K.Greer’s book WOMEN Of THE GOLDEN DAWN.
Thanks for this!
Yogaandthetarot
“…the poet (which includes all the arts—the Greek word poetes, the source of our word “poet,” literally means “maker”)”
That is quite a revelation to me. Now I know I’m on the poet’s path. Also, it affects my theology; I’m thinking of the role of the head of the Muses, who inspires poetry – or making. It’s not just a Hephaestus thing.
It sounds to me as though the Daimon, the higher genius and the HGA have something to do with one another, though in what ways exactly I haven’t worked out. So far none of them has shown up to explain it. But certain faces, certain works of art seem to hint at them; it’s like they’re something to aspire to.
“It would be fairly easy to write a play that would get full-blown riots these days but, er, it wouldn’t be avant-garde…”
Playwrights, get busy; producers, don’t let us down!
The three paths remind me of the Celtic roles of aios-dana (people of the arts), warrior hero and hermit sage.
In my experience socialism is definitely the path of the hero. It has impossibly idealistic objectives, a history of continuous defeat, and it’s all for benefit of the poor and downtrodden. Quite a few socialists have never read Marx, or any other theories, and their activism is just emotion, which is based on a clear view of right and wrong. Surprisingly some outlying parts of socialism also work fairly well in practice (like Fr. Arizmendiarrieta’s Mondragon).
My editing powers, limited as they are, have been especially poor lately. Please allow me to fix the monstrosity of a paragraph towards the end of my last comment.
Maud’s daughter Iseult was the product of her occult activities (conception at her son’s gravesite) and poor Iseult may be an example of Muad Gonne’s failure as a magician. JMG mentions a way to determine to a mage’s success is to study the mage’s personal life and Maud Gonne’s personal life was a mess. She did not recognize Iseult in her will, suffered a failed marriage with John McBride and she could never find happiness. In contrast, Maud’s direct efforts in support of Irish Nationalism were more successful, and her son Seán MacBride could be viewed as positive result for both Ireland and for her personal life (maybe she viewed Seán as having the soul of her first son that she tried to restore with Iseult’s conception).
I’m sure I couldn’t have stood being around her more than a few minutes without getting into an argument or just disappearing to the nearest pub but I do find her story interesting.
“Isaac, I’m not at all sure my three paths correspond so exactly to Yeats’s. The occultist doesn’t create an imaginary universe as the antithesis of this one, for example. I suspect this falls into the same category as J.L.Mc12’s comment earlier, and points to applications of Yeats’s thought that Yeats himself, at least at this stage of his work, didn’t discuss.”
I think that all three of the paths you discuss can combine with any of Yeats’. Let’s look at the mystic first: a Mystic Hero would be someone like Joan of Arc, who’s called by a god to try to do something impossible and ends up being crushed by the world (in fact, any martyr could fit here); the phrase Mystic Poet is a slightly more poetic way of saying “prophet”; and then most mystics are saints, renouncing the world in pursuit of divine love.
Likewise with the occultist: the Hero Occultist seeks wisdom that is beyond what humans can know, which as strange as it might seem at first, would seem to describe what truly great scientists try to do: understanding the world is beyond us, but that does not mean that we cannot try. The poet occultist would be anyone who tries to synthesize divine wisdom into something that can be shared and taught, Levi being a classic example. Finally, the Saintly Occultist would be anyone who renounces the world in pursuit of wisdom and knowledge; the monks and nuns from religious traditions who spend their days in meditation would be a classic example of this.
Finally, the mage combines with all three paths as well: The Hero Mage, having unified his will, pursues and impossible task, and quite often gets much further than anyone would have thought possible. Gandhi comes to mind here immediately, because while he freed India from the British, his goal of making India a utopia could never happen. The Poet Mage would describe many of the great authors of history: anyone who pursues an imaginal vision as far as it can go, such as Tolkein with Middle Earth fits here. Finally, anyone who decides that having mastery over the world is overrated, and the true mastery is mastery over the self, would be a Saintly Mage.
@JMG (#56):
It is indeed an astonishing catalog, and clearly shows how very well read Jung was in occult and esoteric subjects from Antiquity up to his own days. Some of the books listed are very rare, and must have cost Jung a pretty penny to purchase. And he even has photocopies of some rare manuscripts, including one of the Abramelin working.
I noted, too, that the volumes he owned of The Occult Review were the ones in which Dion Fortune published a lot of her most important articles (many of which she later collected into books). As you have said before (IIRC), Jung was an occultist masquerading as a scientist, not simply a scientist.
Apparently Jung’s library is being maintained as an institution which serious researchers and students are welcome to visit and use. This is very good indeed.
I am appalled, though not really surprised, that no US academic library seemed to have bothered to add a copy of the catalog to its holdings.
Jill, hmm! Which of Farr’s writings is that definition from? I’d like to see how she presents it.
Kevin, it’s a complicated matter. Various traditions in Western esoteric spirituality have various conceptions of “the other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self” — but what exactly those conceptions have to do with one another, or with the transcendent reality behind them, is a question none of us will probably ever be able to answer until and unless we experience that reality. As for the playwrights and producers, here’s hoping!
Tengu, that’s an interesting suggestion. I’ve known socialists who probably qualified, though I’ve known too many others for whom it was a dress-up game and a convenient way to pretend to care about the poor in the serene knowledge that they would never have to act on their rhetoric.
Scotty, if you were around Maud for more than a few minutes and didn’t get into an argument with her, I suspect she would have been disappointed!
Moose, hmm. I’ll have to reflect on that.
Robert M, no, that doesn’t surprise me, either. If US universities had that catalog in their libraries, they’d have had a much harder time excluding occultism — or they’d have had to exclude Jung, too.
“A poet, when he is growing old, will ask himself if he cannot keep his mask and his vision without new bitterness, new disappointment. ”
I read it again today and felt some deep sadness. I’ve just entered a 19 year Saturn period this week, after a 16 year Jupiter period, and I’m looking back on my life as somebody who is really no longer young.
In college, 17 years ago or so, I majored in poetry. I read Yeats, H.D., Pound, Eliot, with something of a nostalgic, sweet, melancholy feeling. Or maybe it’s my nostalgia now that colors the memories of reading poetry outside in early October, with the leaves turning, a hand rolled cigarette burning. That’s the feeling I’m feeling now, maybe not ‘sadness’ per se, but a sense of fondness for some place I can never return to. But I also remember that kid being moved by an image, a romantic idea of what a poet should be, a mask. He was never really a poet, it was a role to play.
I started writing songs at age 12, and in my twenties, in service of the songs, and a desire for fame, I gathered together a band, recorded albums, toured the country, and learned how to book shows, wrangle people, and make stuff happen. It was almost as if in order to be a poet, I had to become a hero. And then at a certain point, there was just no more spark in the music. There was no more desire to write or play, there was no more faith left, only disappointment. I couldn’t make myself do it, the romantic image had fallen flat and stale. The mask seemed paltry and worthless. Perhaps it was because I also desired to be a saint through this whole period, but could never say no to Experience, and perhaps the division of my Will left me but a dabbler in all things.
So now I think back, in the middle of my life, in my gardens and with my wife, grateful for the gifts, but still nostalgic at the thought of the twenty year old sitting with the poetry in the slanted sunlight.
@Inna #47, I wouldn’t worry. The wisdom of paths is situational and circumstantial. People who are following them are usually thinking about the current obstacle, milestone, or step. The people shuffling through maps and comparing different paths tend to be the ones contemplating changes or feeling a little lost.
“Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run
There’s still time to change the road you’re on”
But on the other hand,
“You never count your money when you’re sitting at the table
There’ll be time enough for counting when the dealing’s done”
I wonder how often it happens that someone tries to be a Hero, but turns away for whatever reason and becomes a Poet instead – relocating the heroic ideal they could not live up to into art. I think of early 20th century Russian writers like Alexander Grin, a dedicated Socialist Revolutionary agitator (apropos of Tengu’s mention of socialists) who spent years fleeing from the law and stirring up discontent before growing disillusioned with the cause and tired of the life and switching over to writing latter-day romantic novels; or Yevgeny Schwartz, who voluntarily fought for the Whites in the civil war before being badly wounded, concussed and shell-shocked, forcing him to take up a literary and theatrical career instead. Grin’s novels and stories and Schwartz’ plays both feature extremely driven, idealistic heroes wrestling with seemingly or actually impossible tasks and endless struggles with the world itself – some of the finest examples of the type in Russian literature, I’d say (especially Schwartz’ Lancelot in The Dragon, conveniently translated here: https://a7sharp9.com/dragon.html ).
I’m sure there are many similar examples to be found elsewhere too. (Though not, I think, Wagner – if I understand correctly, he was always Poet first, regardless of revolutionary entanglements.) It makes me think that sometimes, a Hero’s surrender is a kind of strategic retreat to the plane of art. Many causes or ideals that proved doomed in the real world can at least retain some phantom existence there – and exercise influence on the real world from there.
It seems the concepts of will and mask are reversed from traditional cabala.
As I understand it, traditional cabala considers Will an aspect of the higher self (geburah) – with the path of Mem being one of surrender to the higher Will. Similarly a mask would normally seem to be associated with the lower self / persona / personality. Ie. The role the personality takes on in a given life.
Am I correct in this assessment? If so I find this reversal surprising based on Yeats’ Golden Dawn / cabalistic background.
@Walt #65,
Those are cool lines, thank you. I have some more lines (by Samuel Beckett) to add:
Ever tried.
Ever failed.
No matter.
Try again.
Fail better.
I think that would work equally well whether you “want to change the road” or “count your money”.
“The hero and the poet fling themselves into this striving in an attempt to make the real world (in the hero’s case) or the imagined secondary world of creative art (in the poet’s case) conform as perfectly as possible to the mask. Of course they fail, but in the process they have an effect on the world, and also on the Daimon, which is nourished by their experience.”
To what extent does the corporate mass media embody a mask? I ask because I have noticed something quite odd in certain dynamics in my family, things that make me quite uncomfortable. My parents uncritically embrace the narratives of the mass media, which means they see themselves as among the brave freedom lovers working to help Canada maintain a democracy in the face of a corrupt and evil regime in the US by doing things like buying different ketchup; but I think it’s telling that they are happy to cross the border to go to Hawaii. My parents have also worked for large multinational companies which have fought Canada’s government before when it tried to impose policies they did not like; so the notion that they are fighting for Canada is somewhat absurd. However, the narrative they embrace allows them to pretend to embody greatness without doing anything more than change what ketchup they buy.
It might make a great deal of sense to view the corporate media as Poets who have lost track of the fact that their poems do not describe the World, and are trying their best to act as Heroes; and at least some of the people who get dragged along as people who are unwilling to actually be Heroes, but want to go through the motions.
“The Mask works most powerfully when it’s allowed to function free of conscious tinkering.”
In other words, if my goal is to create good art, it would be an error to apply Yeats’ thinking to the process. I would be better off continuing my attempt to master my chosen field and figuring out how best to express the images that come welling up within me, and how to encourage that welling-up, rather than getting lost in the abstract scheme of Mask and Will.
Is that a reasonable interpretation?
Fascinating series – tough but rewarding. Thank you for this.
Any recommendations for books on traditional folklore on ghosts?
Hello JMG!
The Florence Farr definition of magic was quoted in the Mary K. Greer WOMEN OF THE GOKDEN DAWN book on page 64 in Chapter 1, with a citation of Farr, MODERN WOMAN p.33…
”W.B. Yeats sought knowledge of what he called ‘the single energetic Mind’ and its pole, ‘the single Memory of nature’, both of which he believed could be evoked by symbols. But I like Florence Farr’s definition of magic best: ‘Magic is unlimiting experience.’ That is, magic consists of removing the limitations from what we think are the earthly and spiritual laws that bind or compel us. We can be anything because we are All.”
Hope this helps.
Jill C
Joel, JMG, Robert Mathiesen, Annette2 and anyone else wondering if Jung read Yeats:
James Olney’s “The Rhizome and the Flower: The Perennial Philisophy – Yeats and Jung” offers a bit of evidence on this question, which you may credit or discredit as you wish since he is an academic. 😉
Olney says that both Yeats and Jung were friends of John Watkins, who had a bookshop in London. This same John Watkins published Jung’s “Septem Sermones ad Mortuos” in 1925.
“Whether Jung acquired his autographed copy of A Vision from John Watkins I do not know, but whatever the source of No. 139, I am quite sure that Jung never read it; in fact, he seems to have opened it in Kusnacht just long enough to decide that it should be shelved with his alchemical texts and then left it untouched for the rest of his life, for in response to a question from two inquirers, Jung wrote, ‘Your remarks about Yeats have interested me very much. As you rightly surmise, I am not acquainted with his work at all. I have never read a line of his.’ 4
4 Richard J Wall and Roger Fitzgerald, “Yeats and Jung: An Ideological Comparison,” Literature and Psychology, 13, No. 2 (Spring 1963), p. 52, n. 8. According to Wall and Fitzgerald, this remark occurred “in private correspondence with the authors, dated January 28, 1960”-i.e., a little over a year before Jung’s death.”
Olney’s book is archived at:
https://archive.org/details/rhizomeflowerper0000olne/mode/2up
Hi John Michael,
I had to read the following sentence many times over, just to make sure I grasped the sense of the meaning:
“is to create characters who are everything their authors know, in those moments of terrible clarity that seize all of us from time to time, that they can never be.”
Cugel the Clever? A true fictional rogue of the darkest stripe. He’s got a nasty plan, and hope you’re not involved at all (to quote a song line from the Arctic Monkeys). 🙂
Last I thought to consider the matter, we’re all kind of programmed to consume. That’s a deliberate choice. It takes a heroes journey to set forth from the path of the familiar and comfortable. And who knows where it shall lead?
Cheers
Chris
@Goldenhawk (#73):
Thanks so much for this additional datum! Watkins’ bookshop may indeed have been a ready link between the two men. Like the first edition of A Vision, Watkins’ first edition(s) of Septem Sermones ad Mortuos seem(s) not to have been sold to the general public. (I am not sure how many early editions there were of the Sermones.)
I will definitely have a look at Olney’s book.
Isaac, I didn’t have the same experience with music — my creative passion is still very much with me, I’m grateful to say — but I know the feeling. I remember vividly what life felt like when I was just on the brink of adulthood. I wouldn’t go back to that time for anything — even with my recent griefs, my life is almost incalculably happier now — but I recall the sense of freshness and possibility that my life had in those days, and yeah, I feel a certain nostalgia for that.
Daniil, fascinating. I don’t know either writer — my knowledge of Russian literature is embarrassingly scant — so thanks for the pointer.
Paul, as I was taught, it’s a little more complex than that. Geburah is the lower will, which even so is not manifest in the ordinary unawakened person — before awakening comes, we have desire (Netzach), not will (Geburah) — and so one of the tasks of the mage seeking initiation is to develop genuine will (along with imagination, Tiphareth, and memory, Chesed). Only then is it possible to place that lower will in the service of the higher will. As for the mask, that’s not at all what Yeats has in mind –his Mask isn’t the persona or ego, much less the personality. In all this, it’s important to have in mind that the GD was far from the only influence on Yeats’s thinking.. His pose of ignorance about philosophy was pure literary artifice — he had a solid grasp of Platonic and Hermetic philosophy, both directly and via their influence on Swedenborg and Blake — and he also had a remarkably good background in Asian philosophies; he and Sri Purohit Swami translated the ten principal Upanishads into English, for example, and he also made a very close study of Japanese philosoply and spirituality after falling in love with the No drama. All of that flowed into his work in A Vision.
Moose, your parents are what Yeats refers to as “out of phase,” not necessarily in their personal lives but in their place in the collective cycle of our time. As we’ll see later, for every phase there’s a true Mask and a false Mask, just as there’s a true Creative Mind and a false Creative Mind; the false Mask for the current phase of Western history is “Emulation” and the false Creative Mind is “Pride” — that is, people out of phase with the collective cycle now are obsessed with feeling that they’re morally superior to others (“Pride”), and express that by emulating whatever image of faux superiority is dangled before them by, e.g., the media (“Emulation”). The true Mask at this phase is “Renunciation” and the true Creative Mind is “Supersensual Receptivity” — that is, people in phase with the collective cycle now are trying to attune themselves to a spiritual reality that is more than dogma, and are letting go of any material or psychological burden that stands between them and that attunement. Humans being what they are, there are always more people out of phase than in phase…
Cliff, exactly! “Let it happen, don’t make it happen” is always the formula for good art, and abstract schemes are only helpful in retrospective, accompanied by a sense of humor and a stiff drink.
Stocksbridge, not off hand, but your local public library will likely have some examples. Check the Dewey decimal number 398.
Jill, thank you — this is fascinating. I was able to chase down Farr’s book readily enough, and that definition wasn’t in it, on that page or any other (the pdf is searchable). Now I have an interesting quandary to sort out…
Goldenhawk, interesting. Count me as skeptical — Jung was never averse to spin doctoring his own reputation, and of course both Yeats and Jung were massively spin doctored by academics once they were safely dead.
Chris, bingo. In Vance’s case, his settings were at least as much Mask as any of his characters, though there’s always Mask(e), the sometime Thariot spy.
So I patch together two of your comments like so: “We all have Masks, for the simple reason that not one of us can perceive the world as it is. Knowingly or not, we all construct the world we perceive, using a mix of biological, cultural, and personal frameworks to do so. Since the world is always the “not-I,” the sum total of everything that’s left when we subtract what we think of as ourselves, it’s always the opposite of the self….
The true Mask at this phase is “Renunciation” and the true Creative Mind is “Supersensual Receptivity” — that is, people in phase with the collective cycle now are trying to attune themselves to a spiritual reality that is more than dogma, and are letting go of any material or psychological burden that stands between them and that attunement. ”
And I says to myself, theres a conundrum. The mask and the world are both the not-I, but/and the more I apprehend towards my mask the more I incorporate it moving the target of ‘absolutely not me’ continually self-generated treadmill like away from ‘me’. meanwhile the naming of the true mask and creative mind of the current phase absolutely resonates with what I see happening around me , but/and also complicates even further reaching for the elusive mask as it’s caught up in renunciating things, both self and non-self, that get in the way of attunement with info from beyond the senses. And it makes me feel then like , 1) that’s why the cycles need a lot of time generationally to work through because this is a hard puzzle and 2) that’s why poetry and the supersensual non-self info is the only way to approach the mask at all, like it’s the true key, because if you go directly looking for it, your reaching self will always be pushing it away! Returning to poetry, ahhhh… gods the nostalgic tenderness of the sound read aloud of the opening poem even forgetting all meaning, and the helpful summoning. Thanks again for bringing the book club to these tender wild windswept shores.
Hic
On the grey sand beside the shallow stream,
Under your old wind-beaten tower, where still
A lamp burns on above the open book
That Michael Robartes left, you walk in the moon,
And, though you have passed the best of life, still trace,
Enthralled by the unconquerable delusion,
Magical shapes.
Ille
By the help of an image
I call to my own opposite, summon all
That I have handled least, least looked upon.
Hic
And I would find myself and not an image.
Ille
That is our modern hope, and by its light
We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind
And lost the old nonchalance of the hand;
Whether we have chosen chisel, pen, or brush,
We are but critics, or but half create,
Timid, entangled, empty, and abashed,
Lacking the countenance of our friends.
@Chris at Fernglade (#74) wrote:
“we’re all kind of programmed to consume.”
I’m old enough to remember when many (most?) of us, at least here in the USA, had not yet been programmed to consume, and did not think of ourselves as consumers in an economy, but as citizens in a polity. Most Americans only began to have TV sets in their homes in the early 1950s — TVs with small black-and-white pictures, only three channels, and no programs on any of them after 11:00 pm.
With TV sets came TV commercials for each show’s sponsor. Boy, were those commercials cleverly crafted to embed themselves in your memory.!!! I can still call up the memory of Groucho Marx singing his show’s commercial for DeSoto automobiles: “So be sure you see and drive / The new DeSoto, why man alive, / It’s delightful, it’s delovely, / It’s DeSoto.”
TV commercials impacted the ears as well as the eyes, and thus they riveted attention more effectively, so they had a far more powerful impact on the mind, and on mindless desire, than newspaper or magazine commercials ever could. Also, they lent themselves to creative parody in a way that newspaper commercials did not: “It’s delightful, it’s delovely, it’s delerious, it’s demented, it’s demanding, it’s DeSoto.” And so forth …
I think that’s what changed us from citizens into consumers, and the country from a polity to an economy.
“abstract schemes are only helpful in retrospective, accompanied by a sense of humor and a stiff drink”
This helps, because while I’m enjoying Yeats’ writing (as obtuse as it is), I find that a melancholy settles on me after reading his material.
Thanks for your reply, and it now makes sense. I did indeed misunderstand what you and Yeats were saying.
I just remembered something else I was curious about: In the bibliography of the DMH, I noticed that A Vision was listed. Did Yeats’ wheel help to inspire the Wheel of Life?
@Kyle having been through law school myself I second your friend’s opinion.
It’s also good to know you write stories for yourself; that’s something I do too. I never planned to publish any of them. I start with world building and then proceed from there. I have several finished and unfinished takes which I have no idea whether or not will ever be published. Perhaps we both are in the path of the poet?
@Kyle oh, another thing I thought I should say: I often write these stories in more than one language. Some of them are in my native portuguese, others are in English. The funny thing is that I find much easier to create writing in English. Portuguese feels too close to home – too much of me slips through, I think.
“Most Americans only began to have TV sets in their homes in the early 1950s ”
Early 1960’s for my family. Over the air TV went away out here in 2004, the high-definition signals don’t reach out to the countryside. Between that and the start of streaming I sort of lost interest in TV. (There is no cable here either.) It’s probably improving my mental health quite a bit.
For that matter deprogramming likely started with submarine duty. No TV for months at a time.
AliceEm, excellent! Yes, it’s a conundrum; if it wasn’t, we’d all be enlightened already.
Cliff, interesting. Do you know why?
Jbucks, yes, though not in detail.
The part I am taking away most strongly is the part about the Hero. The Hero fixing the lineaments of the mask and then putting it on reminds me of Levi’s first chapter in the Doctrine, the Initiate. Its as if the Hero wishes to create himself in the image of the mask.
I wondered if you have thoughts on James Hillmans Acorn theory? I can’t say Im a good translator or Hillmans theory but I know it has some resonance with the Mask… On a side note, I’m a new reader of this blog, and Ive had a decent look in the archive to discover you’ve covered quite a lot! So I’ll try not to go over worn out topics if I can going forward, but I must say I wish I had found this blog a few years ago! Particularly when something fairly big happened to the whole world, I imagine this blog was a steady head in a crazy time…
Also, my friend and I are going to enter into the history of Fantasy novels together, starting with W. Morris Well at the Worlds End, he reads a lot more modern SF/Fantasy, I’m just rooted in Lord of the Rings and strayed not very far from that… So any recommendation of where we should take our fantasy exploration after Morris would be appreciated, chronology feels important at the moment so the earlier the better.
All the best and thanks for giving me something more useful to read than my usual scrolls as a younger millennial raised by the internet
Hi John Michael,
🙂 One of my favourites, and so a special thanks for encouraging a total geek out. Yes, Ramus Ymph was the dude which caused Yeats moments of consternation in both important matters of state and also with the ladies, whilst the poet himself acted as the noble Jubal of esteemed, yet completely unacknowledged class. Thus it always was my friend. And what a fine story too. The consistent and amusing negotiations for a pay rise alone are worth the read. So glad that you took the time to travel the path of yallow.
Cheers
Chris
@JMG – then the False Mask is the Sin of Lucifer, which you described long ago. Interestingly enough, in the Gypsy Witch cards, I found “Children” popping up repeatedly, and took it as the attitude I needed to have these days, gentle, friendly, unassuming. It has served me quite well. There’s a psalm that echoes this, “my soul in me is like a little child in its mother’s lap….I do not distress myself with matters too high for me. (Need to look up the exact quote.)
What put the frosting on that cake was, quite recently, throwing up my hands and deciding to stop expecting things to make sense, just muddle through. For me, a classic overthinker, that’s a revelation – and a revolution. and not only very restful, but has improved my relationship with my daughter no end.
Thank you for this.
>Yeats had already guessed or intuited the presence of a mathematics underlying the process, and speculated that someone who knew that mathematics could predict in advance the arrival of one of the great figures of human history.
Maybe. But I would say that also is the path to madness as well, if you’re not very very careful about it. We have used math to make astounding insights into how this reality works, but like Monty Python said “It’s only a model”
—
As far as heroes go, what if there are no heroes in the story at all? What if everyone is up to no good? What if the people who think they are the most heroic, are actually the most villainous villains of the story, only they don’t know it and if you point it out, they get madder and madder and madder and more villainous?
—
I find that little vignette about the son who inherited his father’s fortune and had all the girls chasing after him just a little depressing. The more I look at Irish culture in general, the sadder I get. Did you know that they have integrated grocery stores into their bars in Ireland, so that before he drinks all his paycheck away, the wife can get all the month’s shopping done first?
Toby #86:
“So any recommendation of where we should take our fantasy exploration after Morris would be appreciated”
I highly recommend The Worm Ouroboros, by E.R. Eddison, and the Compleat Enchanter series by Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp.
re: TV
Someone, I can’t remember who, made this observation. Take the cost of a good TV show. Divide that by the cost of the audience it brings in. In pure money terms, it’s roughly the equivalent of someone handing you a quarter if you walk up to the booth he’s in. HE’S NOT DOING IT BECAUSE HE LIKES YOU OR BECAUSE HE’S YOUR FRIEND. In fact he may actually hate you. Why would someone who doesn’t like you just hand you a quarter like that?
You watch TV, you WILL do what it tells you to. They spend billions if not trillions on getting you to do what they tell you. The only reliable counter is – not to watch it. I laugh and laugh every time I get some offer for a cable subscription.
Regarding the melancholy, I’m not completely sure why. Part of it is Yeats’ imagery and word choice – a very Irish sense of defeat seems to suffuse his work. Another part of it is that existence, as described by Yeats, seems to require self-negation. Maybe I’m misunderstanding something.
@Patricia Mathews (#88), on your decision “to stop expecting things to make sense, just muddle through.”
That’s long been my approach to the human world, too. I’m glad to hear it works for others as well.
@The Other Owen (#91):
Right on!!! Toss your TVs, or at least stop watching them regularly I stopped cold-turkey in the mid-1980s and have never looked back since then.
Hello, JMG and kommentariat. It’s been a long time since the last time I read yout blog. Well, I’m glad John keeps writing here about several topics. Really, I’m curious about Yeats, a writer I’ve never read before…Regards-
On being Irish – who was it that wrote this?
“Ireland, oh, Ireland the land the gods made mad,
For all your wars are merry, and all your songs are sad.”
For what it’s worth, I’ve noticed a profound difference between those northern cultures that were once Romanized, and those that weren’t.
JMG,
I appreciate your correction on the nature of Will, it has given me much cause for reflection. My previous model was that once one pierced the veil (contacted / awakened the higher self), functions like Will and Memory became then accessible. It sounds like in actuality more work is involved beyond that point.
Would it be fair to consider Yeats’ Mask as the inverse of the persona (a photographic negative if you will). If so, would Yeats’ mask similarly change for each incarnation- as does the persona itself?
Siliconguy # 48 … as opposed to the Canadian obverse: where as ‘Hauk Tueae’ = ‘beware of WEFian Justinians bearing GRIFT$!
I was going to ask what Yeats would’ve made of rock singers (and similar modern musicians), but I suppose they’d be classed together with actors and other performers as a particular kind of Poet. Sure, they put on a mask themselves in public instead of expressing it at a greater distance, but it is ultimately for an artistic performance, not for life – even if the boundaries between art and life can become more blurred there than is the case with most writers.
@Patricia Matthews #96 From memory, I’m pretty sure it was Chesterton, in the Ballad of the White Horse.
Rajarshi, the reference may be deliberate. Yeats, like everybody in the Golden Dawn, knew Lévi’s book inside and out.
Toby, Hillman’s theory simply suggests that each soul comes into incarnation with some specific purpose. Yeats is saying that the purpose can be understood as embodying, in some sense, what the soul is not. As for fantasy novels, delighted to hear this! You’re in for some fine treats. Morris will keep you busy for a while. After that come George Macdonald’s Phantastes and Lilith, Lord Dunsany’s stories, E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, and Fletcher Pratt’s two fantasy novels, The Well of the Unicorn and The Blue Star. James Branch Cabell’s comic fantasies are an acquired taste for some, but Jurgen might be worth your while. Then there are the Golden Age fantasy stories of Robert E. Howard (Conan was only one of his heroes) and Clark Ashton Smith, and H.P. Lovecraft also did some fine fantasies when he wasn’t inventing some of the main archetypes of modern horror — The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is arguably his best.
Chris, it’s been a while — I need to reread that among many other Vance novels.
Patricia M, the false Mask is Luciferic in some phases and Ahrimanic in others. There’s a lot of complexity in Yeats’s system! We’ll sort it all out in due time.
Owen, “hero” doesn’t mean “morally virtuous protagonist” except in the pop-culture spectacles our society uses to paper over its decadence. A hero in Yeats’s sense is someone who attempts to live out a role on a more-than-human scale until the effort destroys him. That role need not be a virtuous one.
Cliff, maybe so. Stay tuned!
Chuaquin, welcome back to the commentariat.
Patricia M, funny! True, but funny.
Paul, both the mask and the persona do in fact change with each incarnation, and yes, each one is the inverse of the other. We’ll be discussing that in much more detail as this proceeds.
Daniil, yes, rock stars and other performers are poets in Yeats’s terms — notice that Yeats includes an actress in his discussion.
>A hero in Yeats’s sense is someone who attempts to live out a role on a more-than-human scale until the effort destroys him. That role need not be a virtuous one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3wjVwuaN98
Thanks for the response. I was in a bit of a mood when I wrote that! My creative passion gets channeled in other directions now. Though, one way of looking at it is that I was really a hero whose superhuman goal was to become a (poet) rock star, and at a certain point crumpled in surrender to the reality of the situation. Maybe I’m more of an actual poet now, or maybe it’s just that all the songs I needed to write were written.
However, I sure do enjoy working in my garden, studying, writing, and giving astrological readings more than travelling around the country sleeping on floors and playing in bars and at festivals… maybe that’s just growing up.
Mr. Greer … in response to Daniil above..
You mean like say, NEIL YOUNG!!!???
I’m a bit more discerning with regard to aging rocking retards… just sayin. And no, Daniel, this is no slight towards you personally. Not every every ‘poet’ rock star is um, golden..
Who knows what Yeats would’ve thought of such a bloated, hubristic ‘has been’ …
annnnd, if you don’t like that example, as per the late great Groucho ..well… I have others …..
@JMG 100: a bit tangential. I thought “The Blue Star” was superior to most of the fantasy fiction I’ve read. I used to work with a guy (Dave S.) who called everyone “Puke Face.” Maybe that’s where he got it. As to James Branch Cabell, back in the 1970s I used to be able to find his fiction in the local library. Their copy of “Jurgen” was published in the 1920s but beyond about p 25 the pages had not been cut. I was the first to read it in 50 years! Ah, those days are gone.