A Vision: Anima Mundi

As we move from the first to the second half of Yeats’s programmatic essay “Per Amica Silentia Lunae,” we leave the territory of poetry and the arts and plunge headlong into the second of Yeats’s lifelong passions, the realm of occultism. More specifically, he sets out in a single vivid paragraph the central theme of his own magical explorations, which proceeded to unfold after his time into one of the principal projects of twentieth century Western occultism: the finding of common ground between the occult traditions of educated culture and the popular beliefs and folk culture of everyday people.

That’s become so much of a commonplace in occult circles these days that it can be difficult to grasp just how much of a break with the past it was when Eliphas Lévi tentatively suggested such a quest for common ground in his Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, or when Yeats flung himself into that quest with all his passionate energy half a century later. The occultists of the Renaissance, by contrast, distanced themselves as far from folk magic as they could possibly get. This was partly because folk magic in those days was generally called “witchcraft” and could get you burned at the stake, but the rejection of folk magical traditions by Renaissance magi had a theoretical basis as well.

Renaissance mages believed that they had inherited a body of teaching, the prisca sapientia or original wisdom, which had been passed down by saints and scholars since the creation of the world. The sages of Egypt, Chaldea, India, and Greece all played roles in the “golden chain” that united the occult student of Renaissance Europe with the wisdom teachings of the distant past. To some extent this was simply pseudohistorical handwaving, but there was a social reality behind it. Renaissance occultism was a thoroughly intellectual system, literate, numerate, and philosophically based, and those who studied it had to prepare themselves with a solid training that embraced most of the branches of formal knowledge then available. Peasants? The thought that they could know anything serious about magic would have been dismissed as absurd by the Renaissance magi if anyone had thought to suggest it to them.

That was one of the things Lévi challenged when, in his writings, he used the simplest and (by intellectuals) most despised forms of folk magic and traditional religious observance from the French countryside as examples of competent magical practice. Yeats, for his part, flung the old notion down and danced on it. For him, the prisca sapientia was to be found precisely where no Renaissance occultist would have looked for it, in the commonplaces of human thought, where the abstract considerations of scholars are far away and the realities of life are very close. The same concept guided C.G. Jung in his development of the concept of the collective unconscious, which Yeats very neatly describes under a different set of terminology in the opening paragraph of this half of his essay.

Profoundly Jungian, too, is the method of accessing the Unseen that Yeats presents here as “evocation.” Jung named it “active imagination;” in the Golden Dawn, it was called “scrying in the spirit vision,” and formed one of the core methods of practice. To my knowledge, at least, neither Jung nor the other adepts of the Golden Dawn recognized, as Yeats certainly did, the deep interconnections between this form of imaginative work and artistic and poetic creativity. Most writers I know use some form of this, whether or not they have any form of occult training; I certainly do. It’s by opening up that link with the deeper imagination that characters in a novel I’m writing take on a life of their own, and phrases, paragraphs, and whole pages come spilling out, astonishing me by the clarity of their prose and the unexpectedness of the connections they make between ideas I hadn’t linked together.

This was the central practice of the magical order Yeats had tried to found in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Castle of Heroes, which I discussed in a post several years ago. That project has a strange, phantasmal existence in the world of Yeats scholarship today. Rituals, instructional papers, and a great many notes on the esoteric work that was intended to bring the order into being survive in Yeats’s papers; they contain passages of vivid and powerful prose, and offer remarkable glimpses into Yeats’s thoughts at a time when he was working on some of the most iconic of his early verse; yet at a time when scholars are very nearly writing heavily footnoted essays on George’s laundry lists, the Castle of Heroes papers are all but untouched. Outside of an obscure if capable doctoral dissertation from the 1970s, they remain unedited, unpublished, and rarely mentioned outside of pro forma references by biographers.

The Castle of Heroes project, by the way, is what Yeats was discussing in the second section of “Anima Hominis,” where he discusses mythological images gathered up in fragments by several minds. Yeats and the other participants in the project used the methods of evocation he discusses here to try to unfold the deeper dimensions of Irish myth and legend, and the Castle of Heroes documents show the process by which the resulting visions fit neatly together to provide the necessary symbolism for a system of Irish ceremonial occultism. The sense that work of this kind can sometimes make contact with the efforts of other minds in the past is one that many other operative occultists have encountered. (I have had similar experiences with some of my projects, most strikingly The Celtic Golden Dawn.) Whether it reflects a historical reality or not, it gave Yeats confidence in his occult work and shaped a variety of his prose and poetic works.

The implications for Yeats’s own understanding of occult philosophy, however, are what matter for our present purpose. To him, as to many other occultists of past and present, two distinct factors shaped the way that the individual imagination seemed to be able to tap into something that transcends the merely personal. The first of these factors was the existence of the anima mundi, the soul, mind, or imagination of the world itself, which is said to form the background of all individual consciousness and also provides the medium through which thoughts pass from mind to mind. C.G. Jung’s ideas are again relevant here, for Yeats’s concept of the imagination of nature and Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious differ only in the labels used and the audience—literary in one case, scientific in the other—to which these two very similar contemporary thinkers addressed their works.

(It is by no means impossible, for that matter, that Yeats and Jung influenced each other directly in this matter among others. Jung’s writings were much discussed in the British occult scene during the years when the Yeatses were most heavily involved in the Stella Matutina—habitués of that scene such as Dion Fortune reference Jung admiringly quite often in their writings. Nor was Jung himself a stranger to the occult scene, or to Yeats; his private library contained a copy of the privately printed 1925 edition of A Vision. Scholarship on Jung has shied away from the thought that he might have been influenced by Yeats, but then Jung’s deep and lifelong involvement in the occult community is just as unwelcome to today’s Jung scholarship as Yeats’s equivalent commitments were to Yeats scholars until very, very recently.)

Yet the anima mundi is not the only factor at work in Yeats’s vision—or, for that matter, in his Vision. There were also individual minds whose thoughts mingled with those of the mind of nature, and some of those individuals had once had human bodies. They were, in Yeats’s own metaphor, mariners who sailed the seas of the anima mundi and knew all its shores. The belief that such beings existed and could be contacted was very common in the occult community of Yeats’s day; those of my readers who know their way around the literature of Spiritualism and Theosophy will find many equivalent discussions.

That belief fell out of favor over the course of the twentieth century, largely because too many bunco artists and an even larger number of gullible fools claimed to speak for such beings, and most of the pronouncements they made on behalf of the Unseen turned out to be impressively fallible. Nonetheless the concept itself is by no means absurd. If human personalities are capable of surviving the death of the material body, in whatever form or by whatever means, it makes sense that some souls of unusual strength or wisdom or blessedness might still be within reach of the living. The traditional Christian notion of the mediatorial power of saints, to name only one example, is the same concept as Yeats’s, passed through a different theological filter.

Folk belief and folk magic, too, make ample room for such interactions between the living and the dead. The “knowledgeable man” of the little coastal village of Spiddal in County Galway—his title was pronounced “cunning man” in rural England at the same time, and “wizard” (which derives from “wise” the way “drunkard” derives from “drunk”) half a dozen centuries earlier—is a classic type. He got his supernatural knowledge from his sister’s ghost the way that many Catholic mystics get theirs from a saint, and both these echo the way that shamans get their knowledge from spirits, some of whom are believed to have been human, while others are not. The differences among these varied traditions are important, but so are the similarities.

One difference Yeats puts at center stage in much of his discussion in this half of the essay has to do with the embodiment, or lack of same, of these wise mariners of the anima mundi. Religious traditions strongly influenced by abstract philosophy tend to assume that the soul in the state after death is bare, and very often claim that in life nothing exists but the soul and the material body. Occult teachings and folk tradition both reject this notion. The ghostly sister of the wizard of Spiddal was so thoroughly embodied that her hair grew grayer with each passing year, though the body she had could doubtless pass through walls in proper ghost-fashion. Occultists in Yeats’s time worked out detailed taxonomies of the layers or phases of subtle body uniting the animal form with pure consciousness and will; old-fashioned occultists still study these.

The anima mundi and the human subtle body, furthermore, are not entirely separate. Yeats refers to the raw material of both as “animal spirits”—a term he borrowed from the Cambridge Platonists of the seventeenth century, one of the philosophical schools he studied closely. (The ignorance of philosophy he claimed in various points of A Vision was simply another of Yeats’s masks, and should not be taken too literally; he was well versed in philosophy, though not in the schools popular during his time.) These “animal spirits” are also the “ectoplasm” of the nineteenth-century séance room, a weightless and luminous substance that was frequently witnessed and sometimes even photographed, though today’s channelers seem to have lost the trick of producing it.

Yet the souls of individual human beings are not the only things we experience that have subtle forms of this same kind. Yeats argues that our thoughts and desires, especially those that we never allow to earth out in action in the material world, also take on ghostly forms drawn from the same animal spirits that flow through us and through the anima mundi. These can become deeply problematic for the individual, especially when they are allowed to sink out of waking consciousness into the subtle body. There they grow and spread, putting down roots into strange soil and bearing stranger fruit.

To Yeats, all our normal mental activity consists either of following the twisting stems of these “parasitic vegetables,” as he calls them, or planting new seeds, intentionally or otherwise, from which more such thought-plants will sprout. It is only in certain states of clarity and insight, which have to be learned and mastered either in incarnate existence or after death, that the stems can be pruned and straightened, the unwanted plants torn up by the roots and reduced to compost, the desirable plants given ample room to flourish. Whether living or dead, the soul can gradually extract itself from the thicket that it has created around itself, but this is never a quick or an easy process.

Until it does so, however, these vegetable growths keep proliferating unchecked. Yeats suggests that they can grow across the boundary between the living and the dead. Rupert Sheldrake gained fame in some circles and notoriety in others a few decades back by suggesting, and offering experiments that seem to prove, that human and animal behavior respond to subtle patterning forces that are not subject to space or time. He called these forces “morphogenetic fields”—a typical sort of formulation for our epoch, in which metaphors from physics are so fashionable.

Such metaphors were almost as fashionable in the alternative culture of Yeats’s time, but he rejected them root and branch. For him, every genuine reality belonged to some person: in words he quoted from Blake, “God only acts or is in existing beings or men.” What guides young birds in building nests for the first time, for Yeats, is not “instinct” (whatever that intentionally vague word might mean) or the action of impersonal morphogenetic fields, but the dreams of dead but wholly individual birds dwelling in their own memories of nest-building during life. In the same way, living and dead human beings influence each other in complex ways; many of us have seen, for example, how often the two sides of a quarrel, each convinced that every word from their mouths is their own, are merely following the track of some quarrel of the dead.

Yet the dead, in Yeats’s view, can take a more active role than this. They cannot innovate, nor can they choose—those capacities are reserved for the living—but they live in their memories and can act through those. The Spiddal knowledgeable man’s ghostly sister is not simply an abstract force but a person, who can communicate with her living brother and give him magic powers; in the same way, Yeats suggests (and the folklore of all lands joins him in this) that the dead mother really can manifest to her child, even to the extent of setting a cradle rocking. The living and the dead remain thoroughly entangled with each other, until one or both unties the knot that binds them together.

The alternative to this state of entanglement, and the means by which the knot can be untied, is what Yeats calls “the condition of fire.” Behind that phrase lies the whole history of occult philosophy, in which the four elements play such an important role, and a half-concealed structure of ideas. The parasitic vegetables, embodied as they are in the passions, belong to water, and the sensory experiences in which they put down their roots belong to earth. Their antithesis is the condition of fire, where all is unity, harmony, and rest, and between this and the realms of passion and sense lies the realm of memory inhabited by the spirits of the dead, corresponding to air. It’s a familiar elemental sequence to anyone with a background in occultism, and we will see it again in A Vision.

The condition of fire is not the goal or end of the process Yeats sets out in this essay, however. It is one pole of a cycle through which souls pass, rising from the world of the senses to the condition of fire and then returning to the world of the senses again. Only in the material world, the world of earth with all its bitterness and pain, is the soul capable of freedom and choice, and yet freedom and choice are always and only exercised in response to promptings that descend from the condition of fire. It is the Daemon, who is at once the adversary and the guardian spirit of the individual soul, who brings those promptings through, and in every case it confronts the soul with whatever challenge is most difficult among those that are not actually impossible.

Here again Yeats draws on his Cabalistic training to make sense of the interplay of soul and Daemon. The soul in its wanderings follows the winding path of the serpent up the Tree of Life, which is also the route full of twists and turns through which the parasitic vegetables of thought and passion twine. The Daemon in its actions sends its influence down the zigzag pattern of the flaming sword or lightning flash. Only when the soul itself seeks the condition of fire—by refusing to hate, as Yeats suggests—does the path of the arrow up the Middle Pillar of the Tree open up.

As noted earlier in this sequence of essays, Yeats at the time he wrote “Per Amica Silentia Lunae” believed that the Daemon of each living person was the soul of someone who was between lives. He changed his views later on, but not completely. Among the things that got edited out of both published versions of A Vision were the names and biographical identities of the spirits that communicated the system to George. Many of these, according to their own ghostly testimony, were spirits of dead human beings.

Thus the role assigned to the dead in “Per Amica Silentia Lunae” never quite vanished from the completed system. The result is a certain ambiguity—how much of what comes to any one individual soul from the Unseen is the product of that soul’s Daemon, and how much is the work of the dead working out their own destinies in the condition of air? This never really becomes clear, and of course it may be that the complexity of human life is best explained by some such tangled relationship among different and potentially competing influences.

A similar ambiguity surrounds the question of whether the cycle Yeats has traced out here has an endpoint, and if so, what it is. In the developed myth of A Vision, the soul moves back and forth between two poles in an entire concatenation of cycles. The ordinary cycle of individual life and death is one of these, but this takes its place in a larger cycle of between 28 and 36 incarnations. In this larger cycle, the simple alternation between terrestrial existence and the condition of fire is doubled; there are two different states of complete immersion in the terrestrial realm of struggle and choice, and two equally distinct states of contemplation and rest.

In the later system, there is also a way out of the whole process, though the cycle of incarnations must be trodden many times before it comes within reach. In the fully developed cosmology of A Vision, there is a condition of the soul where the oppositions are resolved at last. One reference in “Per Amica Silentia Lunae” hints at this resolution, the quote from Thomas Aquinas about souls that have “entered upon the eternal possession of themselves in one single moment.” That hint will be taken up in detail in a later post.

Assignment: With “Per Amica Silentia Lunae” as necessary background, we can now proceed to the heart of A Vision. Those who are following along with this little adventure will want to turn to Book I, “The Great Wheel,” and read the first section, “The Principal Symbol.” Reading it more than once will be wise, as our text covers a great deal very, very quickly.