A Vision: Examination of the Wheel

The system of metaphors at the heart of Yeats’s system of occult philosophy is not easy to grasp. Those readers who have been following this discussion as best they can will have realized this already, but the part of the text we’re about to contend with might as well be designed to rub the noses of students in that fact. It would be possible to write an introduction to the teachings of A Vision that proceeds gently, one concept at a time, so that the reader can grasp the whole system step by step before approaching its practical applications.  Deliberately or otherwise, Yeats didn’t do this.

Instead, he chucked his readers in the deep end of the pool to sink or swim. Those readers who are familiar with the knowledge lectures given to initiates in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the magical order in which Yeats had his occult training, will be familiar with this approach, and certain parts of the text ahead do in fact resemble nothing so much as those very knowledge lectures. Students of the Golden Dawn, however, could go to more advanced members of the Order and ask for help; Yeats is unfortunately not around these days to provide guidance of that sort.

So the process of making sense of A Vision very often resembles the splash, spluttering, and flailing that comes from an unexpected plunge into deep water. The portion of the text we’re going to discuss here is perhaps the most extreme example of this. My job, therefore, is to toss in as many flotation devices as possible so that those who are floundering in the water have something to grab onto. Your job, in turn, is to keep paddling as vigorously as you can, and grab anything I toss your way that seems helpful. If it’s any consolation, once we get past this highly technical and abstract section and start discussing the 28 phases of Yeats’s cycle one at a time, the entire system will become much less opaque and the value of the points raised this month will become easier to grasp.

With that in mind, let’s proceed to Part II: Examination of the Wheel.

The points we covered last month are crucial to an understanding of this month’s material. To review these points very briefly, the Great Wheel is defined by the interplay of two tinctures or basic conditions of being, which Yeats calls primary and antithetical. You can call these solar and lunar, objective and subjective, yin and yang, macrocosm and microcosm, God and the soul, or any other such pair of concepts you please. These don’t form a rigid binary opposition because each one is constantly turning into the other; they die each other’s life and live each other’s death. The cycle by which each flows into the other is symbolically the lunar month, and Yeats divides it accordingly into 28 phases.

Each of the 28 phases is defined by coordinated positions of four faculties of the individual soul: Will, Mask, Creative Mind, and Body of Fate. The Will seeks to attain the Mask, the Creative Mind seeks to understand the Body of Fate, and in both cases the faculty that seeks is the opposite of the one sought. These two opposing pairs circle in opposite directions around the wheel, the Will-Mask pair moving counterclockwise and the Creative Mind-Body of Fate pair moving clockwise. The position of the Will in the cycle provides the shorthand used to identify each phase. If all this isn’t instantly clear, it’s probably wise to review Part I: The Primary Symbol before proceeding.

The four faculties get considerably more definition in this section of Yeats’s book, and some attention to these refinements will help make the whole system clearer. The definition of the Will given here is particularly useful. To Yeats, the Will in its naive form is wholly practical, without the least interest in emotional or intellectual life; its concerns are “how things are done, how windows open and shut, how roads are crossed, everything we call utility.” It is only when it confronts its opposite as the Mask that it turns inward and becomes capable of self-knowledge and genuine creativity.

This confrontation with the Mask does not happen by accident. All four of the faculties come from the Daimon or essential self, as instruments through which the Daimon seeks self-knowledge and unity of being. Each faculty, in fact, is derived from a certain part of the Daimon’s memory. The Will is constructed from the memories, conscious and otherwise, of the present life; the Mask from the Daimon’s memories of moments of exaltation in past lives; the Body of Fate from the Daimon’s memories of the circumstances of past lives, and the Creative Mind from the Daimon’s memories of abstract truths—Yeats uses the old philosophical term “universals”—experienced between lives, or learned from other people during lives.

Thus each incarnation sums up what the Daimon has learned in previous lives, and becomes a springboard through which the Daimon learns more about itself and prepares for lives to come. “The Dance of the Four Royal Persons,” to use the label Yeats gave this pattern in the first edition of A Vision, defines the process through which the Daimon eventually completes its journey through incarnation and passes on to another state, which Yeats will discuss later on.

Take a moment now to imagine the two pairs of faculties circling around the wheel in opposite directions. At two points—Phases 1 and 15—they are exactly aligned: Will and Creative Mind are united at the same position on the wheel, and Mask and Body of Fate are united at the opposite position. Yeats calls Phase 1, the new moon, “Moon in Sun” because in this phase the lunar, antithetical, or subjective side of life is swallowed up in the solar, primary, or objective side; he calls Phase 15, the full moon, “Sun in Moon” because in this phase the solar, primary, or objective is swallowed up in the lunar, antithetical, or subjective.

Neither of these states are conceivable by the human mind, since our consciousness depends on drawing a distinction between subjective and objective, self and other; thus Yeats calls these supernatural incarnations, in which the soul is free of human embodiment. At two other points, Phases 8 and 22, Will is united with Body of Fate and Creative Mind is united with Mask. Here the tension between solar and lunar, primary and antithetical, subjective and objective reaches its peak. For that reason, both these phases are extremely difficult to pass through, but they are incarnate phases; souls may be born into these phases as many as four times before they finally pass through the crisis and move on.

All the other phases fall in between these extremes of perfect alignment and total conflict. In the phases closest to the supernatural incarnations—2, 14, 16, and 28—the soul faces little conflict within itself, though it may have to struggle against its surroundings. In the phases closest to the points of crisis—7, 9, 21, and 23—internal conflict is inescapable, even though it does not mount up to the same intensity as in the crisis phases. This double heartbeat, two contractions and two relaxations in each cycle, sets the pulse of the soul as it circles the Great Wheel.

The two cycles of the double heartbeat differ in a crucial way, however. One half of the process takes place in the solar or primary half of the Wheel, in which the soul must deal primarily with the objective realities around it; the other half takes place in the lunar or antithetical half, in which the soul must deal with the subjective realities within it. During the antithetical phases, beginning with the crisis of Phase 8, the soul must learn self-expression, bringing out everything implicit within itself through the pursuit of its own opposite. It achieves that moment of perfect creative delight in the supernatural incarnation of Phase 15, and then spends the remaining antithetical phases trying to hold onto what it learned in that moment. In the process of that struggle to retain the vision of beauty, creativity is transmuted into intellect; the soul dreams less and knows more.

Once the crisis of the 22nd Phase is overcome, the soul turns to the opposite task. Having learned the lessons of self-expression, it must learn to let go of its achievement and learn the opposite but equally necessary lessons of acceptance. The Mask, which was chosen and pursued by the Will in the antithetical phases, is now imposed from outside and must simply be accepted. This acceptance takes two forms, one in the late primary phases (23 to 28) and the other in the early phases (2 to 7). Before the supernatural incarnation of Phase 1, the soul seeks to unite itself to the cosmos through religion, taking some form of divinity as an image of all that it is not and seeks to embrace. The last few phases of the Wheel are those in which this quest can succeed, and these are therefore the lives in which genuine sainthood becomes possible.

The soul achieves the goal of the religious quest in Phase 1, the supernatural incarnation of total absorption in objective reality, and thereafter it has been so completely absorbed in the whole that it can no longer really conceive of divinity separate from its own nature. Only when it circles around again to Phase 15 can religion be anything more for it but a collection of abstract formalities without meaning, and only when it passes Phase 22 does religion become an essential need of the soul. From Phase 1 to Phase 15, then, the soul goes in search of Nature, while from Phase 15 to Phase 1 the soul goes in search of God.

Yeats draws a neat distinction between these primary and antithetical states of the soul by noting that in antithetical phases, the soul develops personality, which is unique to itself; in primary phases, the soul develops character, a state that is shared by others and can become an image of all humankind. There is also a third expression, which Yeats calls individuality. This is the Will in its pure form, neither driven by its own creative desires nor shaped by outside forces. It shows itself mostly at the crisis points of the Wheel, the 8th and 22nd Phases.

Got that? No, in all probability you don’t. This is complicated stuff and it requires multiple readings and a fair amount of thought to absorb. Take your time with it. If you practice discursive meditation, you can do a lot worse than taking each paragraph above, or even each sentence, as the theme for a session of meditation. Intricate and confusing as this all seems at first glance, you’ll find that once you understand it, it all comes together in a pattern of great simplicity and elegance, and provides you with tools for thinking that you won’t find gathered neatly together like this in any other source.

With that in mind, let’s proceed. The distinction between primary and antithetical, solar and lunar, has complexities beyond those we’ve already covered. While all the phases from 8 to 22 are antithetical and all the phases from 22 to 8 are primary, every odd-numbered phase has an antithetical quality and every even-numbered phase has a primary quality—so, for example, in the 17th phase the soul pushes forward to achieve something new, and in the 18th phase the soul must then accept and integrate the consequences of that achievement. Keep this in mind when we get to the descriptions of the individual phases; it will make their sequence easier to understand.

The primary and antithetical tinctures, however, are both always present in the soul. (The Will and Mask are antithetical, remember, and the Creative Mind and Body of Fate are primary.) These tinctures are said to open and close at certain points in the cycle of 28 phases. When they are closed, the soul is left to its own devices, and the two great phases of crisis take place when the tinctures are closed.

The opening of the tinctures on the antithetical side of the Great Wheel takes place in Phases 11 and 12: the antithetical tincture opens in the antithetical phase 11, and the primary tincture opens in the primary phase 12. Before these phases, the soul cannot perceive itself—it struggles with its own passions and thoughts as though with forces from outside itself—but once the tinctures open, the soul becomes capable of self-knowledge, and thus of integration and unity of being. Before Phase 15, this capacity is used to unite the whole self in the pursuit of its own creative vision; after Phase 15, the same capacity gets put to work trying to understand the self and maintain its unity as the vision wanes. In Phases 17 and 18, the tinctures close again, the antithetical in Phase 17 and the primary in Phase 18, and the soul loses knowledge of its own inner life and must turn outward again.

The tinctures open again on the primary side of the wheel at phases 25 and 26—again, the antithetical tincture in the odd-numbered phase, the primary tincture in the even-numbered one—but what they open onto is not self-knowledge but knowledge of spiritual or, as Yeats calls them, supersensual realities. In effect, where the tinctures in the antithetical phases open onto the self, the tinctures in the primary phases open onto God before Phase 1 and Nature after it. The result, if the soul lives up to its potential—lives “in phase,” in Yeats’s term—is genuine sanctity and spiritual experience in the former case, and instinctive wisdom in the latter case. Again, all this will make much more sense when we explore the individual phases.

Has all this overloaded your tolerance for complexities, dear reader? Brace yourself, there’s more. The one advantage we have in making sense of the final round of intricacies I intend to dump on you this month is that we have a word nowadays that Yeats lacked. That word is “fractal.” Yeats had to struggle to communicate the nested structure of the Great Wheel; we can leap past him by simply recognizing that the Great Wheel is a fractal pattern, and its structure is therefore mirrored in each of its parts.

Let’s start with the simplest expression of this property. Each half of the Wheel, primary and antithetical, is equivalent to the whole Wheel. The antithetical wheel has its Phase 1 at Phase 8, its Phase 15 at Phase 15 of the whole Wheel, and cycles back around to Phase 1 at Phase 22. The primary wheel has its Phase 1 at Phase 22, its Phase 15 at Phase 1 of the whole Wheel, and circles back around to Phase 1 at Phase 8. Each of these two lesser wheels go through two phases in the time it takes the whole Wheel to go through one phase.

Now look up at the diagram of the Great Wheel above. You’ll notice that if you set aside the four quarter phases—1, 8, 15, and 22—the rest of the Wheel sorts itself out into four groups of six phases each, or two triads for each quarter. Each of these triads is itself a wheel, in which the first phase introduces a new energy, the second phase arranges and systematizes it, and the third reduces it to a belief before which the soul again becomes passive. Furthermore, every pair of phases, an odd-numbered antithetical phase and an even-numbered primary phase, forms a wheel of its own, and every phase is also a complete wheel.

Thus every phase relates to a whole cascade of cycles, all of which echo one another in a fractal manner. Take the 17th Phase again for an example. In the Great Wheel, the 17th Phase is in the waning part of the antithetical half, part of the process by which the soul integrates and then releases all it gained in the pursuit of its Mask that found fulfillment in Phase 17. During this phase the antithetical tincture closes but the primary remains open—that is, the soul can still understand its own Creative Mind and Body of Fate but is losing the ability to understand its own Will and Mask.

At the same time, Phase 17 is equivalent to Phases 18 and 19 in the antithetical half-wheel, and so always shares in the qualities of those later phases when it comes to the purely antithetical side of existence. It is also the middle phase of the triad composed of Phases 16, 17, and 18, and so arranges and systematizes the surging energy of Phase 16. It is the antithetical half of a wheel composed of Phases 16 and 17, and also of one composed of Phases 17 and 18; finally, it is a wheel all by itself, and will pass through all 28 phases within itself.

There’s more, but we’re going to stop here. The latter half of Part II: Examination of the Wheel consists of tables and cryptic paragraphs that will make perfect sense once we work through the individual phases, but communicate nothing to anybody until that is done. (Further down the road, in fact, I plan on returning to the second half of that section and going through it in detail, with examples drawn from the phases.) For now, as suggested earlier, I recommend taking the time to go through this commentary and the sections of A Vision that we’ve reviewed so far. Think through it, and try to turn as much of it as possible into visual metaphors; picture the movements of the four faculties around the Great Wheel, the solar and lunar influences, and the rest of it. All this will lay the groundwork that will let you understand and use Yeats’s system in practice.

Assignment: For next month, read the first half of Part III: The Twenty-Eight Incarnations, from Phase 1 to Phase 15. See how much of the material in that reading you can relate to the points discussed in this month’s post.