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 18 and 19, the tinctures close again, the primary in Phase 18 and the antithetical in Phase 19, 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.
Seems like for the previous post last week, I read too much; I accidentally read all of book 1 instead of just part 1 of book 1.
meant last month, not last week
“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.”
I wonder if Yeats is building on Hegel’s dialectical process here (Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis)?
“the Will-Mask pair moving counterclockwise and the Creative Mind-Body of Fate pair moving clockwise.”
It is definitely helpful advice to visualize these pairs simultaneously moving in different directions, like propellers moving in different directions around the same shaft. I wonder if anyone has made a video of this, you-tube or otherwise?
Hello JMG and commentariat:
Here we go again, with the difficult Yeats terms. After a first reading, I think you’ve been wise enough to point the “tinctures” aren’t in a rigid binary opposition, but in a lively “dialectic”.
Another (sub)topic I must point in your today essay is you’ve written about the Great Wheel structure like a fractal. Well, this depiction has fascinated me, but I don’t understand very well yet. I’m afraid I’ll have to read you again (or maybe again and again) to understand you more perfectly.
Do most people through the course of their early life go through the Wheel until they stop and get bogged down in a phase, which is where they are at in the larger cycle? Then in old age, they have to pass through the later phases, but might not manage to get through the whole cycle (full acceptance of death) during their physical incarnation?
GM JMG and friends
Ok… brain exploding while reading about Yeat’s very interesting, sophisticated system while trying to make sense of it. So far: the descriptions of the cycling states of mind reminded me of Yoga philosophy‘s VRITTIS – the ever fluctuating and whirling waves of the primary conditions of the psyche. These are the subjective, intersubjective and objective conditions supported by the personal memory state, the collective dream and imagination state, and the state of correct or incorrect perception. These states manifest as feelings, thoughts and willful figuration. Normally, we navigate our existence with these fluctuating frameworks through which we see the world. A hallmark of Yoga philosophy is solution practices of training and directing the activities of mind. For the vrittis, willful analysis and refinements leading to the unadulterated state of complete absorption in the centered Self…a Self not as “remembered”, or collectively modeled, but the Self as the pure power of consciousness.
Thank you JMG!
Yogaandthetarot
“You can call these … God and the soul”
“while from Phase 15 to Phase 1 the soul goes in search of God”
“the tinctures in the primary phases open onto God before Phase 1 and Nature after it”
How does this work in a polytheist context where there are usually more than one God?
“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.”
This has me wondering about distinctions between nature spirituality along druid revival lines and the like, or pagan earth religions, with their emphasis on seeing divinity in the manifest world, and those seeking it in some way beyond. Immanence and transcendence you could call it… or is that not really what this is about?
Well, I’m glad to hear that the reason I’ve been thrown into the deep end is because that is, in fact, what has happened. I’ve followed along with both of the previous book clubs, have read Spengler on my own, and am generally pretty comfortable with complex works, but whew, this one’s a doozy. Thank you for the flotation devices!
I have a question, but if it’s going off in the wrong direction, do please warn me off. It seems that I might have an easier time making sense of the generalities if I could work out which phase I’m in this incarnation and relate those generalities back to my own experience. Other than reading through all 28 phases and looking for which of the 26 incarnate ones looks most applicable, do you have any recommendations on how to narrow down which ones to consider? What came to mind reading this chapter and your commentary is to first determine if I’m in a more antithetical or primary phase, and then to work out if I’m more in the “opening up” or “closing down” side that cycle, but any other tips would be welcome (look at the elemental correspondence and compare to my natal chart? Think about what kind of things I strive for and struggle with?)
Cheers,
Jeff
“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.”
A few weeks ago, in answer to my Magic Monday question, you identified yourself as being at Phase 18. I understand this to be a phase of ordering and systematizing the creative insights of Phase 17, which fits the role you’ve taken on as an occult writer and teacher, but based on all you’ve written about the spiritual value of self-knowledge, it’s hard to see your current lifetime as a process of losing knowledge of your own inner life.
To state the same puzzle more generally, the final quarter of the wheel (23-28) strikes me as a process of regression and simplification rather than growth. So how do souls continue growing and evolving from one circuit of the wheel to another? There’s clearly something large that I’m not seeing about the value of the latter phases.
I tried a six-card tarot divination on which portion of the Wheel I could be on, leaving out the supernatural phases, and to my surprise, the cards told a story.
Waxing Crescent Phases 2 to 7: Hierophant (following established rules)
First Quarter Phase 8: Three of Pentacles R
(some sort of falling out)
Waxing Gibbous Phases 9 to 14: Three of Wands
(Making progress on what goals I then had, growing)
Waning Gibbous Phases 16 to 21: Seven of Wands R
(Giving up the struggle)
Last Quarter Phase 22: the Sun
(might mean I am on this phase, or just passed it successfully)
Waning Crescent Phases 23 to 28: Ace of Cups
(that portion of the cycle is just beginning for me, or will begin soon)
My wandering mind wonders what a great Poet like Yeats (or the short-lived but brilliant Gerard Manley Hopkins) has done in his previous (or subsequent) lives!?
We miss them today….
Mark, good. Now you can read it over again, and have a better shot at making sense of it.
Emmanuel, it’s quite possible that Yeats got it from Hegel, but at least as possible that he got it from occult sources, which may also have been Hegel’s source. As for videos, I have no idea — has anyone else seen something of the sort?
Chuaquin, it’s not easy stuff! Multiple readings are a good idea.
Patrick, no, that’s not what Yeats is suggesting. Whatever your Mask is in this incarnation, that’s what you achieve (or fail to achieve) in this incarnation’s Phase 15; you spend the early part of life extracting yourself from unthinking participation in the collective, find your own way, achieve as much as you’re going to achieve in life, and then have to deal with that slipping away as old age sets in and you have to turn your attention to the Unseen (or fail to do so).
Jill, interesting. Yeats discusses the movement from the rim of the wheel to the center, too — we’ll get to that.
Anonymous, a fine theme for meditation! As a hint, though, I’ll remind you that in many polytheist traditions, each god has a heaven for those who have embodied that god’s energy well in life.
Flaneur, that’s an interesting point. I’m not sure Yeats really deals with that, but it’s worth reflection.
Jeff, the best guide I’ve found is, first, to get a general sense of the four quarters of the wheel. As a very rough guide, the first quarter is sensory and practical, the second passionate and enthusiastic, the third intellectual and reflective, the fourth spiritual and self-transcending, but close readings of the whole sequence of incarnations will give you a much clearer sense. Most people find it easy to figure out roughly where they fit in the quarters. After that, close attention to the Body of Fate is a useful guide, since there is no “false Body of Fate” — it is what it is.
Dylan, the closing of the tinctures in phases 17 and 18 is also the turning of attention away from too much obsession with one’s own internal states and the awakening of a new awareness and appreciation of the rest of the world. That’s been an important theme all through this life — getting over myself and learning to attend more closely to the cosmos as a whole. It’s a gain, not a loss. As for the last quarter of the wheel, it’s the process by which the self opens up to spiritual realities — again, a change of orientation toward something that is as yet underdeveloped. Hunchback, Saint, and Fool look like regression only because the rest of us can’t see the extraordinary richness of experience on which, when in phase, their eyes are increasingly fixed.
Patrick, interesting!
Pyrrhus, if Yeats is in incarnation right now — well, it’ll depend on how long he spent between lives. He might be an old person of the 18th phase, or a young person of the 19th or (if he spent a long time out of incarnation) a young person of the 18th. In any case he’s probably balancing the obsession with publicity he had in his life as Yeats with a more private, self-effacing existence. Furthermore, as we’ll see a little later on, we’re past the point in the historical cycle (which also follows the same sequence of phases) at which great poetry wins the kind of audience it had in Yeats’s and Hopkins’s time. By my calculations, we entered the 26th phase, the terrible phase of the Hunchback, in 2012 and are moving toward the phase of the Saint. More on this in due time!
JMG # 13:
I’m going to read again your essay, so I hope to refine my understanding of it. I’ve also read in your answer to Emmanuel the name of the philosopher Hegel, pointing this obscure thinker was inspired by occult philosophy (or imitated directly it?); you also suggest as alternative explanation Yeats read Hegel before his own thoughts. I don’t know which one was the truth. However, it’s interesting me and Emmanuel have remember some Hegelian flavor in Yeats structures (in my previous comment I’ve written “dialectics”).
I am busy right now making diagrams and maps to see if they throw light on the matter. Dense, and much to unpack, for sure.
One lunar phase system that I am already familiar with, and work with in my clinic, is the female menstrual cycle. I was struck by the concept of the “double heartbeat” you mention, because, well in my years of dealing with women seeking fertility assistance while being woefully uninformed about how their bodies work, I have developed a few wee “lectures” of my own that can be followed by women adventurous enough to explore.
For example, not many women have ever learned (or been taught) that their cervix performs a monthly “double heartbeat” movement within them. At the moments of their periods and their ovulations (Phases 1 and 15) a cervix is descended and open. At the inbetween intervals (Phases 8 and 22), a cervix is ascended and tightly closed. For those adventurous enough to follow this movement inside themselves, ovulation is relatively easy to detect. From a TCM perspective, down and open corresponds to a yang phase which is benefitted by movement and activity, while up and closed corresponds to a yin phase, most benefitted by stillness, and calm reflectiveness.
Likewise, Phases 1 to 15 comprise the Follicular phase, in which a follicle grows to maturity. In TCM this phase is a yin phase, closely associated with nourishment. Whereas Phases 16 to 28 comprise the Luteal phase, in which – presuming there is a fertilised egg, it will seek to implant in the uterus, sustained by the hormones emitted by the luteal body – the ovarian “husk” from which the most recent egg follicle has emerged. In TCM this phase is a yang phase, closely associated with warmth.
I intend to spend a wee while comparing my menstrual cycle maps with Yeats’s wheel, and see if there are natural resonances or not.
Thanks for the flotation devices… I shall let you know if any have helped with the process, as it proceeds.
@ Emmanuel # 3
There is a visualisation video (more a gif than a video) illustrating the two countermoving axes on the wheel here: https://www.yeatsvision.com/Wheel.html
I love this book club series! I actually find Yeats a good deal less obscure that Levi, complicated yes, I can’t hold it all in my head at once yet, but its like a giant 3d visual jigsaw puzzle and I’m enjoying slotting it together in my head and trying to see the bigger picture. ‘Fractal’ thanks for that, I zoomed out on a whole load of pieces as soon as I had that!
Still trying to wrap my mind around all this, but I’m astounded by Yeats’ brilliance and also thankful for your efforts to make this somewhat accessible to us.
What really piqued my curiosity as of late is the relationship between individual fate and destiny (which I mistakenly used to believe were interchangeable terms), and also that of the will and the imagination—whatever that is. It’s mind blowing to consider that all of this is happening at the collective level, fractally, at every order of magnitude.
Do you think that maybe only the souls in very particular phases of this incarnation would ever be crazy enough to read Yeats’ A Vision in a serious manner? Haha.
Yeats hunchback and saint poem was interesting. The hunchback had a bunch of Caesars in him. It does seem indicative of our days since the great mayan debacle. Now we go marching on to saints.
Neat to see the material in his poetry
Yeat’s wheel reminds me much of your model of spiritual development outlined by the Tarot trumps in Revisioning the Tree of Life. The one (from memory so forgive me if I error) that goes something like: badly getting hurt in life by falling off a cliff, finding the occult, mastering the elements, succeeding materially, finding love, feeling trapped by all of this, realizing you need outside help, life falling apart from a “lightning” strike, development of intuition in a subjective state, inner maturation in a subjective state, illumination, being raised out of subjective state, and return to participation in the world. I don’t fully grasp everything in Yeat’s model yet and admittedly I haven’t put in enough effort, although I am up to date with the reading. Does the living the territory of the RtTOL model only happen to those on a spiritual path? If so, why? I would ask for Yeat’s wheel too, but that obviously applies to normies too.
Chuaquin, Glenn Magee’s book Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition pointed out that Hegel read a great deal of magical literature and may have been powerfully influenced by it, so it’s definitely a subject worth exploring.
Scotlyn, fascinating. I wasn’t aware of any of this, but it makes sense.
Free Rain, delighted to hear it.
Mask, oh, very likely — I think you have to be in the third quarter of the wheel to be interested in anything so abstract!
Flaneur, all Yeats’s later poetry is full of imagery from A Vision, or more precisely from the raw materials George brought through that became the text. Consider one of my favorites, the sonnet Meru:
Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion; but man’s life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality:
Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye, Rome!
Hermits upon Mount Meru or Everest,
Caverned in night under the drifted snow,
Or where that snow and winter’s dreadful blast
Beat down upon their naked bodies, know
That day bring round the night, that before dawn
His glory and his monuments are gone.
The whole doctrine of historical cycles we’ll be covering in later posts is there in a single cascade of vivid images.
Luke, that’s a fascinating point. I think that the tarot sequence also happens to those who aren’t on the Path, but in other ways and with other outcomes — still, I’ll want to reflect on this.
@7 Anon
Yeats has this to say about Phase 1:
“[W]hen we have considered cycle and horoscope it will be seen how those that are the instruments of subtle supernatural will differ from the instruments of cruder energy; but all, highest and lowest, are alike in being automatic.”
So souls can open up to different divinities or entities in the late primary phases. I would presume that souls completing their first trip around the wheel become the “instruments of cruder energies,” and veteren souls can submit to higher deities, but I really have no idea.
JMG # 20:
I take note of Glenn Magee’s book, thank you.
(Off topic) Anselmo:
If you’ve witnessed personally the lack of that post-electoral operation, there’s no argument here. There are motives to be concerned.
‘His glory and his monuments are gone’. Whatever phase I’m currently in, it has this quality, of pulling one towards renunciation like an irresistible rip tide. The intellect, which was formerly my closest friend, is now almost dead to me. The same is true of all my worldly desires. Their beauty is greatly enhanced but they’ve become somehow abstract, like a painting in a gallery. For this reason I may ultimately fail to grasp Yeats’ vision, but I intend to try anyway.
My question is whether Western occultism sees those who fall on the Wheel, who are certainly the great majority, or whether it only sees the elite few whose ascent is constant. Hinduism also displays this rather unrealistic optimism (from a Buddhist perspective).
Hi John Michael,
Thanks for the introductory paragraph, as I’d not previously appreciated Mr Yeats occluded approach to his system. Clearly the author wants students to work. Nothing wrong with that. Thanks for the floaties! 🙂
Hmm. Presumably the Daimon is a different representation of the divine spark, and the wheel is a representation of the larger journey? Is it my imagination, or is the wheel a representation of the individual, whereas the Golden Dawn journey you wrote of long ago, a much bigger view showing the flow of the individual as a species?
There’s a lot of meat in here. So, neither driven by its own creative desires nor shaped by outside forces in order to achieve this, presumably the will must be driven by self awareness with a modicum of control?
Thanks for the advice as to re-reading the essay! Will do. Far out! What do you mean that there’s more? My brain is reaching limits of abstract concepts. Will have to cogitate upon this subject and candidly I may have to draw this one out on paper based on your words, which will make the wheel more alive as a concept.
No need to reply to this next off topic, but read this and thought you may be interested: If he wins, Michael Burry’s $2.3 billion AI bet is bad news for Aussie super funds exposed to US tech. Hmm.
Cheers
Chris
– Got that? No, in all probability you don’t.
– Woah, hey buddy chill out!
Juss kiddin’. Thanks for this discussion, JMG, it’s engrossing.
I’m wondering whether the cycle of human incarnations is always complete at phase 28. You’ve said that you’re at phase 18, and you also think this may be your last human incarnation. Does that mean one can leave the wheel at any point, or only certain points? Which is making me wonder if we continue to go through similar phases of development when we’re no longer in bodies….
I do appreciate the flotation devices–actually last month’s was more important for me. This month I had struggled and flailed through most of it before your post went up, and what a relief. There are some details like “opening and closing of the tinctures” that I need to work through, and the fractal idea (I know nothing about fractals, so the word, by itself, doesn’t convey much to me). The triads remind me of the astrological principles of cardinal, fixed, and mutable.
Tengu, it depends (of course) on the specific occult tradition, but by and large the Western occult teachings I know are clear that most people, most of the time, are trudging through life, stumbling from one crisis to another, heaping up difficult karma for themselves, and remaining almost completely passive in response to the world. That in itself will bring them to better things eventually, but “eventually” is a very long time; the path of ordinary evolution takes many incarnations of failure and pain, and it hurts. The alternative is always available but only the few ever take it up.
Chris, exactly. There’s the process of individual evolution, and then there’s the broader journey of whole swarms of souls, and those are related but far from identical. As for the will, eventually it must not be driven — it must do the driving itself.
Thibault, glad to hear it.
Karen, the 28th phase isn’t necessarily the end of the cycle, and it’s possible to leave it at any point on the second half of the wheel (phases 16-28). It’s also possible to go around again — Yeats suggests that most people do a total of 12 rounds, for a total of 312 human incarnations. As for what happens after we’re no longer in human bodies, of course — material incarnation is the prenatal state of the soul; it’s after we’re born into spiritual existence that our real lessons and our real growth begin.
Thanks for this important and lovely stuff. I am perking up and paying attention! I note that yeats has two binaries operating a wheel here, with four quarters. I can’t help but think of the four elements, cardinal directions, etc. I have spent a lot off time thinking about the cross. And the number three as it relates to four. Pyramids are quite interesting and telling in this regard. Did yeats ever do anything on the relationship, explicitly, of three and four?
Useful what you said that if you are looking to find yourself on the wheel and arent sure, look for the Body of Fate because ‘there is no false Body of Fate, it just is.’ I feel like there’s a funny joke to my life here about liking personality tests when I was a youth. Talk about the mother of all personality schema.
@JMG
You’ve written in a Magic Monday that most souls pass through the human stage of existence (including time spent out of incarnation) within one zodiacal age. In that case, most souls wouldn’t even pass through the wheel once before building their first mental body. If 312 lives are normal, most of us should spend a few tens of thousands of years being human before moving on to Gywnfydd (over 10,000 years incarnate, even more time in the afterlife state).
We cannot complete phases between lives because the vast majority of us don’t yet have the capacity to will in that state. And us skipping phases would destroy the progressive logic of Yeat’s system. And I doubt many people have the capacity to complete several phases in one lifetime.
Hi John Michael,
Ah, thanks for the confirmation of the questions. You know man, I’ve met people who had extraordinarily strong wills, which were not their own. What the experience has taught me, and need I mention experiences from say I dunno, four or five years ago, is that they’ll push the button, right or wrong.
I’ll draw the wheel out as it appears to me over the next few days (in my spare time… 🙂 ) and post up a link to the image. Hopefully, with some assistance from the good people here (I ain’t afraid of critique) something may develop. Even thinking about turning the words into a practical application has revealed something. The number seven features highly in this system. Hmm. Who knew?
Cheers
Chris
The hunchback description sounds a lot like internet culture
So I am turning my mind in knots trying to follow this system of Yeats.’ There are so so many phases to keep track of, it rrally does feel like drowning. In my flailing, I manage to find a very helpful resource – a raft amidst the floaties.
It’s a website that has been created by what must be an avid fan of Yeats, and a Vision in particular. It has what Emmanuel was asking about – the moving clock of the wheel, with the line for will and mask moving counterclockwise, while the oppositional line of Creative Mind and Body of Fate moving clockwise. It also has excellent summaries and explanations for a lot of the terms and relationships. And there’s even a link to an interactive wheel where you can click on each ohase and get a more in depth explanation! I’m putting the link here, assuming our gracious archdruid host allows it.
https://yeatsvision.com/Wheel.html
So, having found a steady vessel to help me navigate these choppy waters, I feel like I have my bearings a bit now. While I’m sure I mangled it quite a bit, I’d like to put my vision of this vision out there and see what kind of feedback I get reflected back to me.
So, each phase can primarily be viewed as a particular lifetime of an incarnated soul. The soul comes out of total union with the divine in phase 1, and incarnates as a person in phase 2, where one tends to be very natural and innocent. There is in this phase a certain goal to be acheived, either embracing or rejecting the will, embracing or rejecting body of fate, creative mind, and so forth. What is needed changes from phase to phase, but when it is acheived, it allows the soul, or daimon, to overcome the circumstances of one phase and move to the next one. Otherwise, the sould staus trapped in that particular phase for however many times it takes them to figure out what it is they must do and then acheiving it.
Of course, the wheel could be the wheel of one’s life, and the phases are different parts of that life, which could be counted in years, not lifetimes. But the most basic non fractal way to look at the wheel is as a series of lives the same soul lives through and what that soul must do in each phase.
Am I close to the mark? Or did I veer wildly away from it? Your guidance is always appreciated.
I’ve read somewhere about the Saints before my current comment, I hope I’m not going too off topic now; but today when I was walking near my neighbourhood catholic church, I’ve seen a big poster in its main wall which message was “You can be a saint too”. Well, it’s made me think about the Saints way, which I see as possible for everybody who proposes it, but indeed IMHO very difficult in the nowadays conditions.I want to let clear to you what I understand with Saints it isn’t identified necessary with catholic religion says. I think it in a more ecumenical and general type of personality and good actions. What do you think about this topic, John and commentariat? How is related sanctity with Yeats Wheel?
I have begun to look into the quarters (going deeply into individual phases is still much too complicated).
Quarter 1 (Phases 1-8) Soul Seeks Nature Without
Quarter 2 (Phases 8-15) Soul Seeks Nature Within
Quarter 3 (Phases 15-22) Soul Seeks God Within
Quarter 4 (Phases 22-1) Soul Seeks God Without
Phase 15 is unity not experienced in incarnation, but the experience is of Beauty, the perfect appreciation of Nature.
Phase 1 is unity not experienced in incarnation, but the experience is of Submission, the perfect appreciation of God.
Phase 8 is conflict, experienced in incarnation, possibly in several, as the Soul changes the direction of its gaze from outwards to inwards.
Phase 15 is conflict, experienced in incarnation, possibly in several, as the Soul changes the direction of its gaze from inwards to outwards.
It strikes me that the openings (at 11 and 12/ and at 25 and 26) together with the closings (at 18 and 19/ and at 4 and 5) work as “cross quarter” transitions, but I am still pondering their significance to the whole.
This is extremely simplified, but I am *beginning* to get swimming stroke (even if it is only a doggy paddle)… Is there any part of this summary that I have wrongly understood? (I don’t say too simplistically understood, because obviously deeper is the only direction available to go from here). 🙂
Hello, Archdruid
This is certainly a thought-provoking article. I expected your article on this part of A Vision to be thought provoking, because I tried reading this part and quickly got a face-full of abstract complexity that choked me out of the attempt.
Making a diagram of the wheel and looking at it while reading your article (for the third time) helped me to finally get it. There are still a few points I do not fully understand, but I get the gist.
For instance, you said that 17 and 18 are the phases where the tinctures close. Since they open in 11 and 12, from symmetry, I would have expected them to close at 18 and 19. After all, when the Will is at 11 and 12 the CM is at 18 and 19, right?
Another question – you mentioned that the 17th phase is the antithetical phase of both the 16-17 and the 17-18 wheel. So to understand these two aspects of 17, I will need to understand both 16 and 18, correct? To understand which, of course, I would need to understand 15 and 19, and so on? So I cannot have clarity on any part without clarity of the whole. I must begin, then, with a blurry understanding of the entire wheel and then progressively sharpen it?
Finally, I have been thinking about the Primary and Antithetical aspects. My understanding of it at the moment is that it has something to do with the way a person relates statements of fact to value judgements. My basic understanding of a moral syllogism is this: a value judgement and a statement of fact together result in another new value judgement. For instance, “cancer is bad” + “smoking causes cancer” = “smoking is bad”.
So Primary folks will say “Smoking causes cancer? Then smoking must be bad!” and consider this to be a logical conclusion requiring no further logical requirement. For them, the badness of cancer is an implicit and axiomatic truth. An antithetical person, on the other hand, will look at this and say: “Smoking causes cancer? So smoking is bad if cancer is.”, paying attention to the subjective nature of oughts.
Is this something of a right track?
Celadon, not explicitly, no.
AliceEm, it would be quite something to come up with a Yeats-phase personality test!
Patrick, this is one of the places where the teachings I learned differ from those that Yeats got from George’s disembodied communicators. In the teachings I learned, the minimum number of human lives for any soul is 12, one in each sun sign; the maximum — well, that depends on how badly you mess up. But Yeats had different ideas.
Chris, yeah, there’s that. One of the main reasons for developing your own will is that you’re going to follow somebody’s will, and if it’s not yours, there are plenty of other people eager to exploit you.
Flaneur, it does indeed. This is part of why I think we’re in that phase now, historically speaking.
Paedrig, yes, that’s basically correct.
Chuaquin, oh, everyone can be a saint, but next to nobody will. In Yeats’s scheme, you have to be in the last quarter of the wheel before the longing for God reaches the kind of intensity that makes sainthood possible.
Scotlyn, dog paddle may not be elegant but it keeps you afloat. Yes, that’s basically correct.
Rajarshi, unfortunately Yeats didn’t explain why the tinctures close at 17 and 18 — he just noted that they do so. Yes, you really do have to understand the whole thing at least in very broad and vague outline in order to make sense of the details. As for primary and subjective, hmm. As I see it, Yeats is talking about something much broader and more general than that, but your illustration is one aspect of the distinction, yes.
Paedrig # 34:
Thank you very much for the link to Yeats Wheel you’ve kindly put in your comment! I was really lost in my second lecture of John essay, so your help has been of course well received by me…I’ll read JMG text the third time after looking at your link with attention, and I think I’ll understand the whole topic in depth.
@ JMG – re “Yeats didn’t explain why the tinctures close at 17 and 18 — he just noted that they do so.”
I think there may either be a typo in the version of The Vision which you are looking at, or there may be a typo in your post.
I had to go and check the text on this point, because my attempt to draw the openings and closings was not working too well. In my copy of “W.B. Yeats: A Vision and Related Writings” selected and edited by A. Norman Jeffares, c. 1989, the following passages on the matter appear on page 135:
QUOTE
At Phases 11 and 12 occurs what is called the “opening of the tinctures,” at Phase 11 the “antitethetical” opens, at Phase 12 the “primary.”…. At Phase 18 the “primary tincture” closes once more, and at Phase 19 the “antithetical.” At Phases 25 and 26 there is a new opening, and at Phases 4 and 5 a new closing…”
END QUOTE
I have omitted all the explanatory material, but all of the above is contained within the same paragraph.
When I found it, I was able to diagramme it more symmetrically and that was a help to me.
JMG # 38:
I suppose Yeats point of view had his good reasons to be, because he thought such as complex and deep structure in Wheel form…so no argument here. Indeed, average people in this world aren’t saints (me included). So sainthood is possible but only in the Wheel situation you’ve described briefly. Thank you for explaining it to me (and to the general commentariat).
I cannot explicitly speak to my other incarnations, but in this one, I have tried to serve too many masters/gods. I have one little Will and a wish to chase too many Masks. This tends to be very common for women of this era: this idea that we can take on all the responsibilities of a man and still be amazing and excellent at a gallery of things or the arts that we want to pursue. The facts on the ground are that you can only die once and you can only go to one Valhalla. At least now I’m old enough to realize that there is power in limits.
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 10/20). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May Patrick’s mother Christine‘s vital energy be strengthened so she can continue healing at home without need for more surgical operations.
May both Monika and the child she is pregnant with both be blessed with good health and a safe delivery.
May Mary’s sister have her auto-immune conditions sent into remission, may her eyes remain healthy, and may she heal in body, mind, and spirit.
May Marko have the awareness and strength to constructively deal with the situation.
May 5 year old Max be blessed and protected during his parents’ contentious divorce; may events work out in a manner most conducive to Max’s healthy development over the long term.
May the abcess in JRuss’s left armpit heal quickly.
May Brother Kornhoer’s son Travis’s left ureter be restored to full function, 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 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 HippieVikings’s baby HV, who was born safely but has had some breathing concerns, be filled with good health and strength.
May Trubujah’s best friend Pat’s teenage daughter Devin, who has a mysterious condition which doctors are so far baffled by necessitating that she remain in a wheelchair, be healed of her condition; may the underlying cause come to light so that treatment may begin.
May J Guadalupe Villarruel Zúñiga, father of CRPatiño’s friend Jair, who suffers from terminal kidney and liver damage, continue to respond favorably to treatment; 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 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 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 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.
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Dear JMG,
Funny indeed how starting from the beginning of the book now makes much more sense than it did at the first attempt! There are so many hidden references put into prose form. I suppose it is perhaps like waves hitting rocks on a beach. Each wave polishes the rocks just a little bit more, like each pass through a book.
Makes me think of many contemporary books that are so fluffy that they can barely sustain one read. And, of course, many do not.
Just a brief comment to say I’m still floundering along with this series. I haven’t abandoned it.
When reading last night a thought came to me that the Romans were primary and their will focused on the antithetical Greek mask. Reasoning is that the Roman’s were very practical but aspired to Greek culture. So much so that the empire eventually became a Greek one.
Going back further it could be said that the different Greek colonies and native Italian tribes influenced by them were striving toward a practical mask, finally succeeded to become Rome.
John,
Thanks for doing this series of posts. It’s a valuable resource. I’m struggling to put all the pieces together but I am enjoying turning A Vision over, looking at all its texture, and contemplating it.
Thank you for another life preserver!
At one point I nearly threw the book across the room, but a cooler head prevailed and I calmly placed it back on the bookshelf and muttered “I can’t make sense of this. I’ll see where I’m at in a few weeks.”
So, back into the deep end of the pool this week and making a liitle progress. I made a three-dimensional “spinner” in an attempt to represent Yeats’ concept of the Great Wheel, showing the 28 phases of human incarnation, the four faculties (Will, Mask, Creative Mind and Body of Fate) that move around the wheel through the phases, and the two tinctures, primary and antithetical. My aim is to move to a more concrete, sensory understanding of Yeats’s abstractions. This is a work in progress! I’ve posted a picture of the spinner on my Dreamwidth Journal:
https://inavalon.dreamwidth.org/809.html
Two comments on this month’s encouraging essay:
“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. ”
Oh good! I have a topic for meditation: What is the distinction between the Individual Soul (Anima Hominis) and the Essential Self (Daimon), if any?
“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.”
I go in search of Nature and I find God.
I’m encouraged when I see from the comments that I am not the only one finding this difficult. Thanks to your explanations, JMG, I feel some glimmerings of understanding.
I have a question. On the diagram of the wheel, the crossed lines that intersect the wheel are marked Fall, Heart, Head and Loins. I see they correspond to Libra, Cancer, Aries and Capricorn. (I think I’ve got that right). I am just wondering about “Fall”, is this word traditionally used for Libra? Is it meant here to signify some kind of failure that must take place to pass through this point on the wheel, between 4 and 5? As in the sense of a fall from grace, or power, or wealth, etc. Or does it just indicate the corresponding Libra body parts of lower back or buttocks.
Reading this through it seems like a silly question, but I’ll go ahead and ask because it’s like a bee in my bonnet, now…. thanks JMG for this series 🙂
@Scotlyn #15
“There is a visualisation video (more a gif than a video) illustrating the two countermoving axes on the wheel here: https://www.yeatsvision.com/Wheel.html ”
Thanks for finding that gif! The rest of the article is very informative too!
Hi JMG,
Thank you for your analysis. I’m not drowning, but I’m seasick, and my boat is careening wildly, and I’m surely thankful for the life jacket strapped securely to my chest and back. 😉
28×12=336. Where do 312 incarnations come from? 😏
I also have a question about a fractal pattern. If the pattern is fractal, then our many incarnations are reflected in the current one. Also, our whole life is reflected in any particular period of that life. Hm… That brings me to a quote that was mentioned a few entries back, “si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait” (there is a similar thought expressed more rudely by the French, “Le bon Dieu envoie toujours des culottes à ceux qui n’ont pas de derrière”). Aren’t those thoughts just excuses to remain passive (“I’m too old”, “I don’t have a derrière”)? If life is fractal, then the situation very similar to that we failed at 17 would be presented to us at 67, wouldn’t it? And it again would be that the only way out is through. Admittedly, we don’t have 50 years ahead of us when we are 67, but then if the pattern is fractal, we can still act even when we have 5 years, heck… even 5 days … because it’s fractal…
I have been thinking about the tinctures. They seem to be similar to the Antinomy of Freedom and Necessity.
For instance, Body of Fate is restricted by causality and circumstance, and its partner Creative Mind is restricted by the universals that is uses as the building blocks of its simulacra of reality. Both causality and universals are aspects of necessity. By contrast, Will is that we can do, and Mask is what we have carved, from our Memories, to be our ideals and principles. It is reasonable to say that we could have chosen any Moral Principles to live for, but we carve the Mask this way.
Has this connection been drawn?
@Helen W #49,
That’s not a silly question (the “Fall” used for Libra and parts of the body for the other signs) or, if it’s silly, I wanted to ask the same question! Thank you.
JMG,
I’m really curious to know if you have reached, due to your extensive knowledge of a wide variety of spiritual writings, of attempts to describe the indescribable and of magic systems, the vantage point of a meta concept that would give you the tools to judge various systems in comparison to each other and to what you understand to be reality. I hope that question makes sense, knowing there is no objective reality we can access and all systems we struggle to explain and understand are limited by the veil of perception we exist behind. And yes, I know it doesn’t need to be True, it just needs to work. But still, is there a way to compare them from an overarching concept of systems?
I ask because my reaction to A Vision so far has been that it makes sense, it’s beautifully expressed so far, and there is no doubt in my mind that it would be very useful as a framework to do some workings, but I have a very strong feeling that this system isn’t right for me, at least at this time. And I have no idea why. Possibly because I am working on a different one but that seems an inadequate answer. There is nothing in this system so far that gives me any reason to think justifies this feeling. I had a different reaction to Dion Fortune and Levi when we studied their books.
I will keep reading along, however, because I can see it has value as a system, and knowledge of different systems is good since no system is the One True system. I just wanted to know if you had a way to compare them that might explain why I feel as I do about Yeats’ system.
-Myriam
Scotlyn, good heavens. Yes, there’s a typo in my paperback reading copy, though not in the critical edition I also have. I’ve corrected it in the post. You’re quite correct — the primary tincture closes in the 18th and the antithetical in the 19th.
Kimberly, for what it’s worth, it took me many years to reach that same realization, set aside the many things I’m never going to be good at, and concentrate on the handful of things that I can do tolerably well. It’s not an easy realization, especially in this culture, but it’s worth achieving.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Oskari, that’s why I mostly read books by dead people! The quality of writing is a good measure of the quality of the author’s thinking, and few people these days ever learn how to think clearly.
Phutatorius, good to hear. Keep dog paddling!
Scotty, that’s fascinating, and also quite plausible. I wonder if it’s more generally true that cultures tend to fall at various points on the spectrum from primary to antithetical — or, just possibly, at different points on the wheel.
Nephite, delighted to hear it.
Goldenhawk, thank you for this! That spinner is a very nice representation of the four faculties and how they move on the wheel:
With regard to your two comments, first, we’ll get to that in a later stage of the book, and second, so do we all, I think.
Helen, glad that you’re still hanging in there! Yeats never does explain “fall” — it was something, if I recall correctly, that was passed on to George by her inner communicators. I’ve wondered more than once if it’s a euphemism for the excretory organs.
Inna, two of the phases in each cycle aren’t incarnations in the strict sense of the word — that is to say, they’re not in material bodies — so it’s 26 incarnate phases x 12 times around = 312 incarnations. As for the fractal nature of life, I doubt it’s quite so mathematically exact, but certainly the same challenges meet us over and over again until we overcome them.
Rajarshi, I don’t recall whether that specific correlation comes up in Yeats’s writings, but it’s a perfectly valid one, and I think he’d have approved of it.
Myriam, I do have ways (plural) to compare systems, but I don’t know that I’d categorize them as metaconcepts. Wittgenstein’s argument that you can’t really judge a form of life from outside it seems valid to me, as does his denial that there’s any Archimedean point from which all systems can be judged. What I do, and what I think pretty much everyone does (whether they recognize this or not), is examine other systems from within the standpoint of the working system I use, and see how well they fit. There are plenty of systems that work very well for other people but aren’t right for me, and I can recognize that without trying to place any overall judgment on them — much the same reaction, in other words, as you’re having to our text.
I am in the “this is a bit difficult” boat too. I will probably have to go over this a few more times.
From the first reading, comparisons with two other systems came to my mind (that’s one way I learn, by comparing to other things) – the first is the cycle of evolution and involution, especially as found in ‘Cosmic Doctrine’, the other is Gurdjieff’s 4 kinds of man (there are 7 but 4 are all you can really talk about).
It’s interesting to me that when we overlay the ‘initation of the nadir’ onto Yeat’s cycle, it is phase 15, which is “Complete Beauty”, “complete subjectivity”… and as you say in the previous post:
“As our text points out, a single vortex is one way to diagram the relationship between the two opposing principles Yeats has in mind, which are the subjective life—meaning here a person’s experience of himself or herself—and the objective life—meaning here a person’s experience of everything that is not the self.”
When I think about the initiation of the nadir, I think about the Kali Yuga, I see our current material reductionist world where all that exists (officially) is the material object, yet, we have this obsession with the self – self identity, self expression. Perhaps it is due to the mind boggling paradox of the subjective experience being a center of non material awareness in a world where only material objects are possible. Suddenly, we have to define ourselves as this or that in order to feel like SOMETHING.
This also leads me to a question in regard to that statement you made from the previous post, about the subjective and the objective. It seems to me from direct experience that all thoughts, feelings, sensations, experiences, are somehow outside of myself – they are all objective, though often I am identified with them (they’re “laminated”). I still have yet to be able to answer Ramana Maharshi’s simple question. It seems to me that everything is objective except for the direct experience of pure subjectivity/being aware, yet I still don’t know what that is. I still do not have direct experience of what Franklin Merrell-Wolff calls “consciousness without an object”. It seems as though consciousness co-arises with sensation/experience.
What is subjective when all is objective? What is objective when all is subjective? It seems like I can see both as valid – everything I can see/experience is somehow outside of me, yet, everything I experience is filtered through my perceptions and thus not really “objective” or outside of me.
To get back to the other system, Gurdjieff’s 4 types of men, the first man is the “instinctual man”, very much this pure objective person associated with the earth element in Yeat’s cycle. Then there’s the “emotional man”, who corresponds wonderfully to the next water quarter. Then, the “intellectual man”, again, corresponding beautifully with the air quarter, and then the “fourth way man” who integrates insights from the previous stages, much like the fire element.
Off topic, but topical for this forum in the larger sense. I worked a secular spell as described below. A TSW experiences . A twenty minute writing exercise. You are welcome to not post this won’t hurt my feelings as I realize it is off topic.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-177726153
My goal was to overcome time wasting in useless activities and become a person who with good energy is productive 24/7 including rest and recreation. Curiously I found the above spell while aimlessly browsing Substack, a now ended time waster. The “spell” or “working” includes all the elements mentioned below in a definition of magic produced by AI, sorry. The author of the substack besides “changes in consciousness” experienced synchronous coincidences she had gained the sensitivity to pick up on. The “spell” is appropriate for use by any belief system, even this Christian.
“ John Michael Greer uses Dion Fortune’s definition of magic as “the art and science of causing changes in consciousness in accordance with will” to explore how consciousness, will, and symbols can be used to create change, both personally and politically. Greer emphasizes magic as a “craft” that operates through the medium of consciousness, not necessarily the supernatural, using the will and imagination to achieve goals.
Greer expands on this, describing magic as a “craft” that uses consciousness as its medium.
Role of will: The presence of “will” is crucial; if there is no will, there is no magic.
Tools of magic: The tools of magic are will, imagination formalized through symbol and ritual
In traditional almanacs there is a diagram of “zodiac man,” showing which organs of the human body correspond to which signs. LIbra corresponds to what used to be called the “reins,” that is, the kidneys and loins. So yes, most likely Fall is a euphemism.
Speaking of typos, I think there’s a couple in the edition I’m reading, which is the pdf download that’s been linked here. On p. 104, at the very end of Part II, under the subheading Consciousness, it says:
“From Phase 8 to Phase 22 is Well.
“From Phase 28 to Phase 8 is Creative Mind.”
I assume “Well” should be “Will.” Should the 2nd line be “From Phase 22 to Phase 8”?
Isaac Salamander Hill # 56:
Gurdjeff ideas about the four types of men were unknown to me, I recognize I’ve never read anything from him, thanks for your reference. It seems an interesting writer within the occultist world, I should read some of his books…However, I also think his men classification is too simple if we compare it with Yeats system, although maybe the simple way can have its advantages to learn a system, IMHO.
Hey JMG
In “Per Amica…”, Yeats mentioned something he called the “Rythmic body”. Would I be correct in thinking that this was his first draft of the “body of fate”, or is it meant to mean something else?
Re: “Fall” used to describe qualities of Libra:
Thanks for your answer JMG, and also Robert M. After I asked the question yesterday, I had been wondering if it also referred to the Biblical Fall, and its association with childbearing, assigned to humans as a punishment, which might also tie in with the notion of Justice associated with Libra. But yeah, the eliminatory body processes seem to be a better fit to describe this first phase of the wheel. To quote the Monty Python song, ” life’s a piece of sh** ” 😉
I still have to meditate more on the qualities and correspondences of the other four points marked on the wheel. I want to think more on this level before drilling down further to each phase. I will be excited to get to the table of phases!
Thanks to Goldenhawk, for your image of the spinner. Also thanks to Paedrig, for the link to the website with all the Wheel-related diagrams!
@JMG #55
As I understand The Wheel so far, it must be as you stated: “I wonder if it’s more generally true that cultures tend to fall at various points on the spectrum from primary to antithetical — or, just possibly, at different points on the wheel.” because of this statement “Each of the 28 phases is defined by coordinated positions of four faculties of the individual soul”.
My thought is that the Greek colonies and early Italian tribes and Kingdoms pursing Will followed by the practical Roman culture pursing its Mask, holds true and would be, as you suggest, one phase of a larger wheel but each phase (e.g. Greek antithetical to Roman practical) of this larger wheel, is a wheel unto itself.
Next is to think if the opposite and concurrent gyre of Creative Mind and Body of Fate fits into this meditation construct. Fortunately, I now have access to Goldenhawk’s splendid, “The Great Wheel Faculties Spinner” (TM) to try to make sense of this next step.
When “the soul loses knowledge of its own inner life” in phase 18/19, is this at all similar to the state of the no consciousness described in Origins of the Breakdown of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind?
JMG,
I haven’t been commenting much, but I am over here paddling away and just wanted to say that I really appreciate your work on these book club posts!
Isaac, well, I can’t comment on Gurdjieff as I haven’t studied him. As for subjective vs. objective, though, those words really are blunt instruments, aren’t they? The distinction Yeats has in mind is between the kind of thing you and other people can all perceive, discuss, and agree about, and the kind of thing that you experience alone and other people can’t perceive directly at all. However you want to describe it, that’s a distinction that matters.
BeardTree, delighted to hear it.
Robert, true indeed!
Karen, hmm! Yes, that’s another typo. Given that Yeats was an astoundingly bad speller, I suppose it’s not surprising that typos would infest his work. 😉
J.L.Mc12, I’m not at all sure. Do you happen to recall where in “Per Amica” he used that phrase?
Helen, now you’ve got me trying to place various Python characters on the Wheel… 😉
Scotty, that makes sense.
Luke, no, not at all. It’s simply a refocusing of consciousness away from what’s going on inside your head toward what’s going on in the world around you; you remain fully conscious, it’s just that your focus has shifted.
Jennifer, thank you!
Hey JMG
It’s in the 19th section of “Anima Mundi”. The full quote is this.
“Henry More thought that those
who, after centuries of life, failed to find the rhythmic body and to pass
into the Condition of Fire, were born again.”
Hi John Michael,
My head is spinning thinking about this stuff. Using words to describe a visual moving system is a notably challenging prospect, so here’s what I made of your words (and thought you might be interested). Hopefully I didn’t stuff it up: Yeats Wheel Image. Feel free to critique, and I’m old school and would prefer the phase 1 at the twelve o’clock position, and no doubts this will ruffle feathers.
Cheers
Chris
J.L.Mc12 @JMG
“When all sequence comes to an end, time
comes to an end, and the soul puts on the
rhythmic or spiritual body or luminous body
and contemplates all the events of its memory
and every possible impulse in an eternal
possession of itself in one single moment.”
Per Amica Silentia Lunae, “Anima Mundi,” Section X
JMG: “What I do, and what I think pretty much everyone does (whether they recognize this or not), is examine other systems from within the standpoint of the working system I use, and see how well they fit. There are plenty of systems that work very well for other people but aren’t right for me, and I can recognize that without trying to place any overall judgment on them — much the same reaction, in other words, as you’re having to our text.”
This approach reminds me of the argument Floyd Merrill makes in favor of Peirce’s semiotics in his book Sensing Corporeally. It’s been a while so I hope I’m remembering this correctly, but he argues that in communication as well as making sense of other systems (what else, after all, is a dialogue?) that you can’t stand entirely within the other, but A and B form a territory AB in which they exchange signs that each can take back into the exclusively A (or exclusively B) part of their system, which changes it accordingly. Then A and B are slightly new entities the next time they encounter other things. There is no true union, nor is there complete separation. I’m probably butchering that but I thought I’d mention it since you recently expressed interest in Peirce and that book by Merrill, opaque as it is, helped me to wrap my head around the even-more-opaque Peirce.
JMG,
Thank you for your answer. I find it a relief. I am an anxious sort of person who tries hard to get things right, probably due to my unfortunate upbringing. I keep forgetting there is no right (or wrong), there is only right for me.
@BeardTree
Thank you for posting that wonderful exercise! I put in my first session last night and had a really productive day today. I have an enormous, very complicated, time-consuming project that will take 6 hard months to complete. I had a good start today. 🙂
-Myriam
J.L.Mc12, thanks for this. The rhythmic body is the eternal body of light, which the Greek Neoplatonists called the augoeides.
Chris, a good clear visual image! That’s quite correct.
Goldenhawk, thanks for this.
Kyle, and thanks for this! I’ve picked up an anthology of Peirce’s works, though I haven’t gotten to it yet. Merrill’s viewpoint seems sensible at first glance, certainly.
Myriam, glad to be of help.
If it’s not too late: Has anyone mentioned Ezekiel’s vision of wheels within wheels? Since this book is titled, “A Vision” it seems to cry out for a comparison.