A Vision: Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends

Perhaps the most important thing that sets A Vision apart from other works of occult philosophy in its time is that its author was one of the greatest writers and poets of the age. The occult revival that Eliphas Lévi launched in 1854 with the first volume of Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic produced plenty of philosophical syntheses, Lévi’s first among them. It also yielded no small number of works produced, as A Vision was, by automatic writing or some other mediumistic method—but it only produced one such book that was also a literary masterpiece.

Aleister Crowley’s Book of the Law and Dion Fortune’s The Cosmic Doctrine offer useful comparisons, not least because both remain tolerably well known today in occult circles. Both are channeled documents, as A Vision is; both expounded cyclical theories of reality, as Yeats did, and both were written by dedicated occultists active in the same tradition that shaped Yeats’s magical worldview. What’s more, both Crowley and Fortune were published authors whose novels and essays remain in print today. That said, of course, there’s a difference between the kind of author who has a few mildly successful books in print and the kind of author who reshapes the creative vision of an age and wins the Nobel Prize for literature. Crowley and Fortune belonged to the first category—as of course do I. Yeats belonged to the second.

One of the unexpected benefits of this difference is that it’s possible to learn quite a bit about literary technique by watching the way Yeats presents the system he got from his wife’s mediumship, and comparing it with the way that Crowley, Fortune, and other examples of the type presented their teachings. The section of A Vision we’re discussing this month, “Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends,” is the best example of this in Yeats’s book. Even if you’re not interested in writing elegant, funny fictional prose, it’s worth paying attention to the techniques Yeats deploys here, because he uses them to set out the basic concepts of his philosophy and weave them into a story.

One caution before we begin. Yeats was writing for educated readers in the early 20th century, who were familiar with a galaxy of authors and cultural figures that have been almost entirely forgotten today. When one of the characters says to three others, “You at least cannot sympathize with a horrible generation that in youth sucked Ibsen from Archer’s hygienic bottle,” his readers knew at once that he referred to Norwegian playwright Hendrik Ibsen, whose works were translated into English during Yeats’s time by Scottish theater critic William Archer. Ibsen is still remembered in some circles today, but Archer’s translations were replaced a long time ago; it requires a sustained effort of historical imagination to recall how shocking Ibsen was in his day, and how deeply Archer’s pedestrian prose appalled the poetically minded at that time.

There’s a great deal of this sort of thing in A Vision. When Yeats gets to the 28 lunar phases, he illustrates them with characters out of literature and history, assuming as a matter of course that his readers knew exactly who he was talking about when he mentioned William Morris’s character Birdalone or literary figures such as Ernest Dowson or Walter Savage Landor. In Yeats’s day, any educated person knew such things. In our time, that’s no longer true—and as we’ll see, that follows precisely from Yeats’s own analysis of his position and ours in the great historical cycle that the phases of the Moon trace out. I hasten to say that you can understand A Vision without knowing the people cited in it, but a little research will add to your grasp of the intricacies of the system.

With that said, let’s plunge straight in. In the first paragraph we’re introduced to four young people: John Duddon, Peter Huddon, Daniel O’Leary, and a young woman who goes by the alias Denise de l’Isle Adam. The first three of them got their names from an Irish nursery rhyme Yeats enjoyed in childhood; the fourth took her pseudonym by feminizing the name of the male French author Denis de l’Isle Adam, author of Axel, one of the most popular works of the Decadent era of literature. They’re sitting around a fireplace in a house in an upscale London neighborhood. That fireplace and the room around it are the setting for this entire part of the book; it’s not hard to tell that Yeats was used to writing for the theater, and in fact “Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends” could be performed as a play—though a very odd play it would be.

First off, Daniel O’Leary tells his story, which revolves around the conflict between poetic and realist trends in the theater of his day. Yes, these are our friends, the antithetical and primary tinctures, of which we’ll be hearing much more as this proceeds. As a partisan of the poetic and antithetical school, O’Leary inevitably has passionate courage but lacks practical competence; his grand gesture of contempt for the realist theater thus went absurdly awry, and he had to be rescued by Owen Aherne on Michael Robartes’ instructions.

Next we hear from John Duddon. He, too, had to be rescued by Michael Robartes after an attempt at a grand gesture goes hopelessly awry. Duddon and Huddon are rivals of a sort—as we will see, a very peculiar sort—for the favors of Denise; Duddon set out to clobber Huddon over the head as he left the Café Royal in London, but knocked out Michael Robartes instead. Of course, being an antithetical type and thus hopelessly at sea when dealing with practical affairs, he went straight to Huddon to ask his advice; Huddon took charge of the situation and set out to talk Robartes into not pressing charges, and that was how the two young men and their mutual lady friend ended up sitting around the fireplace in Robartes’ house, where they met Daniel O’Leary. This concludes the first of the four scenes in Yeats’s giddy drama.

As the second scene opens, Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne enter the room. Yes, Robartes belongs to the antithetical tincture and Aherne to the primary, but Robartes is a more capable and impressive figure than the two young antithetical idiots we’ve met so far. His story takes up the second scene, in a lively dance in which Robartes as antithetical figure contends with a whole series of representations of the primary tincture—the ballet dancer, the impoverished mistress, the Church of the Holy Sephulcre in Jerusalem, and Lawrence of Arabia are the obvious ones. More subtly, and more crucially for the material to come, he must confront the primary tincture in himself, for what his body craves, his will despises, and what his judgment approves, his passions find hopelessly bland. This leads him again and again to an imaginary book, the Speculum Angelorum et Hominum (“Mirror of Angels and Men”) by the equally imaginary Giraldus, supposedly published in Cracow in 1694.

The place of publication is no accident, though you have to know as much about alchemy as the Yeatses did to get the joke. Cracow is famous in occult history as a major center of alchemical studies in the late Renaissance, and in particular for the work of the Polish alchemist Michael Sendivogius, who lived and practiced there in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. (His laboratory, still intact, is in Cracow’s Wawel castle.) What sets Sendivogius apart from other alchemical theorists is that his theory of alchemy depends on two principles, salt and niter, and yes, these are chemical and alchemical equivalents of the primary and antithetical tinctures respectively. Both the Yeatses knew this well: an important text of Sendivogian alchemy, Anton Joseph Kirchweger’s Aurea Catena Homeri, was studied closely in Golden Dawn circles. Like the 22 sections in “A Packet for Ezra Pound,” this was another nod and wink to occultists.

In discussing Giraldus’s imaginary book, Yeats also let something slip out that had been part of the original transcriptions but did not go into any of the published versions of the system. This was a set of 28 images, one for each of the phases of the Moon. The man torn apart by eagle and beast, the man whipping his own shadow, and the rest of the images Robartes describes in the story are from that set. The unicorn is a reference to George Yeats, as that mythic beast was a favorite image of hers—her bookplates had one printed on them—and the diagram in the shape of a wheel is of course the basic mandala of the whole system, which Yeats’s artist friend Edmund Dulac rendered elegantly in Renaissance-woodcut style for A Vision.

The bit about Robartes studying with the Judwalis, the mysterious Arab tribe that preserved the same teachings Giraldus passed on, is all that remains of the cover story that Yeats concocted and deployed in the original 1925 edition of A Vision to conceal, at her request, his wife’s involvement in the creation of the system. Bogus pedigrees for occult teachings go back a very long way, long before the recent attempts of Wiccan traditions to backdate late 20th century feminism to the Neolithic era. The Golden Dawn itself, to cite only one older example, claimed origins in the German occult scene that have turned out to be wholly fraudulent. (Who or what the fictional adept “Fraulein Sprengel” was meant to conceal is an interesting question.)

The story about the Judwalis also contains yet another nod and wink to occultists. When Robartes set out to visit the Holy Sephulchre in Jerusalem but ended up studying with Arabic mystics instead, he was following in very distinguished footsteps. The mysterious Brother C.R.C, legendary founder of the original Rosicrucian Order, did exactly the same thing. Mind you, Brother C.R.C. almost certainly never existed—here again, bogus origin stories are as old as occultism—but the vivid founding narrative of the Rosicrucians uses a very similar story to that of Michael Robartes to frame the teachings of the Rosy Cross. This matters becaus the Adeptus Minor ritual of the Golden Dawn, the initiation that gives access to the Inner Order and its wealth of practical occult instruction, focuses on the career of C.R.C. and the rediscovery of his tomb. Here again, any occultist who read Michael Robartes’s story when it was first published would have chuckled and known exactly what Yeats was hinting at.

The third scene is set three months later but takes place at the same fireside. Just as the first scene focuses on two stories of grand gestures ineptly performed, the third scene focuses on two embarrassing and unintended love triangles. First, Denise recounts her story, which is also the story of Duddon and Huddon. It’s a fine tangle. Duddon and Huddon are close friends. Duddon is a painter; Huddon, a soldier, adores his paintings and has bought an absurdly large number of them at high prices; Denise loves Duddon, but as his name suggests, he’s a dud (impotent, in fact) with any woman that Huddon hasn’t slept with. So Denise beds Huddon so she can get the man that she really wants.

Absurd? You bet, and Yeats has enormous fun with it, not least because in his younger days he was very much the Duddon-type, passionate, high-strung, clumsy, and impractical, routinely left in the lurch by women more attracted to the more robustly masculine primary-tincture type. Here again, though, Yeats was also foreshadowing the philosophy of A Vision. In the cycle of incarnations traced out in the text, the soul, like Denise, spends one sequence of lives embracing the primary tincture and then another sequence pursuing the antithetical tincture. The two tinctures are as dependent on each other as are Duddon and Huddon.

After Denise tells her story, we hear about two new characters who have entered the room and the story, John Bond and Mary Bell. Bond tells another story of tangled relationships. Bell is the wife of a much older man; she and Bond meet while vacationing in the south of France; both are horrified by the attraction due to religious scruples but end up surrendering to it nonetheless and she becomes pregnant. Later, they meet again, because Bell’s husband has devoted his life to the quixotic task of teaching cuckoos to make their own nests instead of plopping their eggs in the nests of other birds. That he’s completely oblivious to the fact that Bond has plopped a cuckoo-child in the Bell nest is just one of the cascading ironies in this section of the tale.

It gets stranger, and funnier. Mary Bell reconnected with her erstwhile lover, a specialist in birds, to learn how to build bird nests by hand. As her husband lies on his deathbed, she bursts in with a fine cuckoo-nest which she claims one of his cuckoos has just made. The old man, convinced that his life’s preposterous mission has been accomplished, sinks back into the bed and dies smiling. Of course the nest was made by his wife, based on the instructions she received from her lover. The same pattern of mutual dependence mediated by a woman we’ve seen before is reflected here.

In the fourth scene, Robartes speaks again, but he has finished with stories. He has philosophy in mind, and a tremendous task. Somewhere in the Middle East, Robartes obtained a strange treasure. Leda, the princess in Greek legend who was raped by Zeus in the form of a swan, was said to have given birth to two eggs; from one, the divine twins Castor and Pollux hatched, and from the second, Helen of Troy and the murderous queen Clytemnestra of Mycenae. In Yeats’s version of the myth, there is a third egg, not yet hatched, and this is Robartes’s treasure. He plans on traveling with Owen Aherne and Mary Bell to the Middle East, where they will bury the third egg in the desert sands so that the sun’s warmth can hatch it.

This isn’t simply a random action. A new age of the world is about to be born, Robartes tells his assembled guess, and the hatching of the egg will begin it. Here again, Yeats’s occult background shows clearly. The cycle of alternating ages that Robartes sets out is the traditional one known to ancient astrology, marked out by the precession of the equinoxes; the egg that hatched out Castor and Pollux represents the long-vanished Age of Gemini, the Twins, and the egg that hatched out Helen and Clytemnestra, both of them associated with heroism and bloodshed, represents the age of Aries, as Yeats will explain in detail in a later section of our text.

The intervening ages, those of Taurus and Pisces, are the primary ages of “necessity, truth, goodness, mechanism, science, democracy, abstraction, peace” that Robartes describes. By these labels he means to describe the ideals of the age, not the reality; war, for example, was just as common in the Taurean and Piscean ages as in the others. The point is that people in those ages tend to strive for the things listed, though they achieve them about as effectively as O’Leary does with his boots or Duddon with his amours. The antithetical ages of Gemini and Aries, and also Aquarius, the age about to dawn, are correspondingly those that seek “freedom, fiction, evil” (at least according to the primary tincture’s standards), “kindred, art, aristocracy, particularity, war.” Humans being what they are, their success rate is no higher, but the resulting ages differ, just as classical Greece differed from Christian Europe.

All this will be discussed in much more detail later on in our text. One further foreshadowing of the system of A Vision, however, needs to discussed here, and that is the exact relation between the four scenes of “Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends” and the four quarters of the wheel of lunar phases, the core mandala of Yeats’s occult philosophy.

The wheel, in Edmund Dulac’s version, is shown here. In the first part of the cycle, from the new moon to the waxing quarter, the soul must separate itself from the collective mind. The vehicle for that separation is temptation (Temptatio in the diagram), and the soul in its struggles inevitably falls as short of its goals as O’Leary’s boots—yet it is this failure that actually brings the soul the separation it needs. In the second part, from the waxing quarter to the full moon, the soul pursues a vision of beauty (Pulchritudo in the diagram) as Robartes pursued his ballet dancer and then the visionary wisdom of Giraldus. In the third part, from the full moon to the waning quarter, the soul struggles to hold onto what it has gained, and its increasingly violent efforts (Violentia in the diagram) simply prepare the way for its own successor, as Huddon prepared the way for Duddon to replace him in Denise’s arms. In the fourth part, it sinks back into the collective mind, and gains a wisdom beyond time (Sapientia in the diagram) by forgetting everything it knows.

At first glance this spinning around the circle seems like useless flailing. It is not. Each journey around the wheel brings the soul closer to its own opposite, which is its Daimon or higher self, and assists in the awakening of soul and Daimon alike. It is only through this circle of success through failing and peace through constant struggle that the soul can come into its own and, in Yeats’s terms, leave the wheel behind for the timeless and spaceless sphere. This, too, we’ll explore in the proper place in our survey of the system.

Assignment: One of the advantages we have in making sense of A Vision is that many of its core ideas appeared in an earlier and simpler form in Yeats’s essay “Per Amica Silentia Lunae.” Next month’s assignment is therefore to read the first half of that essay: the Prologue, the poem “Ego Dominus Tuus,” and the first section of the essay proper, “Anima Hominis.” If you don’t have a copy you can download one free of charge from Project Gutenberg here. Read it, think about it, and be annoyed by it; we’ll discuss it a month from now.