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.
Thank you JMG for this series and for this long awaited post.
I have been trying to relate this Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends section with the associated Tarot cards for each section. I take things too literally but for the first section I’ve been trying to match the four magician’s tools (wand, cup, coin and sword) with Huddon, Duddon, Denise and O’Leary. As it relates to the first tarot card and the duality in Section 2, I consider both Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne as the magician.
I need to put more work in sorting out the Primary tincture of the senses relating to the creative mind and body of fate and the Antithetical tincture with imagination relating to will and mask. I get hung up on relating imagination to the creative mind.
Yeats is imparting something important in that Denise de L’Isle Adam is ignored by all. She finally gets a word in and it is not even acknowledged. This happens twice and at another time, she’s finally prompted to tell her story by Robartes, but once she is done, no one acknowledges what she had to say. He asked for her story for another purpose, a segue into the Bond & Bell drama. Denise represents love (cups?) but probably more than that.
Yeats’ prose in our assigned sections is amazingly “thick,” yeasty, full of meaning even in a surface sense. I guess that eating beef stock concentrate might be an analogy. Can’t “chug” it, not even slightly. Like eating a tiny cup of chowder and being full for an entire day. A sip at a time for me, at least. Reading this resembles old-timey mining with hammers and chisels. The less elegant prose of Fortune and Levi is somewhat more intelligible, though perhaps not as deeply coded and ultimately rewarding (word for word). I’m giving it the old “college try,” but if it weren’t for your commentary, I’d be completely at sea. Thank you, good sir!
I always thought Crowley’s Liber LXV had a more powerful poetic resonance than Liber Al.
https://sacred-texts.com/oto/lib65.htm
“I am the Heart; and the Snake is entwined
About the invisible core of the mind.
Rise, O my snake! It is now is the hour
Of the hooded and holy ineffable flower.
Rise, O my snake, into brilliance of bloom
On the corpse of Osiris afloat in the tomb!
O heart of my mother, my sister, mine own,
Thou art given to Nile, to the terror Typhon!
Ah me! but the glory of ravening storm
Enswathes thee and wraps thee in frenzy of form.
Be still, O my soul! that the spell may dissolve
As the wands are upraised, and the aeons revolve.
Behold! in my beauty how joyous Thou art,
O Snake that caresses the crown of mine heart!
Behold! we are one, and the tempest of years
Goes down to the dusk, and the Beetle appears.
O Beetle! the drone of Thy dolorous note
Be ever the trance of this tremulous throat!
I await the awaking! The summons on high
From the Lord Adonai, from the Lord Adonai!”
…but you are still right… Yeat’s was the better writer for sure! (Though it would have been cool if he had done some pulpy fiction like Crowley) Thank you for the elucidation, re: Archer. I got the Ibsen reference, but not the translator. Thanks also for the fact that this chapter could be done as a play… A kind of metaplay about theater itself (and the masks donned by the actors?) I can see that, for sure. It will make re-reading it a bit different if I imagine the curtain opening and proceeding to the dialogue.
Thanks for shedding some New Chemical Light on all this…
The third egg then probably represents the upcoming Age of Aquarius?
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). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May Brother Kornhoer’s son Travis‘s fistula heal, may his body have the strength to fight off infections, may his kidneys strengthen, and may his empty nose syndrome abate, so that he may have a full and healthy life ahead of him.
May Princess Cutekitten, who is sick of being sick, be healed of her ailments.
May Jack H.’s father John continue to heal from his ailments, including alcohol dependency and breathing difficulties, as much as Providence allows, to be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Audrey’s friend’s daughter Katie, who died in a tragic accident June 2nd, orphaning her two children, be blessed and aided in her soul’s onward journey; and may her family be comforted.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Pierre and Julie conceive a healthy baby together. May the conception, pregnancy, birth, and recovery all be healthy and smooth for baby and for Julie.
May Viktoria have a safe and healthy pregnancy, and may the baby be born safe, healthy and blessed.
May SLClaire’s honorary daughter Beth, who is undergoing dialysis for kidney disease, be blessed, and may her kidneys be restored to full functioning.
May 1Wanderer’s partner Cathy, who has bravely fought against cancer to the stage of remission, now be relieved of the unpleasant and painful side-effects from the follow-up hormonal treatment, together with the stress that this imposes on both parties; may she quickly be able to resume a normal life, and the cancer not return.
May Kallianeira’s partner Patrick, who passed away on May 7th, be blessed and aided in his soul’s onward journey. And may Kallianeira be soothed and strengthened to successfully cope in the face of this sudden loss.
May Viktoria have a safe and healthy pregnancy, and may the baby be born safe, healthy and blessed. May Marko have the strength, wisdom and balance to face the challenges set before him. (picture)
May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical (Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed and have a speedy and full recovery from cancer.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, and who is now able to be at home from the hospital, be healed of throat cancer.
(Healing work is also welcome. Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe)
May David Spangler (the esoteric teacher), who has been responding well to chemotherapy for his bladder cancer, be blessed, healed, and filled with positive energy such that he makes a full recovery.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be quickly healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery and drugs to treat it, if providence would have it, and if not, may her soul move on from this world and find peace with a minimum of further suffering for her and her family and friends.
May Liz and her baby be blessed and healthy during pregnancy, and may her husband Jay (sdi) have the grace and good humor to support his family even through times of stress and ill health.
May Debra Roberts, who has just been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, be blessed and healed to the extent that providence allows. Healing work is also welcome.
May Jack H’s father John, whose aortic dissection is considered inoperable and likely fatal by his current doctors, be healed, and make a physical recovery to the full extent that providence allows, and be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
May Open Space’s friend’s mother
Judith be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
Just started reading Anima Hominis now… the way it shows the wrestling between the two tinctures is masterful. Masterful, masterful prose. It’s interesting because earlier this week I had a dream about rhetoric, the trivium and quadrivium. (Currently reading Touches of Sweet Harmony at night before bed and its blowing my mind.)
“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing
amid our uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders.” -Yeats
Another thought… The unity of primary roots… the marriage of heaven and hell… it seems to me these all relate to the self and anti-self, the primary and antithetical tinctures.
Scotty, the creative mind is imagination. We don’t just see the world — we construct it with our minds, assembling the raw material of perception into patterns that mean something to us. The kind of imagination most people think of is secondary to that. That’s why the other active faculty of the self is will — there’s that which perceives and assembles, and that which desires and pursues.
Clarke, good! Yes, Yeats was an astoundingly good craftsman of language. You can take one of his sentences, pick it apart, figure out how everything weaves together, and end up knowing much more about prose than you did when you started out.
Justin, sure, but it wasn’t a channeled document. Crowley’s poetry was very uneven but some of it is quite good.
Anonymous, exactly. What will hatch from it? Yeats hints at that later on.
Quin, thanks for this as always,
Justin, yep. Yeats is good. I’m delighted to hear that you’ve plunged into Touches of Sweet Harmony! It had the same effect on me when I first read it thirty-odd years ago.
So the waxing half of the lunar cycle is the soul’s pursuit of the primary tincture, and the waning half is the pursuit of the antithetical tincture? And we become ever more beautiful in the first and ever more ugly in the second?
I’ve been wondering for a while now what might be the occult significance of human physical beauty. ‘As above, so below’, we are taught, yet in real life being gorgeous seems to have nothing to do with being virtuous. Are the sequence of twenty-eight lifetimes actually the underlying cause of physical beauty, then? How literally is this scheme meant to be taken?
Steiner says somewhere that physical beauty is a direct result of physical pain in the preceding lifetime, which at least makes some karmic sense to me. The twenty-eight-phase cycle seems at first reading very abstract and deterministic.
@Scotty #1
I noticed on my second reading that Robartes mentions an apple, a cup, an acorn, and a sceptre mixed up with the image of the lunar wheel, which I interpreted as the suits of the Tarot. (An apple bisected crosswise shows five inner chambers like a pentacle, and the acorn is shaped like the spades in an ordinary deck of playing cards, which correspond to swords). Curiously, the woodcut seems to show a flower in place of an acorn. I don’t know what to make of that at first glance.
It occurs to me now that reading the sequence of minor arcana as a wheel with four phases, using the scenes depicted by Pamela Colman Smith, could fit very well with the idea of a sequence of lifetimes. But in which order? I would choose Pentacles, Cups, Swords, Wands, corresponding to the traditional Earth, Water, Air, Fire sequence as a picture of the soul’s increasing sophistication and mastery from life to life, and Temptatio, Pulchritudo, Violentia, Sapientia line up fairly well with this order. The woodcut image, however, suggests a different ordering.
Would either sequence help clarify your attempt to attribute the suits to characters and sections in this story?
I’m struck by the fact that Robartes, the supposed Cabalistic master, comes off as such a schmuck, and a mopey schmuck to boot. (Or maybe he was in his early life, but decades in the desert honed him to mastery of himself and his desires). Likewise Yeats himself is depicted as a cheap, gossipy sensationalist, on the one hand, or a studious fool locked up in a tower, on the other. I’m reminded of Chaucer inserting himself as a character in The Canterbury Tales and getting roundly mocked by the other characters for being by far the worst storyteller among them. That particular joke is one of my favourite masterful flourishes in all of literature.
Then there’s Denise the prostitute, who seems to understand everything on a simpler level than the others, but who professes the highest ideals of love and does seem to live a life consistent with them. (See her comment on the necessity of marriage as an unattainable symbol of love, and her willingness to do whatever it takes to make her relationship with Duddon work).
The theme of love and desire is so strong in this whole section. The one passage from Per Amica Silentia Lunae that seems to chime with all of this is Yeats’ notion that the stars in our natal chart that govern love and marriage govern also enemies and rivals, and that this correspondence is not accidental.
Dylan, no, the soul pursues the primary tincture in the fourth quarter, achieving it at the new moon, and then in the first quarter has it gradually slip away. Then it pursues the antithetical tincture in the second quarter, achieving it at the full moon, and then in the third quarter has it gradually slip away. The peak of physical beauty is achieved at the full moon, which is a disembodied phase — no body can express pure beauty — and at the new moon, what is achieved is not ugliness but complete plasticity and formlessness, and this is also a disembodied phase. The wheel is much more complex and subtle than it seems at first glance!
As for Denise, she’s a mistress, not a prostitute — the difference between those two was socially very important in Yeats’s time…
Dylan, #10
I noticed the list but I was stuck at apple and acorn (pg 27). I think your interpretation does very nicely for and will let me move forward. Thank you!
Yeat’s claims the Speculum Angelorum et Hominum had a large diagram with phases of the moon “…mixed up with an apple, an acorn, a cup…..a scepter or wand”. Not sure I see an acorn on the illustration at the end of the chapter (pg 48). Item on the left by the new moon is probably the apple but its opposite is a flower. Oak trees flower but I don’t think like that.
Also, thanks for mentioning the sequence of lifetimes under the order of Earth, Water, Air, Fire, which is a linear progression. I’m thinking the order in the woodcut is different due to the cyclical nature of the system (system of lifetimes?) it represents. It could very well be that in the big picture, the very big picture, our souls proceed back to the divine in a lineal order but on a more granular level (granular over multiple lifetimes) our souls tumble around a bit, getting a few cycles in before proceeding?
As far as Crowley, I thought he might be doing the same thing sd Yeats with some of those texts: taking the channeled information and refining it through some editing, maybe not the book of the law, but others…
…anyway, I have a book I got at a used sale by Reg Skene that is a study of Yeats Cuchulain plays. I will have to read those and that in time.
Skipping ahead slightly, Dodona sounds like a very intetesting oracle.
If tbe sun is a step-down transformer and harmonizing modulator of planetary and other stellar energies, the moon is another step-down transformer. The energy us further balanced there through ongoing tidal / waveform oscillations beamed down to earth in a four-phase cycle.
Whew, all this stuff is way out of my league. But when the next Open Post happens I have something to share about my positive experience of my Christianized version of the Elemental Cross and Circulation of Light. Until then TSW!
Hah! Becoming annoyed and flailing about have been integral parts of my work with A Vision so far! Fortunately the rewards are starting to materialize. Studying Yeatsian prose requires the kind of attention I usually give to his poetry, reading silently at least three times and once aloud to absorb the sound and sense. I’ve been savoring Per Amica Silentia Lunae and loving it! Thank you for your invaluable guidance on this fascinating voyage.
Do you know if the 28 images that were part of the original transcription were ever cataglogued by other reviewers or Yeats scholars? Any public archives of them?
Justin:
Touches of Sweet Harmony sounds interesting. My current before-bed reading is The Rhizome and the Flower: The Perennial Philosophy – Yeats and Jung by James Olney. He gives a brief summary of Pre-Socratic philosophy from Pythagoras, Parmenides, Hippocrates and Empedocles, to Plato’s synthesis and expansion of them, and traces significant parallels between Jungian and Yeatsian ideas. It’s “yeasty” (hat tip to Clarke aka Gwydion).
Methinks there will be consequences in that Robartes chose Mary Bell, experienced in hatching someone else’s chick into her husband’s nest, to accompany him and Owen Aherne to plant the egg in the desert. A new age may be born but the cuckoo passage prior hints that it will be through subterfuge. Maybe that is the only way a new age can be born and survive.
Also, significant is Denise thought she would have been the better person to accompany Robartes/Aherne on the task to hatch the egg but was not chosen. Ignored in conversation and finally not chosen for a great task. Maybe it is as simple as Denise belongs to the primary tincture and those that ignore or not choose her are of the antithetical (O’Leary/Duddon/Robartes).
@justin Patrick Moore
Thanks for the beautiful resonant quote I might never have encountered.
Justin, it is indeed. As for the sun and moon, that’s a very traditional way to look at it.
BeardTree, I’ll look forward to it. I know a fair number of Christians who are interested in esoteric work and I like to be able to point them to approaches that work with their faith.
Goldenhawk, that I know of, the 28 images only exist as written descriptions in the notes Yeats took from the seances with his wife. I have the published copies of that materials, and am considering finding an artist who can create a deck.
Scotty, good. Keep exploring.
Yeats’ writing is certainly evocative, but at times hard to get through. I suppose part of it is because he is trying to get across some very complicated ideas, and trying to write about them in a simpler way may result in something that would be easier to read yet more disconnected from the complex concepts he is describing. Still, it really makes me appreciate those posts.
I read ahead to Per Amica Silentia Lunae as I think you recommended the last time and had some questions, but I suppose they may as well wait until we get to that post (or posts, since presumably you’ll be covering the second half too?). I will say I am already annoyed. 😛 As well as inspired.
As for the subject of this post, I wouldn’t be able to find it on short notice, but I distinctly remember some more modern philosophical debate about whether humanity is morally obliged to save all prey animals from predators by reeducating carnivores or at least by providing them with readily available alternatives and constant surveillance to prevent backsliding. Some doubtless well-meaning souls, keen to end the violence inherent in the ecosystem, answered in the affirmative. The episode with the cuckoos is either prescient or reflects the fact that such ideas have been around for a while – as well as Yeats’ general skepticism about progress and contemporary do-gooders, of course.
Hi John,
I see that this website tackles the moonphases in history:
https://www.yeatsvision.com/Twelvefold.html#:~:text=and%20elements%20from%20both%20are%20included%20in%20the%20last%20entries
are you familiar with this cycles from his work or you have other interpretation
Thanks,
Ed
Mr. Greer, that Edmund Dulac name rang a vague bell with me then I recalled seeing it on a hobby website some while ago. He did some other art things, but for kings, British kings.
http://www.worldofcoins.eu/forum/index.php/topic,46818.0.html
http://www.worldofcoins.eu/forum/index.php/topic,51280.15.html
Hello JMG
I’m with BeardTree @16 with this a bit.
I am not equipped intellectually to tackle reading Yeats proper, however I totally enjoyed (and will in future) your essay on A Vision.
Being a devout student of “the boob tube”😉, and having just watched the marathon over the Fourth of July weekend, a lot of the stories here in your essay reminded me of Twilight Zone episodes😊
Thank you always for your patience and insights.
Yogaandthetarot
Archdruid, why did the ancient Celts wear the symbol of the Wheel? Is the daimon of Yeats the same as the daimon of Socrates?
There is some difficulty for sure in the text, but not like others I have read. To me, when I read Yeats it is like returning to a stream of clear water. Or perhaps a pool where salmon feed on the hazelnuts that fall from above. It is supremely nourishing. I read his Collected Poems back in 2023 or early 2024.
@AliceEm: You will encounter the quote in the Anima Hominis (unless you are talking about the Crowley poem of course! ) No problem, though! Always happy to share.
@Goldenhawk: I think you will get a lot out of the Touches of Sweet Harmony. I will keep an eye out for The Rhizome and the Flower (the library doesn’t have a copy unfortunately.)
the_archivist:
Thanks for that link!
JMG:
The 28 “curious allegorical pictures” are mentioned there:
https://www.yeatsvision.com/PhImages.html
An artist, Jaff Seijas, has painted interpretations of the 28 images:
https://jsarchivegallery.blogspot.com/search?q=yeats
As a further thought, when was the Age of Aquarius supposed to dawn according to Yeats? Is it supposed to include most of the 20th century in his scheme? If I understood that correctly, it makes for an interesting divergence from the common opinion of the 20th century as the age of, for better and/or worse, mass politics. But it is not necessarily wrong if we think in terms of concentration of power among a narrowing elite, as well as a growing strain of cultural elitism…
As for evil, it is readily apparent in a variety of powerful movements and influential individuals that loudly rejected “conventional bourgeois morality”. The previously discussed George Bernard Shaw is a fine example. He wrote in an introduction to one of his plays that it is wrong to kill people as punishment for crimes, but right to kill people (innocent or not) for the improvement of society. Of course those “new moralists” still overwhelmingly thought of themselves as good, but theirs was a very special kind of good that they knew would be seen as evil from the perspective of their deluded and backwards opponents (hence their insistent scoffing at “false humanism”). It was a sort of antithesis to the previously more common idea of good that was, if nothing else, more aligned with the instincts of the majority, which favoured the reverse of Shaw’s position. While visible before, this tendency distinctly gained ground in the early 20th century.
Daniil, oh, yes, we’ll be getting to the second half of “Per Amica Silentia Lunae” in due time. I’ve also seen those pointless debates about how humanity ought to browbeat nature into obeying our current moral fashions; it’s a source of wry amusement for me that what Yeats chose as an over-the-top bit of farce is now treated as a serious option.
Archivist, yes, those are Yeats’s own reflections on history. I think he was incorrect about the last two dates; to my mind we entered the last but one period (26-27-28) in 2012, and will reach the first phase and the beginning of the new cycle later in this century.
Zemi, hmm! Thank you — I wasn’t aware of this.
Jill, don’t diss your own intellect! It’s simpler than it looks — it just takes some patience absorbing new concepts and getting used to an older style of writing.
Tengu (1) we don’t know; they didn’t leave any explanations. (2) Not exactly. We’ll get into that as the discussion proceeds.
Justin, I find Yeats’s prose very clear, but then I’ve had many years to get comfortable with it.
Goldenhawk, thanks for this!
Daniil, Yeats doesn’t specify the end of the current cycle and the beginning of the next one, just that it hadn’t happened yet in 1937. As we’ll see, the 20th century fits his predictions to a T.
Older prose can take some getting used to, especially in fiction, where the dialogue lines between characters aren’t always broken down into separate lines and are all together in a paragraph.
When I read this chapter for the first time, I was pretty sure that Huddon, Duddon, etc. are symbolic representations of something or the other. But at the time I could not determine what, for the life of me. So I am really grateful for this article. I can now understand something of the symbolism.
By the way, even though you haven’t mentioned it, I do feel that there is a symbolism here involving the Planets. I may be wrong, but Duddon is an artist and Huddon is a soldier. Denise claims her business to be ‘Love’. Further, the remaining characters are paired – Aherne and Robartes, Bell and Bond. So perhaps they are the luminaries that we associate pairwise.
In this sense, here is my guess. I may well be wrong:
☉ — John Bond
☾— Mary Bell
☿ — John Duddon (art is a form of expression, or am I going on a stretch here?)
♀ — Denise de l’Isle Adam
♂ — Peter Huddon
♃ and ♄ — Owen Aherne and Michael Robartes, I cannot tell which is which.
I am probably completely off, but this is a guess. This of course leaves Daniel O’ Leary out, but he is the voice that narrates the story (and also the protagonist of the Irish tale in question, or so I have learnt). How close am I to the mark?
@the_archivist #22; @goldenhawk #27 and Zemi #23 thanks much for the links.
@JPM #26 – I too find this work very nourishing though I wonder how the drink was mixed. I particularly like The Phases of the Moon with Aherne and Robartes deep into their poem/conversation/incantation.
@Daniil Adamov #28 – your post prompted more thoughts on what Robartes is up to and what if forebodes about the upcoming age: I already mentioned how his plan to hatch the egg seemed like subterfuge but thinking about it, I’m not sure Robartes, even with Aherne at his side, fills me with confidence. He purchased the egg in Tehran. No, not Tehran, maybe in Arabia or Persia or India. “This egg is of historical and mythical importance and I have an aeon changing plan to hatch it but I really don’t recall where I got it from…” Brah…..
Also the way he offhandedly dismisses John Bond and Mary Bell after they tell their story “I have now two questions to ask, and four of you must answer. Mary Bell and John Bond need not, for I have taught them nothing. Their task in life is settled”. Despite that, he will sure enough use Mary Bell to accomplish his task. She’s ecstatic but I’m not sure she has thought it all through.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Robartes. He’s genuinely kind and a very interesting cat with much to teach. Hope he shows up at the next Ecosophian conference, it would be a blast. The question is, would you let him babysit your kids; borrow your car; loan him some money, let alone hatch and nurture(?) a new age.
Fun fact about Cracow and alchemy- it’s what costed it de facto status as capital. Apparently king Sigismund the third wanted to help the treasury by dabbling in it, but he only ended up causing a fire on Wawel(he was the Michał Sędziwój’s employer btw). While Cracow remained de iure capital, king moved to Warsaw(first temporarily then for good) and things started to go downhill…
Rajarshi #31,
Your idea has a lot of merit. Going off The Great Wheel illustration which follows the The Phases of the Moon, I’m sure all the characters align to one of the different phases which seems to be rule by astrological signs (Aires, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn).
Going by their ruling planets we have Mars, the Moon, Venus and Saturn.
I think each character can be assigned to one phase of the moon around that circle and the main partner may be opposite (Denise = Venus but opposite resides the phases of Aires and in this incarnation she’s tied up with Peter Huddon who is definitely Mars).
I’m interested in your assignment of the sun and moon to John Bond and Mary Bell. Please elaborate. I’ve been mostly ignoring them but they were definitely invited by Robartes to tell their story in person, for a reason. I have yet to figure out Robartes/Aherne and John Duddon yet and where they should appear.
Another complication with the Wheel is the interior square containing a cup, wand, apple and flower. Each symbol spans parts of two different astrological phases on the circle opposite. Top it all off we have alchemical symbiology or ideograms on the four corners of the picture, which are placed opposite of the the middle of each of the four quarters of the circle representing the elements but I don’t think they correspond with the sign of the Zodiac nearby. Maybe as the wheel turns there are moments of friction with the main element producing energy such as a generator through some sort of electromagnetic induction but I’ll worry about that when we get to the next chapter.
“As for Denise, she’s a mistress, not a prostitute — the difference between those two was socially very important in Yeats’s time…”
That would be Proust’s time too. I’m thinking of Odette; a “demimondaine,” lover of Swan, and mother of Gilberte.
@JMG #12: Okay, as eager as I am for more of this story, I see that a lot of the answers to my questions will be ‘Just wait, we’ll get to that!’ Both the Michael Robartes and Phases of the Moon sections seem to be teasers or overtures, introducing the main themes of the coming drama in simpler melodic form so we can catch them as ear worms.
(I like that metaphor! I have definitely been frequently hearing Yeats’ soft Irish voice reciting ‘Huddon, Duddon, and Daniel O’Leary’, rhyming, of course, with ‘dairy’).
As for Denise, I took her at her word when she said that love was her profession. Maybe it’s that literal thinking tripping me up again…
The cuckoo and the egg is an interesting idea. Obviously (or not?) a new era that breaks with the old should have different parentage – otherwise how do you break the cycling of ideas and introduce new ones?
If you ever migrate to a new blog platform, then The Cuckoo would be a good title for your new blog (though I suspect your too humble for that) 😉
#32 Scotty, that does sound fair. I’m not sure if I have it right but I get the sense that “interesting and likeable enough but altogether unreliable” describes the “antitheticals” quite well as a rule. Then again, that prompts a different line of question from me: how much do the people involved in the hatching of an age-egg affect the character of the age? Indeed, what do they influence, and why does an age need them in the first place? If they fail to hatch the egg or just don’t show, would someone else have to do it instead, and until then the previous age or an indefinite agelessness will be prolonged? Of course, it’s likely one isn’t supposed to take the story at face value, but I cannot help wondering about the world suggested by the story.
According to the Oxford Companion to the English Language (under the entry for ‘Celt’):
‘…the peoples so identified share a variety of traditions and attributes that derive from and resemble those of the classical Celts: reputations for being proud, suspicious, flamboyant and quarrelsome, for having vivid and often fantastic imaginations, for engaging in hyperbole and whimsy, and for a love of words, story, music and liquor…In the history and mythology of Western Europe, the Celts are an ancient counterpoint to the Anglo-Saxons, often seen in contrast as stolid, reserved, deferential, and lacking in spontaneity.’
As for the Anglo-Irish, in the words of Yeats:
‘…We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Burke; we are the people of Grattan; we are the people of Swift; the people of Emmet; the people of Parnell. We have created the most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence…’
It’s strange that this hybrid of Norman, Norseman, Englishman, Welshman and Gael should end up ‘more Irish than the Irish’ and more martial than any Anglo-Saxon. Yeats was the soul of the (mostly very eccentric) Anglo-Irish, but he was also the bard of Ireland as a whole, and an inspiration for much of the ‘Celtic Twilight’ movement.
Hi John Michael,
I know about failure, been there heaps of times.
The story floats beyond my understanding, apologies. But actually, a person learns more from their failures, than their successes, if they but choose to face themselves.
Cheers
Chris
“interesting and likeable enough but altogether unreliable” … sounds like some of my artist friends and certain bohemian types in general (though not all). Fun at the party, but you wouldn’t want to call them if you needed help getting something done in other words.
@ Scotty # 34
Well, I did not have a very concrete idea of why Bond and Bell should be Sun and Moon, but the way I see it, there are two ladies here and two of the classical luminaries are normally deemed to be feminine. Since the Moon is paired with the Sun while Venus occurs in a triplet with Mars and Mercury, I assumed Denise (with Huddon and Duddon) would be Venus and Bell (companion of Bond) would be the Moon.
After reading your comment above, I realize that the symbolism of the characters may not have been of the Planets. So I have thought about this again, and here is my second go at this:
The first four characters represent the four Transitions of the wheel.
• O’ Leary, who throws the shoe, is Violentia.
• Duddon is Pulchritudo, pursuing the beauty of his mistress
• Huddon is Temptatio – temptation is required to activate the quest for beauty, just as Duddon needs Huddon to have a go first.
• This makes Denise the Sapienta, although I confess to being a little bit flummoxed by this. She does make old men shy, so there’s that going for her being Wisdom.
Also, since they are all materialistic beings with ordinary (but absurd) experiences, so they represent these phases in the Primary Tincture. This would mean that the next four characters represent the phases of the Antithetical vortex.
Now here we have Robartes, who is apparently Sapienta. He is the psychic in the squad. Not much is mentioned about Aherne, since he rarely speaks, but he does interject to insist that the world is transforming, not being destroyed. He also saves O’ Leary, who is Violentia. This would imply him to be Violentia himself. Likewise, just as Bell required Bond to have a child, and again to have a cuckoo’s nest, they must have the same relationship as Huddon and Duddon. This makes them Pulchritudo and Temptatio respectively.
@ Scotty # 34
> Maybe as the wheel turns there are moments of friction with the main element producing energy such as a generator through some sort of electromagnetic induction but I’ll worry about that when we get to the next chapter.
Thank you, this idea jolted awake an association. Do you remember the fourth chapter of Levi? He mentions the perpetual machine made by combining two binaries in tension. I see two binaries here, the vertical one and the horizontal one.
I have a theory here – that there are two levels at which a human being may manifest the primary and secondary tinctures. The first is a person’s goal, and the second is a person’s means to attain a goal. When someone is seeking material goals with material means (preparing for and sitting through job interviews, for instance), that is one state of being. Here the person is completely in the primary tincture.
Now say such a person, having acquired some material success, discovers that they have been somewhat divorced from true happiness. They then set off to seek happiness, perhaps by playing video game they played as a child to reconnect with the lost joy of childhood. Here they are using external, material means to attain an internal goal.
Having tired of video games eventually, discovering their thirst for childhood joy and nostalgia not quite sated, they traverse through a whole slew of childhood associations – movies, people, etc. that they remember from their innocent days – and finally decide to simply sit and contemplate the memory of their childhood days. This is when their goal (nostalgic joy) and their means (contemplation) are both aligned with the antithetical tincture. At this phase, they are purely in the antithetical tincture.
Eventually, contemplation takes them through a new route. They are diverted from the quest of joy and find themselves questing for an answer to childhood questions, a deeper search for meaning in their lives. They discover, say, that they have always been held back in their lives because of certain shortcomings in their social skills. They lack, say, the patience to sit and wait through trivial interruptions in their thought process. This has made them cranky when working on technical jobs with systems that take a while to execute commands and queries. They decide that if they can fix this aspect of themselves, it will significantly improve their life. So they go about it, and as they do, they are pursuing material success (in the primary tincture) by placing efforts into their own self (antithetical tincture).
I think the Wheel of the Moon represents something like this. Each cycle of the wheel is this kind of rotation. When they have attained their success, they will return fully to the primary tincture and continue their turning, but now they are equipped with yet another positive aspect to face the world and have satiated another thirst in themselves.
So the four stages here are Temptatio (the desire for simple, innocent joy of childhood makes them fall from their pursuit of material success), Pulchritudo (the single-minded pursuit of the joyous experience, deep and internal), Violentia (the regret in their life, and the desire to overcome it), and finally Sapienta (the application of their learning to material pursuits, thus completing the circle).
Justin, I’m showing my age, then. In the stuff I read growing up, that was normal.
Rajarshi, interesting. Yeats doesn’t specify that, and it’s not hardwired into the system as some of the other details are, but by all means develop it.
Katylina, hmm! Alchemy and politics never did mix well…
Phutatorius, exactly. Professional mistresses were in the same intermediate class as professional gamblers, spies, and full-time occultists: not really respectable, but respectable men (though not women) could be seen in their company in all but the strictest social contexts. Regency slang called such women “demi-reps,” meaning “half reputable” — not a bad coinage.
Dylan, yep! We haven’t even gotten into the core ideas of the system yet. As for Denise, yes, love is her profession, but as Phutatorius and I have been discussing, professional mistresses occupied a different class status from prostitutes at that time.
KAN, well, it also has other connotations — in New Zealand, do they use the term “cuckoo” as slang for “mentally ill”?
Tengu, it’s a familar oddity. Notice the number of people in the current Trumpista scene who are either legal immigrants or the children of legal immigrants, and are falling all over themselves to be more American than the folks whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower!
Chris, it takes multiple readings to give up what it has to offer. Give it time.
@Daniil Adamov
– “interesting and likeable enough but altogether unreliable”
You say in seven words what took me a hundred! I may have been unfair to Robartes but that’s TBD.
-how much do the people involved in the hatching of an age-egg affect the character of the age? Indeed, what do they influence, and why does an age need them in the first place?
I think intent plays a big role. Per Eliphas Levi (Ch. 6 of The Doctrine of High Magic) destiny, will and power is a translation into human terms the divine ternary of necessity, liberty and reason.
Destiny – the time has come for a new age or better yet a new set of external influences is upon us.
Will – Robartes definitely has the will to carry out this task.
Power – Per Levi “Power is the wise use of the will, which put’s even destiny in service to the fulfillment of the sage’s desires. I think Robartes has pure intent but not sure he’s been wise. It is the cuckoo passage I find as significant along with Robartes’ story on where he acquired the egg. I think it was a forgery, Robartes obviously does not think so(or does he?) but how he acquired the egg may be another example of a lack in wisdom.
I don’t think it is important that the egg is a forgery or not. I’m reminded of a passage by Levi describing a peasant that harvests herbs each morning and if the peasant would carry “a sprig of the same herb before the rising of the sun, he would be able to perform a great number of prodigies by merely carrying this herb upon his person, for it would be the sign of his will. ” The egg itself not so important as it is a symbol of the will but lack of wisdom in intent will make things interesting.
https://archive.org/stream/transcendentalma00leviuoft/transcendentalma00leviuoft_djvu.txt
-If they fail to hatch the egg or just don’t show, would someone else have to do it instead, and until then the previous age or an indefinite agelessness will be prolonged?
I say someone else would do it, especially in context of the cyclical system we will learn about in A Vision. To me, it’s not so much that an age has to be born but an age is defined about how we relate to the world as it is now (destiny, body of fate) and the outside influences on us (e.g. The Great Wheel / Astrology). I suggest that Robartes will not so much enable the birth of a new age but will create a new framework on how people will relate to their Body of Fate / Destiny / Necessity of Things.
@Rajarshi #42 / #43
Thank you and please give me a day or two to think over what you have presented. I’ll definitely be diving into Chapter 4.
Off topic to your posts but I had a thought about Mary Bell. I really want to know why Mary was chosen to go to the desert and not Denise. One cannot say that Denise represents love and Mary doesn’t. Mary didn’t show fidelity to her husband but does love John Bond and their child even more. That’s when I had a critical thought about Mary in that she may be showing love but she sure enough won’t let love get in the way of availing herself of her husband’s resources.
My thoughts then moved onto the fact that during that age, admitting infidelity, divorce and being a single mother were pretty much not an option. She may have been chosen to help herald in an age in which she would have more options. Options such as divorce being morally neutral. Some will abuse these options and for others, it will be a lifeline.
Rajarshi #43
Thank you! Your idea (“two levels at which a human being may manifest the primary and secondary tinctures”) and the example you describe help me put a face on Yeats’ abstract model.
I am reading “Ego Dominus Tuus”, and the conversation between Here and There reminds me of the disquisition on external action and hidden, inner action in the fifth chapter of the Gita. The chapter draws a contrast between the worldly person inhabiting samsara and toiling in the world of works and wealth, and the spiritual monk who strives to bring their senses deeper within them and thereby discovers a bliss that money cannot buy.
By the way, the magical shapes on the sand got me thinking. I have been reading occult texts for a while, and I am growing sensitive to the imagery typically employed in these works. Is the grey sand on which Ille paints the diaphane? And the tower perhaps reason?
@ Goldenhawk # 47
You are welcome. I myself have never been able to ground myself in abstractions. So I always seek comfortable concrete examples. That said, those are just personal interpretations. I may well be off the mark, but this is the current scheme I am going by until we get a better picture of what these stages in the Wheel of the Moon represent.
@ Scotty # 46
I am honestly not so sure myself, but I have a feeling that these two ladies represent two different tinctures of the same phenomenon. Huddon, Duddon, and Denise have a relationship in which Huddon makes the union of Denise and Duddon possible, and Bond, Mrs. Bell, and the late Mr. Bell have a relationship where Bond gives the two of them a child.
Notice that Robartes says that the marriage bed is a symbol of the union of the thesis and antithesis, the resolution of paradox and conflict. I looked up Kant’s theory of antinomies, and that gave me a better picture. Antinomies are sort of like pairs of mutually contradicting initial assumptions from which we can begin building a philosophical framework, such that both the assumptions lead to stable philosophical frameworks without any internal contradiction.
For instance, freedom and necessity. You can use Necessity – there is no free will, all human actions are the effects of the situation they are responding to based on their current emotional, physical, and mental state – and you can build a working theory of deterministic philosophy with it. You can begin with free will and do the same. For instance, you can say that a hungry man needs to eat, and so does. You can just as easily say that a man can always choose to not eat and starve, but chooses to eat instead.
I think resolving the antinomies is basically another way of saying “neutralizing a binary”, as our Archdruid has mentioned in earlier posts. Resolving the antinomies is symbolized by the union of the marriage bed – the young Bell being born and the sexual union of Denise and Duddon. But here Bond and Huddon are required, so there is a different third element required to neutralize the binary.
So here are two trios, each representing the tertiary principle. In one case, Denise is not ashamed of the action, and eagerly goes out with the “captain”. This provokes jealousy in Duddon, who promptly decides to smash Huddon’s head in. On the other hand, Bell has the conscience to remain faithful to her husband and to only act in secrecy, and to tell her husband that the child is his own. This is their foremost difference.
I think they represent the primary and antithetical tinctures of the tertiary principle (of speech and creation) itself. I have a feeling that Bell is chosen because she represents the tincture Robartes wants to use for birthing the new age.
@ JMG # 44
Thank you. This bit is so thought-provoking: the characters are clearly symbolic, and honestly, trying to figure out what they stand for is kinda fun 🙂
Hey JMG
I can see why everyone is complaining about Yeat’s style in this chapter, it seems very “stream of consciousness” and rambling. It feels like he is trying to hastily summarise a much larger story by mentioning only a few key scenes and conversations, then abridging or leaving everything else.
I noticed that right at the start, we see Daniel talk about some funny idea Robartes has gotten into, which is that the universe is like an egg that turns itself inside-out perpetually without ever breaking its shell. Right at the start Yeats offers us an interesting metaphor for the universe that I expect we should be meditating upon. It seems like this symbol suggests something that simultaneously is changing and being born, while also still contained and limited and never actually leaves its shell or womb. Vaguely similar to the idea of the phoenix I think.
@justin Patrick Moore Anima Hominis it is! I went and read it on guttenburg bless that site and onwards from the trembling rhythm of the poet…
“Nor has any poet I have read of or heard of or met with been a sentimentalist. The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose to name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is reality. The sentimentalists are practical men who believe in money, in position, in a marriage bell, and whose understanding of happiness is to be so busy whether at work or at play, that all is forgotten but the momentary aim. They find their pleasure in a cup that is filled from Lethe’s wharf, and for the awakening, for the vision, for the revelation of reality, tradition offers us a different word—ecstasy. ”
This brought up for me a book which recently I was bound to read, Lolly Willowes, having been kneeling beside it on the shelf, unremembering of when or where I found it and brought it home. This book hit at a major life shift point, involving an embrace of reality which I found that willowes always carried but finally acts on. Tho she finds that she is claimed by satan the loving huntsman, ‘a witch’ and I’m not so one-sided in the identification of my relationship with the one and also dual and also trifold god… she really meets Yeats meaning and tells the comfortable sentimentalists that she must be on her way she simply has more important work to do sleeping in piles of beech leaves, touching a plum and recalling ‘a solitary old woman picking fruit in a darkening orchard, rubbing her rough fingertips over smooth-skinned plums, a lean wiry old woman, standing with upstretched arms among her fruit trees as though she were a tree herself, growing out of the long grass, with arms stretched up like branches’ and that sort of thing.
Hi John Michael,
Re-read the essay. What stood out to me in the second reading was that all of the binary relationships were a bit off, as in mildly dysfunctional (and not the actions of people I’d hang out with). Then along comes the swan egg to be planted in the desert, and with the three sages/magi so we’re offered for the first time a ternary which is presented as neither better, nor worse, but with different hues from the previous age.
Curiously, and this baffled me, so here is a question for you: Why don’t the three sages / magi work with the other characters to round their rough edges so they achieve a touch more balance in their lives?
Cheers
Chris
@Rajarshi #42,
Your assignment of the four transitions to the four primary characters (pupils) is spot on (O’ Leary/Violentia; Duddon/Pulchritudo; Huddon/Temptatio; Denise/Sapienta). This helped me resolve the nagging question on why Mary Bell was chosen by Robartes to accompany him and lay the egg.
The clue is when Robartes said he would ask the four primary characters two questions but “Mary Bell and John Bond need not, for I have taught them nothing”. I assert that Mary Bell and John Bond have completed the cycle and have passed through the initial temptation, pursuit of beauty, violent efforts (e.g. Mary’s lies and building a nest to pass off to her husband as legitimate) and Sapientia (e.g. John Bond accepts that Mary will depart with Robartes and he must mind her estate and their child). Also, Robartes may have deemed it more important that Mary had already raised a child under unusual circumstances and that Denise’s beauty (taller & training as a model) where not the traits needed to usher in the new age.
I’ve yet to map this to the goals of the different ages but I note that Mary Bell’s action are well suited to the new age with her goal of freedom (freedom to fall in love) and evil – evil as in adultery and lies, with her actions viewed via the lens of a heavy primary tincture or view from the point of view of the age at that time.
I still need to think over Robartes’ thoughts as they concern Emmanuel Kant’s antinomies.
Finally, I admit I have been viewing Robartes through a primary tincture. The more I think about it, the more I’m sure that Yeats is not concerned with morality as it relates to the ages as the external influences of the new age will play out in different ways. Same with the egg being fake or not. Robartes is still human and seems to be the person that is best suited put the wheels in motion to usher in the new age.
The first four characters represent the four Transitions of the wheel.
• , although I confess to being a little bit flummoxed by this. She does make old men shy, so there’s that going for her being Wisdom.
Also, since they are all materialistic beings with ordinary (but absurd) experiences, so they represent these phases in the Primary Tincture. This would mean that the next four characters represent the phases of the Antithetical vortex.
Now here we have Robartes, who is apparently Sapienta. He is the psychic in the squad. Not much is mentioned about Aherne, since he rarely speaks, but he does interject to insist that the world is transforming, not being destroyed. He also saves O’ Leary, who is Violentia. This would imply him to be Violentia himself. Likewise, just as Bell required Bond to have a child, and again to have a cuckoo’s nest, they must have the same relationship as Huddon and Duddon. This makes them Pulchritudo and Temptatio respectively.
About the Anglo-Norman-Irish being more Irish than the native Gaels, and American immigrants being more American than heritage WASP Americans, it’s a common phenomenon in humanity. We see a similar thing with the newly rich being more conspicuously rich than the old rich, and recent converts to religions and political ideologies being more zealous in their faith than people who’ve been in that religion or political ideology since birth.
Interesting article about Rene Descartes;
https://aeon.co/essays/was-rene-descartes-a-self-centred-guru-and-a-lying-fraud
“Descartes’s philosophy was therefore a mere tool devised to spread ignorance”
No, but he managed to rile up a bunch of people. They took that old thought that the first step to wisdom is to admit ignorance several steps too far. Socrates got in trouble for that idea too.
@ Scotty # 53
I hadn’t noticed that crucial part where Robert points out that Bell and Bond need not answer the questions. Thank you for pointing it out to me. His two questions are on metempsychosis and on the fall of civilizations.
At first sight, they do not appear to be related. But perhaps what he is , mentioning here is the metempsychosis of civilization itself – carrying the soul of Western Civilization into another civilization (or feudal culture) that shall act as the successor to the Western Civilization, so that the best wisdom of the Western Civilization can be preserved through the coming dark age, and may find occassion to bloom again when the world reaches another explosion of urbanization, abstraction, science, and high culture.
If so, the plan is to plant the ideas of Western Civilization in its successor state unobstrusively, in the same way that the Romans and Greeks were able to bury the egg of neoplatonism inside the very heart of Christian Europe, leading to the spiritual thesis-antithetisis pairing of the Guelphs and Ghebelines that led eventually to the modern world. In other words, Robartes is specifically looking for a cuckoo – someone who can plant Leda’s egg – the ideas of Western Civilization, inherited from ancient times – in the bosom of the culture that shall form the next great civilization.
I believe Yeats thinks that this culture shall be in the Middle East. If he were under the impression that China is your successor, he would have spoken of accompanying Aherne and Bell to China to bury the egg there instead.
Also, the egg’s journey through Turkey, Persia, and India is symbolic. Does it mean that it contains the ideas of the Greeks through an oriental lens?
@Rajarshi #43
I like your thought in there are two levels at which a human being may manifest the primary and secondary tinctures. This leads to the thought that one will approach different scenarios differently, sometimes via a primary and sometime via a antithetical.
Levi goes on to talk about finding the fixed point with four different influences (sprit, matter, movement, rest) and it could be that this is done, countless times, on both macro and micro levels by means of The Great Wheel.
@Rajarshi #49,
And I’m glad you brought up Levi’s Tetragrammaton as it helped me with your comments concerning resolving the antinomies, that and your statement “neutralizing the binaries”. Go to The Doctrine’s Chapter 4 and Levi discussing finding the fixed point. A similar concept is “the opposite of a bad idea, is another bad idea”.
You mentioned “Huddon, Duddon, and Denise have a relationship in which Huddon makes the union of Denise and Duddon possible, and Bond, Mrs. Bell, and the late Mr. Bell have a relationship where Bond gives the two of them a child.” Let’s translate that a bit with Levi’s “ternary summarized in the unit, and, in adding the idea of the unity to that of the ternary, we arrive at the quaternary: Bond and Mr. & Mrs. Bell is the ternary, which results in a child (and also Mary Bell’s selection to hatch the new age). Huddon, Denise and Duddon + Robartes equals the opportunity for Denise to articulate her true love to Duddon and / or the chance for them all to move forward in this particular cycle of the wheel.
Totally off topic but had some fun being contrary. Just now made a couple comments here on your arguments for polytheism and your book on the subject. https://blackibissocialclub.substack.com/p/some-thoughts-on-pagan-revivalism
On further reading: are you certain that it is Robartes whom Duddon knocks down? I was sure that it was Ahearne who got knocked down, and meeting Robartes was the condition Ahearne demands for not going to the police. This is pretty basic stuff. “Aherne, now that I saw him in a good light,… but this other was lean, brown, muscular…” Which is which?
Thank you to everyone who has left comments. So far, Yeats has me thoroughly befuddled and I hope that rereading the relevant sections (after reading everyone’s comments) will help me make sense of things.
JMG,
Would you consider leaving this post open for comments for the entire month, like you did with Levi? (Not for you to respond to comments, but just in case some of us want to continue to discuss throughout the month?)
Rajarshi,
Yeats’ prediction of the next great Western culture and civilization being from the Middle East reminds me of JMG’s predictions of Europe being overrun by people from the Middle East in the next few centuries and the Dar-al-Islam expanding westwards and northwards into Europe.
In this case, I think the metempsychosis means that the Dar-al-Islam takes on European Faustian characteristics as it tries to digest the European conquests and its cultures.
@ Scotty # 58
Uh, I was looking into this question you have raised about the selection of Bell over Denise, and I noticed something. There is an awful lot of mention of the date 2nd June – it is the day Denise fell in love with the impotent Duddon. But there is a little more to it. 2nd June is the date of the commencement of the formal prosecution in the Salem Witch Trials. It is also the date of Urbain Gardner’s trial – a French priest accused of witchcraft. Further, the incident with the malachite case happens a fortnight after this date, on June 16.
Also significant are the numbers 9, 5, and 4 from the story of Mary Bell. She went to winter in Southern France in the ninth year of her marriage, and she called for Bond to her house five years after that. The attendant who brought him this news visited him at 4 o’clock. I am not sure how significant these details are, but I have come to suspect that occultists use seemingly random numbers the way Anton Chekov uses weapons in the scenes of his stories.
June 2nd is the second day of the sixth month. So 6 and 2. In the tarot, 6 is marriage (and Denise met the love of her life on this day), and 2 is the high priestess. By contrast, tarot 9 is the hermit – completion and introspection. So marriage and hermitude, are represented in the first numbers to crop up in the stories of Denise and Mary Bell respectively.
Also, another set of incidents occur after the failed communion with the male partner that is significant, because of the number 14 here. A fortnight after Duddon proves impotent, Denise buys Huddon a malachite cigarette case with a single cigarette in it. Meanwhile, Bell invites Bond into her husband’s house on the fourteenth year of her own unsuccessful marriage, 14 years after the failure of her own communion.
I have checked tarot 14. It is Temperance. On this day, Denise points out that the cigarettes men gift her have always been too few to satisfy her. Cigarette is almost certainly a euphemism for sex – she has had sex only once with Huddon to keep Duddon from dudding, and this is her symbolism in the single cigarette.
On the other hand, on the fourteenth year of her own life, Mary Bell practices perfect temperance by ensuring her husband’s happiness and seemingly forgetting all about Bond, to the point where he is almost a stranger. Even as a widow she worries only for her child. So maybe she has passed the test of temperance?
Also, I have a feeling that this is not a self-contained mystery. Further answers and clarity will be delivered when subsequent chapters of the book have been studied.
JMG: true! That interpretation slipped my mind – though it does bring up some interesting thoughts ala Catch-22
As for planting the egg – the journey to the east may be symbolic (ala Hesse’s book) rather than any prediction of where the next culture is coming from
https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4701676/4691882
Guys! Look what I found trying to check the Huddon duddon O’Leary ref w my mom! What a wild old tale…
I have a strong reaction about why Mary Bell brings in the new era. Denise working in ‘love’ as a professional is separated from love in heart but Mary bell goes from stolid love for her parents and tradition which brings her into the initial marriage, she then experiences the passionate love with John and then she has devotes herself to the child all while maintaining a true compassion for the old man even tho he’s a crazy modern trying to force eccentric natural forms like cuckoo birds into boxes he approves of, caging and harassing them in the name of a misguided neurotic modern-type love. And still Mary Bell releases his soul with painstaking care and attention. She acts from true loving compassion again and again. The cuckoo bit is a red herring! And she is just the woman to mother hen the new era. <3
@everyone – I am really enjoying this Vision series but want to thank everyone for the community we have here. I look forward to the posting on Dreamwidth then here. Thanks always to our host.
I second Random’s suggestion (#61) on leaving this post open for comments.
@Phutatorius #60 – I agree. Reads that poor Aherne was the one knocked down.
@Rajarshi #56 “carrying the soul of Western Civilization into another civilization (or feudal culture) that shall act as the successor to the Western Civilization”
I like how you found this thought based on Robartes’ two questions. It has merit. I’m starting to wonder if he isn’t talking about civilization itself, as the world passes into a new age? More later on that. I do note how Aherne interjects twice to tell Robartes transformation is also an option, along with the end of an age or civilization.
“I believe Yeats thinks that this culture shall be in the Middle East.”
On a physical level, I believe that’s Yeat’s intention but there is importance of Robartes’ “returning to the desert” where he will still have “to find the appointed place”. Here I suggest we return to Eliphas Levi and the need to isolate oneself from the main astral current.
“Also, the egg’s journey through Turkey, Persia, and India is symbolic. Does it mean that it contains the ideas of the Greeks through an oriental lens?”
Oh wow. I’ll be pedantic / like Aherne and remind that it wasn’t the egg’s journey through those 3 countries it was 3 options from where Robartes’ may have picked up the egg on his journeys but what a thought. It doesn’t matter because the three countries listed are the basic itinerary of Alexander’s campaign. This points to the egg as a vehicle to preserve neoplatonism and other classic influences through the approaching chaos and into a new age.
I mentioned above Robarte’s talk of the upcoming horror and towards the end of The Phases of the Moon poem Aherne describes this dough that needing to be kneaded up so Nature can cook it into a new age. I’m thinking more the upcoming journey to the desert is not so much the hatching of the egg but burying it “in a shallow hole” where it will be hatched by “the sun’s heat” and then preserving it until it can be safely hatched. Mary less a mother than a guardian.
@Rajarshi #63
Oh wow again. I will reflect on this. When I was looking at the poem, I followed a footnote and was lead to The Great Wheel portion of the book and we will soon see how each phase is mapped to other phases (e.g. one’s phase’s mask is a different phase and the will is another phase). I’m sure the numbering maps to both the Tarot and to the phases. Good catch.
“I noticed that right at the start, we see Daniel talk about some funny idea Robartes has gotten into, which is that the universe is like an egg that turns itself inside-out perpetually without ever breaking its shell.”
That’s an interesting topology question; is this even possible? An old gf from many years ago, very bright, whose degree was in that subject (topology) entertained me by comparing a woman to a coffee cup (topologically speaking) and a man to a donut with a handle. Now if she’d had better taste in music, maybe I’d have married her!
@Phutatorius #67 (and JMG if curious),
The topology question is termed “everting the sphere”, and there are images and videos that show how it’s done. Here’s an example (gif image).
https://i.sstatic.net/fQRzT.gif
However, that’s based on the weird rules of topology: the surface of the sphere (i.e. the shell of the egg) is assumed to be arbitrarily flexible as well as able to pass through itself with no difficulty. (That might seem to make the problem trivial, but a different weird rule of topology says the whole process has to evolve smoothly without forming any sharp kinks in the process, which requires the elaborate convolutions depicted in the image.)
In a higher dimension a solid shell like a sphere or egg can be turned inside out without having to pass through itself at all. (It would still require flexibility, though. A brittle shell would still crack.)
Robartes’s egg isn’t just an empty shell being turned inside out, though. The question takes on a different character when we consider its contents, the embryo. For the egg itself (not just the shell) to fully turn inside out, the contents have to become the rest of the world, and the former rest of the world the new contents. The transformation of each into the other doesn’t necessarily imply any intermediate states or movement, so the strength or brittleness of the shell doesn’t matter.
Such inversions occur, metaphorically, in many different kinds of subjective experiences. Consider life changes such as a young adult entering a trade. Something that had previously been one minor aspect among countless minor aspects of their life—firefighting, or carpentry, or tax law—is by intention going to become the largest part of their world, and much of what might have been important before compacts into a smaller space, like the Biblical “put[ting] away the things of childhood” (1 Corinthians 1:11).
On a larger scale, the egg might for instance contain “the fringes” of society, put away out of sight, and its eversion is the gradual cycle JMG has often described whereby the embryonic ideas that have gestated in the fringes become predominant while previously predominant culture takes its turn at the fringes.
The word “perpetually” in the description of the universe-egg is really interesting in context. It’s explicitly not a one-time hatching (breaking the shell), nor even a repeated cycle between antipodes (chicken-egg), but a continual eversion. It’s an odd perspective to be leading into a discussion of a lunar cycle; perhaps a clue or caution that time, in that discussion, is not necessarily to be taken literally.
Re: Rajarshi, “This makes Denise the Sapienta, although I confess to being a little bit flummoxed by this. She does make old men shy, so there’s that going for her being Wisdom.”
From the poem on page 32:
“I put three persons in their place / that despair and keep the pace / and love wench Wisdom’s cruel face.”
So I think Denise as Sapienta fits well.
I do like the idea of aligning the characters to planets, though I see the alignment a little differently. Robartes describes Aherne as his messenger, so that would make Robartes Jupiter and Aherne Mercury. JMG describes O’Leary’s story as revolving around the conflict of the primary and antithetical tinctures, so creation and destruction, which is Saturn. Huddon, as a soldier, aligns with Mars; Denise aligns with Venus. But for the triangle, I see Duddon as Hephaestus, which could align him with Earth. (And since Duddon is the narrator, everything is from his perspective, so Earth makes sense to me.)
Someone pointed out that Turkey, Persia, and India are the basic itinerary of Alexander’s campaign and are the possible sources for the egg. The Book of Lambspring (plate V) mentions Alexander:
Alexander writes from Persia
That a wolf and a dog are in this field,
Which, as the Sages say,
Are descended from the same stock,
But the wolf comes from the east,
And the dog from the west.
The wolf and dog probably refer to Saturn and Mars, fixed and volatile. When Alexander conquered Persia, he adopted aspects of Persian dress in an attempt to unify the Persians and the Macedonians, so another version of a cuckoo-mask?
And an egg is mentioned in Splendor Solis (the Fifth Parable, plate IX): “The Philosopher’s take for example an Egg, for in this the four elements are joined together. The first or the shell is Earth, and the White is Water, but the skin between the shell and the White is Air, and separates the Earth from the Water; the Yolk is Fire, and it too is enveloped in a subtle skin, representing our subtle air, which is more warm and subtle, as it is nearer to the Fire, and separates the Fire from the Water. In the middle of the Yolk there is the FIFTH ELEMENT, out of which the young chicken bursts and grows.” The Elements are described in the same order as in Yeats’ Wheel.
My last contribution is a copy of Yeats’ Wheel in a higher resolution (https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FFfHKFmJrac/Tn5YFyAEUtI/AAAAAAAAAEg/GuOmI3kFk7w/s1600/Dulac+Great+Wheel+AVA.pngDulac+Great+Wheel+AVA.png (1523×1600)) I have printed out a copy, so I can take notes on it and thought others might like a larger version, too.
Per Walt @ 68: “Robartes’s egg isn’t just an empty shell being turned inside out, though. The question takes on a different character when we consider its contents, the embryo. For the egg itself (not just the shell) to fully turn inside out, the contents have to become the rest of the world, and the former rest of the world the new contents.”
So, the farther in you go the larger it gets?
@JMG,
Have you wondered or think there is any significance to Robartes stating the book’s diagram contained an apple, an acorn, a cup and a sceptre but the diagram in our book contains an flower in lieu of the acorn (or if that is actually an acorn in the book then a flower in lieu of an apple)? Maybe this is another case of Robartes’ dreams discovering facts or sometimes losing them.
There is always something a little off about Robartes’ as if he himself, is a dream. On one level I think Robartes represents George Yeats’ channeling of A Vision. In a dream or in the translation from the inner planes, details are sometimes lost or changed. Aherne, despite being a “a pious Catholic” is inseparable from Robartes and would represent Yeat’s and maybe George’s upbringing from childhood.
Last night I was trying to get my head around the emphasis on numbers that Rajarshi mentioned in #63. Especially, the importance of 2 June to Denise. No headway , but I had a couple of thoughts:
– Another answer to why Denise was not chosen to accompany the egg is her statement that she finds her parents detestable but loves her grandparents. She dislikes the prior age so would follow she will not be aligned to the values of the age that follows (especially if this is a case of the egg turning inside out).
– Daniel O’Leary mentioning he has been in the house six or seven months ago and then the final conversation with all present three months after the group’s initial meeting with Robartes. I’m sure Daniel O’Leary advanced six or seven moon phases since his initial incident and Denise and her two lovers three. Against this, John Bond and Mary Bell’s story is told in terms of years (more time to learn verses a quicker cycle for those starting out?).
Final thought is I think the ideal is for the ages on earth to turn inside out as the universe does but that never happens. The last two eggs were broken and that is the expectation for the egg to be placed in the desert.
@Phutatorius #70, that does follow, yes!
Here’s an appropriate visual from inversive geometry, not an exact depiction of Robartes’s egg, but another metaphor:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Inversion_of_lambda_Mandelbrot_set_with_different_translations.gif
@Anonymous #54
It’s true that later British settlers in Ireland sought to emphasise their Irish identity, but the Butlers and the other Cambro-Norman families had been marrying native Irish women for more than twenty generations. There’s no doubt that they had become Irish. In my view the Anglo-Irish became culturally Gaelicised, just like the preceding Vikings, because Ireland’s culture was much deeper and stronger. This reverse osmosis of culture also affected the British in India.
Rajarshi, tsk tsk tsk! We’ll get to that in due time.
J.L.Mc12, it’s a standard short story style from the period. Yes, a great deal of the material in the story is meant as themes for meditation!
Chris, good. Because the point of the story is to show off their imbalances, so the reader going into the philosophical part of the book has some good vivid anchors on which to hang the more abstract considerations to come.
Siliconguy, hmm! A case could be made…
BeardTree, so noted. You may find that the lack of abstract systematic theology in young religous movements — which is of course what the modern Pagan revival is — may make more sense once we’ve taken a close look at the wheel of lunar phases.
Phutatorius, thanks for catching this. You’re quite correct, of course.
Random, sure, I can do that.
KAN, Yeats will have some things to say about that as we proceed.
AliceEm, good heavens! Thank you for this — so it was a folktale, not a nursery rhyme.
Walt, thanks for this. That makes for an interesting meditation.
Scotty, I’m sure there’s more to it, but I haven’t been able to sort out that detail yet.
@ Silliconguy # 55
You know, as a STEM trained person, I have always noticed the incredible discrepancy between the treatment of Descartes in the Humanities and the treatment he receives from my lot. I have reverred the man since I was fourteen, not because of his philosophy (which I did not know of at the time) but for his ingenious use of algebra to represent geometric shapes.
I understand Descartes fundamentally as a mathematical mind. He not only conceived the idea of Cartesian Geometry, but also coined the first qualitative draft of what Newton would later call the Laws of Motion, and then topped that off by inventing the exponential notation (the one where you write the tiny 2 in x² to indicate multiplication by itself etc.).
I find it hard to believe that such a clear mathematical mind was subpar in his other intellectual endeavours. Yes, he did say a few things that are questionable – such as insisting that animals have no conscious experiences – but he was a rational and intelligent man. It is telling that the article does not even discuss his contributions to geometry, merely mentioning that he was prolific in mathematics and placing the word next to the phrase “and poetics” like his contributions there are equivalent.
It is my offensive opinion that a whole lot of philosophers suffer from “Mathematics Envy”, similar to the alleged “penis envy” that Freud talked about.
Hate to spam the comments today but just came across this interesting video. Main theme is Glastonbury Abbey. I can’t vouch for a lot of what is stated as fact but the guide follows the Mary current of energy to the “Cosmic Egg” , which was discovered and excavated by Bligh Bond.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYbKGfd-l-k&&t=22m30s
Sorry to be pedantic, but I think it ought to be Henrik Ibsen, rather than Hendrik Ibsen.
Read the chapter yesterday and found it quite delightful, I loved all the irony and symbolism, while still finding myself feeling like these were real people… masterful prose indeed.
I didn’t read this post until after, and I think I made another misstep in reading comprehension. I got the impression that in the story of the cuckoo, the old man was hinting that he knew the son wasn’t his, because he didn’t have sex with his wife, but I must have been reading too much into that.
Unanswered Questions:
Regarding Aherne’s unanswered question at the end of “Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends”: “Even if the next divine influx be to kindreds why should war be necessary? Cannot they develop their characteristics in some other way?”
Could that other way be Art (music, poetry, dance)?
Could it be Magic (to turn the egg inside out without cracking it)?
Could it be Philosophy (to “hold in a single thought reality and justice”)?
The Communicators came to give (Yeats) “metaphors for poetry.”
Some of Yeats’ poems may function as magical incantations (“murmuring a wizard song for thee”).
At the end of John Duddon’s story, there’s a letter from John Aherne (Owen Aherne’s brother) to Mr. Yeats. Three poems are mentioned:
“The Phases of the Moon” (our assignment last month)
“The Double Vision” (partially quoted later in the 1937 edition)
“The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid” (included in the 1925 edition)
Reading (or re-reading) Yeats’ poems provides tasty sensory and emotional flavoring to my slowly evolving/revolving understanding of A Vision.
“There’s more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line.
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
Closer I am to fine.”
Indigo Girls, “Closer to Fine” (1989)
@Goldenhawk #80,
There may be other paths besides war but Robartes is not the one to ask. He has either predicted what is required for souls to pass through as the new age dawns or is only focused on a path of war and terror. Yeats himself displays angst when writing about the artist’s path:
“The sentimentalist himself; while art
Is but a vision of reality.
What portion in the world can the artist have,
Who has awakened from the common dream,
But dissipation and despair?”
My sense is that we will find that, according to A Vision, we can choose different roles as we work our way around The Great Wheel but all must pass through phases of despair.
I thought Aherne received an answer at the end of The Phases of the Moon after he prompts Robartes with “But the escape; the song’s not finished yet”. I also sense The Great Wheel is not so fun a ride as Robartes answers with “Hunchback and Saint and Fool are the last crescents.” I went forward into the book and The Fool stage is not something to look forward to, unless one pins one’s hope on passing through to the first stage again, just to repeat (I’m getting some insight into how Christianity and Islam may have taken off in popularity, you get one shot at it and maybe eternal damnation is a risk worth taking if one can avoid countless wheel cycles?).
Anyway, hoping that as we move forward there will be less case for pessimism.