A Vision: The First Quarter of the Wheel, Part One

With this post we begin a detailed examination of the twenty-eight phases of Yeats’s symbolic lunar cycle. Each phase is a typical personality, as well as a typical stage in the course of a life, of a cultural or artistic movement, of a nation’s history, and of the rise and fall of an entire civilization. For the time being, following Yeats’s lead, we’ll focus on the way the phases work out in individual personalities, but even at this stage it’s worth taking a moment now and then to think of the wider applicability of the system.

Before we begin examining the individual phases, it’s helpful to set the stage, as the complexities we explored last month may have made it difficult for readers to hang onto the broader picture. As the wheel begins a new cycle, whatever phenomenon you’re tracking begins in a state of complete receptivity in which it is defined wholly by the moment-to-moment changes in its environment. Its goal in the first quarter is to contend with its own body—that is, whatever material form allows to manifest in the world. In that conflict, the body is destined to win.

This is necessary, for it’s through the conflict with the body that the soul learns to distinguish itself from its physical and social surroundings, so that it can begin to define itself as an individual distinct from the mass. While it is preparing for this immense challenge, however, all its strength is in the things it shares with other human beings, and to some extent, all of nature. The Will is only just beginning to distinguish itself from instinct in these phases, and so instinct also provides it with its automatonism—the state into which the Will falls back when exhausted, so that it can recover its strength.

If we take a moment to glance at the four faculties—Will and Mask, Creative Mind and Body of Fate—before proceeding, this will also help give some orientation. Phases take their names and numbers from the position of Will, so the phases we are discussing in this and the next post are those that have Will in the first quarter. By definition, then, in these phases the Mask will always be in the third quarter, in the opposite phase to the Will. The Creative Mind will be in the fourth quarter, and the Body of Fate will be in the opposing phase of the second quarter.

As the cycle begins, Will and Creative Mind are barely distinguished—the person is only just beginning to notice that there is a difference between what he can make something do and what it is in any more general sense. Thinking in these early phases is completely incapable of abstraction. The Will can handle specific problems in a way that is effective because it is half, or more than half, instinctive, but it cannot generalize or systematize. These are the phases of those who are much better with their hands than with their minds, and can accomplish remarkable things but cannot tell you how or why.

By the time the first quarter ends, the capacity for abstraction has arrived, and for that reason the struggle between what the person knows and what he wants rises to a terrible intensity. In the same way, and for exactly the same reasons, the cycle begins with Mask and Body of Fate all but identical—the person can hardly imagine goals distinct from the world as it presents itself to him. As the first quarter ends, Mask and Body of Fate are in stark opposition—the person can only imagine the fulfillment of his desires as the opposite of everything the world thrusts on him.

Notice also the way that Will relates to Body of Fate and Creative Mind to Mask. At the beginning of the quarter, each of these pairings are nearly opposite, leaving both active faculties largely free. As it ends, by contrast, the Will is identical with the Body of Fate and the Creative Mind with the Mask: the person is driven by the whole thrust of his environment to will what he wills, and his mind cannot keep from contemplating the desires he can never fulfill. This is why, of all the phases, the 8th (where this happens) is the most difficult. The 22nd, where the same tremendous opposition returns, is just a little easier because its task is to let go of a subjectivity that has become a terrible burden. The 8th, by contrast, is the phase where that subjectivity has to be created in the first place, by being wrenched free of collective consciousness by raw force. Everything in the first quarter of the wheel leads up to that agonizing effort.

Following Yeats’s lead, we will leave a detailed examination of Phase 1 for later, and begin with the first incarnate phase of this quarter, Phase 2.

Phase 2: Beginning of Energy

Imagine for a moment that you blinked awake suddenly with no memories at all: no trace of language, no concept of personal identity, no practical knowledge, not even the muscle memory that plays so large a role in motor skills. Most of us experience this at the beginning of each new incarnation—there are a few who have scraps of recollection from previous incarnations even in those first days of life—and dim memories of that state sometimes surface in odd contexts. Such memories, if you happen to have them, offer a useful glimpse back at the 2nd Phase.

In this phase the Will and Creative Mind have both been wiped clean by their passage through the complete plasticity of Phase 1. The Mask and Body of Fate, by contrast, have passed through the phase of greatest intensity, the full-moon phase of Phase 15, and so have extraordinary power over their counterparts. Since this is a primary phase, like all the phases before Phase 8, the Will can only be in phase—that is, in harmony with the potentials of its own phase—by renouncing its pursuit of the Mask and letting the Body of Fate govern all. The Mask derives from the incandescent intensity of Phase 16, however, and renouncing it is beyond the powers of most souls in Phase 1. Only when the soul has passed many times around the wheel does it have the essential wisdom to live in phase this early in the cycle.

Nearly always, then, this station of the wheel is lived out of phase. What Yeats means by this is that the soul approaches life the wrong way round and suffers the consequences. This is the normal state of human existence, since it is the condition of a soul that has not yet learned the lessons of its phase. The state of being in phase, by contrast, comes when the lessons have been learned. For those who are in later phases, when reflection has dawned, thought and meditation on what it would mean to be in phase can help speed the process of learning the lesson of the phase and gaining the benefits of that condition. In these early phases, however, reflection has not yet become possible and lessons must be learned through that venerable institution, the school of hard knocks.

Out of phase, then, a person of this phase is ignorant and angry. All he knows of the life of the mind is that other people have something that he lacks, and that fact fills him with rage and bitterness; thus his false Mask is “Fury” and his false Creative Mind is “Moroseness.” He lashes out in all directions, bellowing that he is as good as anyone else—and of course he is; the thing he does not realize is that his possession of natural instinct gives him something that the intellectual intensity of the 16th Phase lacks and longs for, and that in this gift, which he does not notice or value, is his potential for magnificence. Only when he lets go of his futile attempt to imitate the blazing individual passion of the 16th Phase, and lets himself become what he already is, can he make the potential a reality.

In phase, he turns his attention away from the Mask and toward the Body of Fate, and Creative Mind rather than Will takes the lead, as it always should for those in primary phases. Rage gives way to a sense of wonder and joy that, being instinctive and therefore the summing up of all human experience, is infallible in its own sphere; the true Mask is thus “Player on Pan’s Pipes,” the expression of the inherent beauty of sheer existence itself. The true Creative Mind is “Hope,” because once the clinging to an artificial image of passion has been set aside, the mind wakes to the experiences of each moment and, because it takes delight in them without clinging, can always anticipate more delights to come.

The Body of Fate of this phase is titled “None except monotony.” This may seem to conflict with what I’ve just written, but the contradiction is apparent rather than real. Nothing much happens to the person of this phase; nature unfolds in its usual way, the Creative Mind attends to each moment as it passes, and that is enough.

Phase 3: Beginning of Ambition

In this phase the Will and the Creative Mind have moved further apart. While they still stand mostly in parallel, the soul has begun to distinguish what it wants from what it experiences: the Mask and the Body of Fate are no longer entirely merged. The soul also has the lessons of the 2nd Phase engraved on it. While these are not accessible to conscious thought in life, they guide the first stirrings of thought and emotion in the growing soul. The phase is called “Beginning of Ambition” because the Will makes its first fumbling attempts to find a direction in which its energies can be expressed.

This is still a primary phase, and so the soul can only be in phase by making the Will turn aside from its pursuit of the Mask and letting the Creative Mind’s pursuit of the Body of Fate govern all. This is just a little easier than it was in the 2nd Phase, partly because the searing intensity of the Mask has faded as it moves further from the disembodied 15th Phase, and partly because the soul is no longer quite so dazed as it was when it first emerged from the complete blank of the 1st Phase. Far more often than not, though, the soul still lives this incarnation out of phase, and learns the lessons of the phase the hard way.

Out of phase, the soul is still incapable of reflection, but it is no longer limited to the blind incoherent rage of the 2nd Phase. It has learned to mouth slogans and repeat the verbal tics of popular culture, or of whatever subculture it happens to take up, even though it cannot yet grasp the meaning of any of these formulae. This is why the title of the false Creative Mind in this phase is “Abstraction,” despite the fact that genuine abstraction is not yet possible for souls in this phase. When real abstraction takes place, the Creative Mind contemplates many individual experiences and draws an abstract form from their similarities. In the 3rd Phase, by contrast, abstract notions have as yet no connection to experience.

This is what generates the “clodhopper folly” that Yeats describes, and explains the title of the false Mask of this phase, which is simply “Folly.” The person out of phase clings to slogans and verbal labels which he cannot connect to experience, and so can only be empty noises to him. His attempts to live these formulae and impose them on others are alike disastrously inept. If instead he gives up the attempt to live in the intensely personal mental syntheses that rule the life of the 17th Phase, and lets Creative Mind and Body of Fate take the lead, he relies on clear and powerful instincts rather than a hollow imitation of intellect, and becomes vital, strong, and successful in life.

The Body of Fate for this phase, “Interest,” is a considerable help in the struggle to turn away from the Mask and live in the primary tincture rather than an imitation of the antithetical. At every moment the world presents the person of this phase with new objects that attract his attention and desires, drawing him away from the realm of empty words. If he attends to this ever-changing panoply in its own terms, it awakens his true Creative Mind, “Simplicity.” Because he no longer tries to be clever, he can become wise. In the same way, once the false Mask fades away, it becomes possible to achieve the true Mask, which is “Innocence.” It is the spirit of the child who can grasp every experience freely because he clings to none.

Phase 4: Desire for Exterior World

In this phase the paired movements of Will and Creative Mind, Mask and Body of Fate have gone further, and the four faculties are now nearly equidistant on the Great Wheel. This is always a condition of great strength, and it is also the state in which the tinctures can open or close. Up to this point the primary tincture has dominated, but both the tinctures have been open onto that immense reality that appears as Nature in the early primary phases and as God in the late primary phases. That reality, pressing in through the open tinctures, swamps the mind and makes any real attempt at thought impossible.

Now the tinctures are closing and the mind begins to awaken. Since this is an even-numbered phase, the primary tincture closes here—the antithetical tincture will close in Phase 5—and so the overwhelming grip of reality-as-Nature loosens. Reflection and genuine abstraction have become possible, though both are unfamiliar as yet, and any attempt to rely on them drives the person promptly out of phase. This is still a primary phase, and many more experiences and several more lives will be needed before the traumatic passage from the primary to the antithetical side of the wheel, where reflection becomes one of the supreme strengths of the Will, and abstraction a tool of immense power.

Out of phase, the person tries to cut himself off from the instinct that it still his surest guide — thus the title of the false Creative MInd of this phase, “Mutilation” — and imitate the emotional philosophy that is the keynote of the opposite 18th Phase. “Will” is the title of his false Mask, for as yet the person of this phase has no freedom to will what he chooses; his Will is enforced, not free, and so is his Mask; so he gives himself over to some set of abstract or conventional ideas, which intoxicate him the way that slogans and verbal formulae intoxicate the person of the 3rd Phase, and convinces himself that pushing these ideas on himself and everyone else is the action of a strong and free will. The results are never good.

In phase, by contrast, he has all the instinctive wisdom and natural grace of the two previous phases, but with an additional factor, because the capacity for abstract thought has been born. If he relies on the Creative Mind and Body of Fate as he should, his abstractions will not be empty concepts borrowed ineptly from some other mind but practical rules of thumb rooted in his own experience. Joined with instinct, this makes him shrewd, pragmatic, and usually correct. Given a leadership role, whether of a family, a community, or a nation, he will become one of those wise leaders memorable for the great good sense of their decisions and the enduring bonds of affection uniting them with those they govern.

The true Mask in this phase is “Passion,” for the innocent calm of the characters of the last two types when in phase has given way to strong desires and definite goals. The emotional philosophy that guides the person of the opposite 19th Phase is reflected here in simple passion which, guided by instinct, leads in constructive directions. The Body of Fate, similarly, is “Search.” What was once mere interest has become an act of the whole self, a passionate quest for something that is not yet clear to the person. That quest will reach its fulfillment in the 15th Phase, when Will and Creative Mind are again united.

The true Creative Mind, finally, in this phase is “First Perception of Character.” In making sense of this, remember that people in antithetical phases have personality, a quality that is wholly individual and uniquely theirs, while people in primary phases have character, a quality that is shared with many others. In this phase the Creative Mind begins to perceive these shared qualities and thus can anticipate what people of this or that character will do. In the process, the person also begins to perceive his own character, and sets the stage for its transformation into personality.

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These first three phases of the wheel, as noted in last month’s post, also form a complete wheel of their own. It can be very helpful to take the time to think through this: to imagine these three phases as a cycle that dawns in the 2nd Phase, reaches its fulfillment in the 3rd, and ripens into reflection and self-transcendence in the 4th. As we proceed through the phases, you will have many chances to do the same thing over again, and this will help you understand the wheel as a whole and get the facility with it that will help you make sense of the system’s practical applications when we get to those.

More generally, I encourage readers to take the time to reflect on the phases we’ve discussed in this post, and especially to see if you can find examples among people you’ve known or know currently. Those readers who have young children will also have the chance to see these three phases as they work out in the cycle of a single life. The more time you put into using the concepts of the system as tools for thinking, the more you’ll learn from it.

In the meantime, please review the text on Phases 5, 6, 7, and 8 for next month’s post!