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

The Great Wheel of the symbolic phases of the Moon, as noted already, is the central mandala of Yeats’s Vision. Two months ago, in the last installment of this (usually monthly) book club, we examined phases 2, 3, and 4 of the Wheel, the phases in which the soul makes the first fumbling efforts to experience itself as something distinct from its social and natural environment. Those first steps are by and large easy ones and, provided that the soul remains in phase and does not succumb to the lure of the false Mask and false Creative Mind, they are happy ones as well. The natural instincts are strong, and guide the soul through this period of childlike innocence.

Neither the ease nor the happiness will endure as the next phases arrive. Having learned from instinct and received guidance and protection from it, the soul must now outgrow it, wrestle with it, and defeat it in order to become something more than the mere product of its society and its genetics. This is anything but easy. It’s as though a plant had to tear itself up by the roots in order to fulfill its destiny, becoming an animal and roaming freely over the earth.

A brief summary of our basic terms will probably be necessary after the hiatus. The soul has four faculties, Will, Creative Mind, Mask, and Body of Fate. The two active faculties, Will and Creative Mind, are the capacities for action and perception respectively, while the two passive faculties, Mask and Body of Fate, are the goals of Will and Creative Mind respectively; think of them as the Heart’s Desire and the World As It Is and you’ll get the basic idea. Will and Mask are always in opposite phases, Creative Mind and Body of Fate likewise. Each phase defines specific positions of all four faculties, but the position of Will gives the name and number to the whole phase.

There are also two tinctures, primary and antithetical, which form the matrix within which the phases come and go. The primary tincture relates to the world around us, the antithetical tincture to the world within us. The tinctures open as they near the two climactic points on the wheel of phases, Phase 1 of complete absorption in contemplation of the cosmos and Phase 15 of complete absorption in contemplation of the unique vision of beauty that motivates the soul. They close as they move away from those points, leaving the soul to its own devices. Got all that? With this in mind, let’s proceed.

Phase 5: Separation from Innocence

As the primary tincture closed in Phase 4, leaving the awakening soul able to perceive itself as a being distinct from the cosmos, the antithetical tincture closes in this phase. This allows the soul to begin to think its own thoughts and dream its own dreams, instead of simply mirroring the commonplaces of the society in which it is born and the hardwired preconceptions of the human psyche. Reflection has become possible—“reflection” here being the capacity of the mind to think about its own thinking, to step outside its own thoughts for a moment and consider them with at least the first fragile hint of objectivity.

The essential task of the soul in this phase, in turn, is to use the freedom that has just been born in it. It matters very little in the greater scheme of things whether the freedom is used well or badly, whether it leads to triumph or disaster—though of course it matters a great deal to the person in whom that soul is incarnate, and who has to deal with the consequences! What matters is that it is used, that the soul begins the process of freeing itself from the natural and social framework that, up to this point, has defined its reality.

The true Mask in this phase, the ideal toward which the Will should strive, is therefore Excess. The Mask always derives from the phase exactly opposite from the Will, and this always offers a clue to its meaning. In this case the Mask comes from the melodramatic and assertive Phase 19, in which the unity of being the soul has attained at Phase 15 comes apart. The personality of Phase 19 seeks some conviction that will give it confidence and justify forceful and dramatic action. To the character of Phase 5—character rather than personality, for personality requires a unique orientation that is not yet possible in these early phases—forceful and dramatic action are as innate and inescapable as flooding when the river ice breaks up in spring.

These actions may be clumsy; in fact, they are rarely anything else, since the soul has not yet learned to be subtle, and the effort it needs to wrench itself free from its natural and social matrix makes all its actions awkward. Failure in this phase comes accordingly from the attempt to flee from the newborn freedom back into the familiar comforts of the collective and the instinctive. Here, uniquely in Yeats’s system, the false Mask and false Creative Mind have the same name: Limitation. Out of phase, a person of this phase obsessively proclaims laws and morals and maxims that he never quite understands, and lashes out constantly at a world that offends him by not behaving according to some set of rules borrowed from outside the self.

The true Creative Mind in this phase is titled Social Intellect. This comes from phase 25, a phase of intense moral consciousness, and gives the person of Phase 5 unusually clear perceptions of the human world around him. These are used, however, in the service of excess. The person of this phase thus becomes, in Yeats’s words, “a corrupter, disturber, wanderer, a founder of sects and peoples,” whose tremendous energy sets destinies in motion that he himself can neither imagine nor direct.

The Body of Fate in this phase, finally, is called Natural Law. As the actions of the person of Phase 5 are very nearly pure untrammeled energy and motion, they are subject to the ordinary laws of nature to a much greater extent than any subsequent phase. The person of this phase rushes on his fate, and that fate will be exactly determined by the mechanical details of speed, direction, and intervening obstacles. The consequences of these actions can therefore often be predicted by almost anybody except the one who does them.

Phase 6: Artificial Individuality

Another step away from unity with nature brings the soul into an intermediate zone between character and personality. Yeats uses the word “individuality” for this zone; where character is generic and imposed by nature, and personality is unique and imposed by the vision of the ideal, individuality is assembled by the Will out of whatever materials come to hand. There is always something forced about this assemblage, and never more so than in Phase 6, when the soul must carry out this task for the first time.

This is the first of the phases for which Yeats offers a real person as an example. The American poet Walt Whitman, author of Leaves of Grass, is a fine case study of this phase in its positive expression. Whitman assembles his individuality right out in public in his writings; the raw materials he uses are his own experiences of nature and his fellow human beings, processed through a mind that has achieved reflection, and gotten skilled at it, but is still not that far removed from the innocence of Phases 2 through 4. The extraordinary freshness and the obvious delight he takes in everything he experiences are typical of the first quarter of the wheel, when in phase; it is Whitman’s genius, and one of his great contributions to world literature, to express those with so much energy and so little self-consciousness.

Essential to that achievement are the true Mask of this Phase, which is Justice, and its true Creative Mind, which is Ideality. The construction of an individuality out of whatever raw materials come to hand is a chancy business; if the Will is bamboozled by abstractions and tries to live in an antithetical manner, according to opinions that can only be empty noise at this Phase, the result is the false Mask, which is Tyranny: the will becomes overbearing, and tries to force everything and everyone around it to obey some formula or other in which the Will itself never really believes. It’s an old and bleak story: the man who spends his life trying to force his beliefs on others in order to convince himself that those very beliefs must be true.

In the same way, the Creative Mind has to focus on the ideal. It has to be more interested in praising the best than in condemning the worst, so that it can maintain the joyous and fresh quality that is essential to this Phase. Lacking that, the soul falls too easily into the false Creative Mind, which is Derision. We have all met the kind of people whose only interest in the things around them is to find something they can scorn or mock or abuse, in order to parade their own supposed goodness by contrast. Out of phase, the soul of this Phase falls into this habit all too easily, and degradation follows. Yeats’s term “jibing demagogue” captures all too well the kind of individuality that unfolds from this.

The Body of Fate of this Phase, finally, is simply Humanity. Here Whitman is again the perfect example: the entire course of his life was determined both by his own profound humanity and by the vast concourse of humanity among whom he spent his days. It’s impossible to imagine him as a solitary figure, just as it’s hard to imagine a great many figures of the third quarter of the wheel in any other terms. There is a deeper aspect to this Phase’s Body of Fate, however. Phase 5 is almost mechanical in its drive to excess through energy, and its Body of Fate is therefore defined by the same natural laws that rule machines. Phase 6 is utterly human, by contrast, and the limits that shape its destiny are those of human nature.

Phase 7: Assertion of Individuality

Though it has to be established at first in a forced and clumsy manner, individuality possesses enormous power and resilience. It depends neither on the objective world nor on the subjective ideal for its strength, and so can bear forces that neither character nor personality could handle without shattering. This is just as well, because the young soul approaching the end of the first quarter is facing the most difficult challenge the wheel of lunar phases has to offer.

The force driving that challenge can be understood readily enough from points raised in the last installment of this discussion. In the disembodied Phase 1, Will and Creative Mind occupy the same place on the wheel, Phase 1 itself, while Mask and Body of Fate also occupy an identical place, Phase 15. In effect, the Will is submerged in the Creative Mind and the Mask in the Body of Fate; the soul cannot conceive of a world different from the one it inhabits. (On the other side of the wheel, at the equally disembodied Phase 15, the Creative Mind is submerged in the Will an the Body of Fate in the Mask, and the soul cannot conceive of a world different from its own highest ideal.)

As the Will and Mask move counterclockwise around the wheel and the Creative Mind and Body of Fate march clockwise, however, that temporary unity gives way first to differentiation and then to conflict. In this phase, as in Phase 21 at the opposite point of the wheel, that conflict is far and away the most powerful influence on the soul, and only a tremendous effort can maintain the poise that was a matter of instinctive grace a phase or two before. At Phase 7, instinct nears its apex of complexity and power, as intellect will do at Phase 21; in both cases, that apex comes just before a shattering disintegration, which is held off for the moment only by a supreme exertion of all the soul’s powers.

The assertion of individuality that gives its name to the condition of the Will, and thus to this phase as a whole, is just such an effort. The soul is reaching toward personality but cannot yet attain it; its thoughts and feelings are still drawn from the common stock, rather than springing from the self in its uniqueness; but it draws on its surroundings and its circumstances to create an image of itself. If the Will lives on the grand scale and stays oriented to the true Mask, which is Altruism—action pursued for its own sake, without thought of self—that image becomes enormously vivid and powerful. If it fixates on appearances instead and falls into the orbit of the false Mask, which is Efficiency—action pursued for some goal meant to benefit the self, which parcels out energy like a miser spending pennies—it becomes palpably false, an oversized mask of papier-maché that fools only its wearer. The true Creative Mind of this phase is accordingly Heroic Sentiment, and the false Creative Mind is Dogmatic Sentimentality.

The Body of Fate in this phase is termed “Adventure that excites the individuality.” That adventure can be lived out or it can be portrayed in literature or art, and occasionally takes both forms, but no one who is of this phase will ever succeed in leading a bland and boring life. This can be seen clearly enough in the lives and works of the four men Yeats has chosen as examples. Alexandre Dumas remains the supreme author of romantic adventure tales in any Western literature, and had a life nearly as interesting as that of his characters. George Borrow and James Macpherson are forgotten these days, but the former was one of the nineteenth century’s great travel writers and the latter one of its most successful forgers—his cycle of poems about Ossian, which he wrote himself but claimed as translations from Scottish Highland originals, were still wildly popular in Yeats’s time. Thomas Carlyle, for all his failings, was an extraordinarily influential figure in his time and after.

Phase 8: War Between Individuality and Race

In the wake of the grand adventures and mighty achievements of Phase 7 comes catastrophe. The primary tincture, the influence of heredity and environment on the self, has lost the last of its grip on the soul, but the antithetical tincture, the wellspring of power that comes from within the personality, has not yet been born. Abandoned by the instincts that once guided it, the soul must scrabble blindly for sources of strength and guidance, and fail. That failure is essential to this stage of the soul’s journey, for it is only through that experience of failed and seemingly futile fumbling that the first stirrings of personality can be born out of the wreckage of character, and of all that is collective.

That much-condemned word “race” which appears in the title of the phase probably needs an explanatory word or two. A century ago it had a much broader meaning than it has been assigned these days; it was common enough to hear “race” used for the populations of even quite small nations—a wildly popular 1921 history of Ireland by Seumas MacManus was titled The Story of the Irish Race—or even smaller groupings, such as one’s own direct ancestors. It is in that sense that Yeats means it. To him, in this work and elsewhere, “race” is shorthand for everything inherited, the entire influence of ancestry, culture, and locality that shapes every human being to a greater or lesser degree. This is what has framed the existence of each soul in the first quarter of the wheel, and this is what must be overcome in Phase 8.

It is not overcome by conquest, as in the clichés beloved by mass media and bad literature. The Will does not ride roughshod and triumphant over the outworn remnants of the past. Rather, the Will is left to its own devices by the departing past, and clutches frantically at what straws of its past certainties still remain to it. Those inevitably slip through its fingers, too, but the sustained effort of the attempt builds the strength from which personality will be born.

If the soul in this phase can rise to the challenge, it will keep up its courage through the ordeal, and learn versatility through clutching at one straw after another. If it crumples beneath the stress, it lives a life of utter terror and powerlessness. Thus the true Mask and Creative Mind are Courage and Versatility respectively, and the false Mask and Creative Mind Terror and Impotence. One way or another, it is doomed to a life of unbroken defeat, but that defeat is the crucible from which future triumphs are born; its Body of Fate is therefore termed the Beginning of Strength.

Yeats offers no historical examples of this phase and only one literary example, the Idiot from Dostoevsky’s novel of that name. Most of us have met people of this type, however: in Yeats’s words, “obscure wastrels who seem powerless to free themselves from some sensual temptation—drink, women, drugs—and who cannot in a life of continual crisis create any lasting thing.” I have known half a dozen examples fairly well, and before I read A Vision for the first time wondered at their lives and the sense of helpless terror that seemed to surround them. That Yeats offered me a way of understanding them that is both compassionate and realistic was one of the things that convinced me to take his system seriously.

*****

As noted in the last post in this sequence, each set of three phases, excluding the crisis Phases 1, 8, 15, and 22, form a complete wheel of their own. Phases 5, 6, and 7 are thus a unit, and reflecting on what Yeats has to say about them and exploring them as a complete wheel will help you get a deeper sense of how the system works.

Once again, take the time to review each of the phases just covered, using Yeats’s text as well as the notes above, and see if you can identify people you know who correspond to these phases. In the meantime, read the material on the second quarter; we’ll see how much of it we get through in next month’s post.