Now that the preliminaries are out of the way, it’s time for us to plunge into the depths of Yeats’s Vision. That’s easy, in a certain sense, because Yeats starts out the main body of our text by tossing the reader straightway into the deep end of the pool, launching at once into the core images that undergird his magical philosophy. In another sense, of course, that’s exactly the difficulty, because it’s all too easy to land with a splash in these waters and sink without a trace. My goal here is to hand out life jackets and so make that initial plunge a little less risky.
“A little less risky” is the crucial point, though. We are going to cover a great deal of ground in this essay. Most of it will be much clearer when we’ve gone further and sorted things out in more specific detail. For now, do your best to follow along, read every paragraph here at least twice, and give the relevant section of A Vision—the first section of Book I, titled “The Principal Symbol”—several close readings. Yeats was not in the business of coming up with a little light reading for the clueless. He was trying to explain a profound and important way of looking at the world, with deep roots in occult philosophy.
Notice, to begin with, that I mentioned the core images that provide A Vision with its foundation, not core ideas. It’s crucial to grasp this, and not just for our present purposes. One of the primary differences between occult philosophy and the more respectable branches of philosophy is precisely the distinction between image and abstraction. A quote from Dion Fortune’s The Cosmic Doctrine is apposite: “In these occult teachings you will be given certain images, under which you are instructed to think of certain things. These images are not descriptive but symbolic, and are designed to train the mind, not to inform it.”
That quote applies with equal force to A Vision, and there’s good reason for the similarity. Fortune penned The Cosmic Doctrine in 1923 and 1924, while Yeats was writing the first version of A Vision; like Yeats, she was working from material received in trance via a magical partnership—her relationship with her longtime friend and fellow occultist Charles Loveday apparently didn’t extend to sex, but the two were very close and were buried side by side in a Glastonbury graveyard. Of course Yeats and Fortune also shared the same occult background: both had traveled, like so many other occultists of their day, from Theosophy to the Golden Dawn and then to an enduring fascination with Celtic traditions. Working within a common tradition as they were, it comes as no surprise that they used the same method to communicate their insights.
Yeats begins, therefore, with the image of a vortex or gyre. Think of a tornado or a waterspout, with one end contracted to a point and the other at full expansion. Now imagine a triangle, to serve as a schematic image of such a vortex. Lay it on its side, as shown below on the right. Get used to this image—you’ll be seeing it a lot. Remember that it’s a vortex, not simply a triangle.
As our text points out, a single vortex is one way to diagram the relationship between the two opposing principles Yeats has in mind, which are the subjective life—meaning here a person’s experience of himself or herself—and the objective life—meaning here a person’s experience of everything that is not the self. The subjective life extends in time: if you watch your inner experiences you’ll encounter a constant flow of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, forming a sequence along the one dimension of time. If you pay attention to the world around you, you’ll encounter a great many things simultaneously present in the three dimensions of space. Thus the point at one end of the vortex represents time and subjective experience, and the whirl at the other end represents space and objective experience.
Yet people differ in their relationship to these two kinds of experience. Some face outward toward the world of objective things in space, some face inward toward the world of subjective things in time, and some—a smaller number—are torn between these two. The people who face outward Yeats considers representative of what he calls the primary tincture, and those who face inward similarly represent the antithetical tincture. In our text, rather than a single cone, these two options are symbolized most often by two vortices or cones, each with its point in the center of the other’s wide end.
This is the most basic symbol of the system: two cones or vortices facing in opposite directions, each growing as the other shrinks and shrinking as the other grows, “each living the other’s death and dying the other’s life.” Imagine a vertical line slicing through the paired triangles, moving first from left to right and then back from right to left. When all the way over to the right, the primary cone will have dwindled away to nothing and the vertical line will be for all practical purposes pure antithetical; when all the way over to the left, the antithetical cone will have dwindled accordingly and the line will be essentially all primary. At any point in between, there will be some different proportion of primary to antithetical orientation, more antithetical on the right side of the diagram, more primary on the left side, exactly balanced in the middle.
(Take a moment to go over the previous paragraph an extra time or two and make sure you have the image in mind: the two triangles, and the vertical line sliding back and forth from one side to the other. That will help you understand what follows.)
The two basic faculties of human consciousness, in Yeats’s system, are Will and Creative Mind. Will could as well have been called Desire or Energy—it is the faculty in each of us that seeks to express our own sense of what should be. Creative Mind could as well been called Perception or Consciousness—it is the faculty in each of us that seeks to experience the world exactly as it is. The Will is antithetical, while the Creative Mind is primary.
Now think of that vertical line sliding from one end of the two-cone diagram to the other, and back again. One end of that line is the Will, the other is the Creative Mind. When the line slides most of the way over to the antithetical side of the diagram, the Will is strong and the Creative Mind is weak; a person in this condition pays little attention to what is, and throws all his or her energy into creating what he or she thinks should be, whether this takes the form of art, politics, or what have you. When the line slides most of the way back the other direction, the Creative Mind is strong and the Will is weak; a person in this condition focuses intently on what is and ignores thoughts of what he or she thinks should be. When the line is in the middle, the person is torn between these two alternatives.
(Again, take a moment to reread this and think through it.)
Each of the two faculties we’ve discussed has an object, another faculty on which it focuses. The Will’s object is the Mask. It has this name because, as we discussed in relation to the essay “Per Amica Silentia Lunae,” the Will always seeks its opposite: in order to create, it puts on a Mask that is as far from its natural habits as possible. The Creative Mind’s object, in turn, is the Body of Fate, which can be thought of as the sum total of the circumstances that make up life. In Yeats’s system, just as the Mask and Creative Mind can be seen as the two ends of a vertical line sliding right and left across the diagram, Mask and Body of Fate are represented by another vertical line that moves together with the first line, but in the other direction.
So the basic diagram of one type of individual is as shown here. The line representing Will and Creative Mind is exactly as close to the antithetical end of the diagram as the line representing Mask and Body of Fate is from the primary end. As the two lines slide back and forth, moving further away from each other and then back together, each going all the way to one side and then all the way to the other, they define certain typical human characters and situations. Each person is at one or another point in this cycle, and that point, for convenience, is defined by the placement of the Will.
There’s one other wrinkle that has to be understood to make sense of all this. When the line indicating the position of Will and Creative Mind is sliding from right to left (and the other line, indicating the positions of Mask and Body of Fate, is sliding from left to right), that’s one kind of experience of life. When the two lines are sliding in the other directions, that’s another kind. If the Will is growing stronger and the Creative Mind fading out, that leads to a very different kind of life than when the Will has achieved its goal and is weakening as the Creative Mind strengthens.
This is shown in the diagram by the placement of the faculties on the line. For reasons that will become clear shortly, the faculty on the bottom end of the line is the one getting stronger. Thus the diagram on the left shows the Will approaching maximum strength and the Creative Mind nearly overwhelmed, while the diagram below on the right shows the Will beginning to weaken while the Creative Mind is resurgent.
Now we can draw all these considerations together. Each of the typical positions, with Will, Creative Mind, Mask, and Body of Fate in a specified place, is identified symbolically with one of the 28 phases of the Moon, and represents one human incarnation. Why the Moon? Because in occult philosophy, being incarnate in a material body is the night of the soul, when it sleeps and dreams the dream we call life. That dream is ruled by the Moon, the traditional ruler of dreams, according to its phase. At death we awaken and enter the sunlight—and this, too, will be explored in detail later on in our text.
It’s probably necessary here to insert, for the first but not the last time, an essential warning about these lunar phases: they are not determined by the placement of the Moon in your natal horoscope. Yeats makes this point explicitly in the 1925 version of A Vision, and it follows from the whole structure of the system, yet there’s been a steady stream of authors and astrologers who have ignored this and garbled the system as a result. We’ll discuss this further a little later on. The phase that the Moon was in on the day that you were born does not determine the phase of your present incarnation. Keep this in mind and it will spare you a great deal of confusion.
The 28 phases—again, each one labeled according to the placement of the Will—can be mapped out onto the diagram of two cones, as shown on the left. For convenience, though, these phases are more often mapped onto a circle or wheel, as shown on the right.
The result is the fundamental mandala of the system, the Great Wheel. In the 1925 edition of A Vision, this was portrayed as follows:
In the 1937 and later editions, that was reworked by Yeats’s artist friend Edmund Dulac into the diagram below:
(In comparing these, notice that south is straight up in the first diagram, but on the right in the second.)
Once the phases are mapped on the Great Wheel, one of the essential symmetries of the system becomes visible. If the Will is at the point marked 17 on the wheel, the Mask will be at the point marked 3, exactly opposite the placement of Will. The Creative Mind, meanwhile, will be at 13, and the Body of Fate at 27, exactly opposite the placement of Creative Mind. As the phases proceed, Will and Mask move counterclockwise around the Wheel, while Creative Mind and Body of Fate move clockwise. At the 8th and 22nd phases (at the bottom and top of the wheel), Will is in the same place as Body of Fate, and Creative Mind is in the same place as Mask; at the 1st and 15th phases (at the left and right of the wheel), Will and Creative Mind are in the same place, and Mask and Body of Fate are in the same place.
Got all that? Make sure you have at least a general grasp of it before we proceed.
So far, all this has been a matter of abstract geometries, and tolerably dry. It’s at this point that it becomes a bearer of meaning. Each of the 28 points along the wheel has its own distinctive character, and this character can be expressed through Will, Creative Mind, Mask, or Body of Fate, depending on which of these occupies that point. Let’s take the example just given, a person of the 17th phase, and work through it.
The 17th phase has the title of “the Daimonic man”—in other words, the Daimon or higher self of the person is expressed more completely in this phase than in any other. It is nonetheless a difficult phase, because the Will is moving away from its complete fulfillment at the 15th phase, trying to hold onto a vision of beauty that slips through its fingers. Its Mask, the form that it gives to that vision of beauty, derives from the 3rd phase, which (as we’ll see in a later essay) belongs to the first fresh springtime of the soul, as it learns to delight in the body, its senses, and its passions; to a person of the 17th phase, whose Will strives toward this Mask, sexual passion and the beauties of nature are therefore profoundly important, as they give the Will a semblance of the unity and power that is slipping away from it.
That Mask can take one of two forms, for there is a False Mask as well as a True Mask. The False Mask of this phase is titled “Dispersal;” under the sway of the False Mask, or “out of phase” as Yeats terms that condition, the person flails uselessly and throws away his energy in a frenzy of temporary and discordant desires. The True Mask, by contrast, is titled “Simplification through intensity;” guided by the True Mask, the person focuses his or her Will on a handful of images or just one, achieving greatness through sheer intensity of focus.
The Creative Mind of this phase derives from the 13th phase, which is a phase of sensuous delight: the soul in its development has come to a complete mastery of matter and its delights and approaches the vision of beauty through sensual experiences. This strengthens the role of sexual passion in the personality of the 17th phase, but it can do so in two ways: there is a False Creative Mind as well as a true one. The title of the False Creative Mind is “Enforced self-realization”—a person out of phase turns inward where he or she should turn outward, broods and sulks and nourishes wildly disproportionate hatreds and jealousies, all of them engendered by a growing awareness of his or her own increasing incoherence. True to phase, by contrast, the Creative Mind becomes “Creative imagination through antithetical emotion.” The person in phase turns outward and expresses his or her Daimon in a torrent of creative work of some kind.
Then there’s the Body of Fate. This comes from the 27th Phase, a late primary phase. Just as the early primary phases have to do with the discovery of the body and its natural delights, the late primary phases have to do with the renunciation of these things. Reflected in the Body of Fate, the 27th phase expresses itself as “Enforced loss.” This means exactly what it sounds like: whatever the person of this phase most deeply desires will be taken away.
Thus we have a picture of a personality as detailed as you’d get from the simpler forms of astrology, and in some ways more exactly focused. One of the things that makes this picture especially poignant is that it’s a portrait of William Butler Yeats, who identified himself as being of the 17th phase. Look through his biography and you’ll find all the details present and accounted for: the struggle against dispersal and morbid self-absorption, the extraordinary torrent of creative genius when he was in phase, and of course the enforced loss, with his doomed love for Maud Gonne the most significant of these. The phase is also a portrait of certain other great creative minds, including Dante Alighieri and P.B. Shelley, and the same themes can be found in their lives.
There are twenty-five other portraits of equal clarity in A Vision. (The 1st and 15th phases, being pure primary on the one hand and pure antithetical on the other, are never found in incarnate people, who are always a mix of both tinctures.) As we’ll see, these are rooted with equal exactness in biography. All these phases, in turn, reach beyond biography and beyond the human individual, reaching their fulfillment in a vivid and precise theory of historical cycles. This, too, will be discussed in its proper turn.
Assignment: Before next month’s post goes up, read the second section of “The Great Wheel,” titled “Examination of the Wheel.” You’ll probably want to reread the whole text up to that point at least once, too, because much of it will make more sense to you now that you’ve been exposed to the underlying ideas and images.
Playing catch up this morning as I finish up the last reading before plunging on…
This has to do more with the last reading of Anima Mundi, and on the nature of the afterlife, ancestors and metempsychosis/reincarnation. Yeats wrote, quoting Spenser: “Henry More thought that those who, after centuries of life, failed to find the rhythmic body and to pass into the Condition of Fire, were born again. Edmund Spenser, who was among More’s masters, affirmed that nativity without giving it a cause :
‘”After that they againe retourned beene.
They in that garden planted be agayne.
And grow afresh, as they had never scene
Fleshy corruption, nor mortal payne.
Some thousand years so doen they ther remayne,
And then of him are clad with other hew.
Or sent into the chaungeful world agayne.
Till thither they retourn where first they grew:
So like a wheele, around they roam from old to new.’
The dead who speak to us deny metempsychosis, perhaps because they but know a little better what they knew alive; while the dead in Asia, for perhaps no better reason, affirm it, and so we are left amid plausibilities and uncertainties.”
I thought this passage (XIX) was interesting, in that I had been reading part of Benebell Wen’s I Ching book about how in some Asian traditions, there is considered to be two parts of the soul. One is sort of like a recording of the memories of the life that was lived, and this stays active in the afterlife and is what gets communicated with in traditions that incorporate ancestor veneration. The second goes on and reincarnates… I just thought that was a useful way of looking at it, and would make sense from dreams I’ve had of the departed, and also the sense that they have still moved on.
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In the meantime, thanks for parsing out the images and giving us a life jacket.
This section of Yeats’ book in particular has been instrumental in figuring out what the heck is going on in my life. The addictions, depression, nihilism, loss of purpose, loss of worldview, loss of hope in the external world, lack of self-knowledge, et cetera. Variations of “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” was a frequent refrain for me during that time.
I’m now fairly certain I’ve been in phase 8 in the past seven years with a false mask and a false creative mind.
The vortices diagram makes me think of the french parable “si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait” (if youth knew, if old age could). As in the vortices work as well for wisdom vs power and not only creativity vs will.
The circle diagram suggests a cycle but the vortices feel like a unidirectional process. Does Yeats suggest can the circle can be traveled more than once?
Thank you for your renaming of Creative Mind as Perception.
I suspected that the phases of the soul did not literally map onto what mansion the Moon was in in one’s natal chart, because if so the position of the Moon relative to the Sun would only be a minor factor in one’s personality, often swamped by one’s other placements.
A month or two ago, I read a book by a neopagan psychological astrologer (Stephen Forrest) who criticized Yeats’ system as inaccurate, and created his own simplified eight-phase system. His system might work for all I know, but I would have to read and analyze a number of celebrity and famous person biographies to find out (and I don’t want to do that).
A quick question: you mention the Mask twice (in position 3rd phase with True/False masks, and also in the 27th phase: “Then there’s the Mask. […]”) – did you mean the Body of Fate in the 27th phase (opposed to Creative Mind in 13th)?
For a bit of humor, does it mean though, if I was born on a full moon, that I might have a latent talent for lycanthropy? Sometimes I feel the need to wolf out, especially when rock ‘n roll is blasting on the radio.
These lunar mansions seem to me to be correlated with age: children enjoy the world-as-is and attempt to change it during late teenage/young adulthood. They peak in the middle years of their life, even if what they achirved in life was not what they originally set out to achieve. In old age, they have to surrender (one way or another) what they have built to the ravages of time or to younger people, before or when they pass away.
Justin, interesting. I tend to take that kind of evidence from spiritualism as a warning that whatever messages come from the Beyond are filtered, sometimes drastically, through the consciousness of the medium, but I suppose there are other options.
Mark, ouch! That’s a very rough road to walk. I hope the knowledge helps.
Rashakor, yes, you can apply the vortices to any binary relationship — and yes, Yeats says explicitly that the wheel is traveled rather more than once.
Patrick, I bet Forrest thought Yeats was giving a system for interpreting moon phase in natal charts. That’s quite common, if silly. The eight-phase system isn’t unique to him — it was invented most of a century ago by Dane Rudhyar, and used (mostly without credit) by various astrologers since his time.
V.O.G., thanks for catching that! I’ve corrected it; yes, it should have been Body of Fate.
Justin, well, do you have hair growing between your eyebrows, and are your index and middle fingers the same length?
Patrick, yes, the wheel also sets out the structure of a single life, and of many other things as well. We’ll get to that!
(Off topic or maybe not so off topic) Hello, JMG and commentariat. Well, there’s been recent personal changes in my life: I’m moving to another house and, though it’s only a change in the same town, it’s always like a little death in our lives. I think every change in life is like a small form of death. I wonder if dying is in a certain mode, like going to live to another home…I hope not to have bored you all with my cheap philosophy about this topic. Thank you for your article about Yeats and the previous comments on that topic.
” I tend to take that kind of evidence from spiritualism as a warning that whatever messages come from the Beyond are filtered, sometimes drastically, through the consciousness of the medium.”
…I can understand that… I’m often of multiple minds about things.
No actual evidence of lycanthropic ability… but the voice of Wolfman Jack has been in the back of my mind this week with regards to an essay I’ve been writing. I’ll leave that to your characters in Carnelian Moon.
On another note, I’m starting to wonder if someone could make a slide rule for these images?
Also, the last bit about Yeats himself, and Shelley and Dante rings very true of other poet biographies as well. A bit of solace there in that… It makes me wonder about the phases young Rimbaud was in, and then where he might have been as the gun runner and explorer of Africa… fascinating.
This model reminded me immediately of the MBST, which is of course based on Jung’s typology, who you said (with good reason) was also an occultist. Primary tincture = extraversion, antithetical tincture = introversion. The people who approach life and the world via their will would be called the Judging types in the MBTI, the people who approach it via the creative mind would be the Perceivers in the MBTI system.
Of course the two systems don’t match exactly; for example, in the MBTI you can be introverted and judging (i.e. trying to impose your will on your surroundings, based on your internal ideas of how things should be, without being overly concerned by external considerations), or you can be extraverted and judging (in which case you become a sort of enforcer of the group consenus). The same goes for the perceiving types. The similarities make it both easier and harder for me to grasp Yeat’s model. Harder, because I need to be careful not to try to ‘fit’ his vision into the MBTI mold.
Wow. I must admit to seeing much of myself in the portrait of the man of the seventeenth phase. It’s taken a lot of work to begin to dig myself out of my scattershot creative efforts and brooding self pity and accept loss. I only hope it’s not too late. Your writings have been a tremendous help to me in this effort and for that I thank you.
Hi that was an enjoyable, knowledge expanding essay on a paradigm of which I knew nothing about. I even read a Keats poem on mask and kind of liked it even though I’m not a big fan of poetry.
Here’s an off topic question: have you read Swedenborg? I hear about him yesterday on a podcast and he has a physical/metaphysical take on things that might align with your philosophical interests. Also, what do you think about “psychic” powers and “remote viewing”? That was part of the podcast as well.
This book is a feast. I sit down to it each time with a large and patient appetite.
I’ve always loved personality typing systems, especially but not only because the incommensurable numbers of types across systems (Big Five, Enneagram 9, Myers-Briggs 16) just go to show that when we talk about human character, we’re talking about something that has more dimensions than can be grasped in a single chart. In honour of certain family members of mine who like to make this point, sometimes while rolling their eyes, I always include in my personal charts an extra category called something like, ‘Type [N]: Someone who doesn’t like to be typed’.
The oppositions between Will and Mask, Creative Mind and Body of Fate, remind me strongly of the dominant and inferior functions in Myers-Briggs. In that system, each personality type has a dominant function, or primary way of interacting with the world, as well as an inferior function, the least developed aspect of the personality, which acts as a lure to the dominant function and unconsciously drives a person’s desires and direction in life. (There are secondary and tertiary functions occupying the ground in between; the overall fourfold symmetry is another striking similarity between MB and Yeats). Dominant and inferior functions are always each other’s exact opposite, and it is quite common to be attracted to someone whose dominant function corresponds to one’s own inferior. The phrases ‘opposites attract’ and ‘she completes me’ are not only relevant here but typologically precise.
Myers and Briggs drew their basic ideas from Jung; I noticed a few chapters ago that the primary tincture corresponds well to Jung’s Sensing function, while the antithetical corresponds to Jung’s Intuition. I think now that I would match Yeats’ Will to Jung’s Judging functions (‘This is how it should be!’) and Yeats’ Creative Mind to Jung’s Perceiving functions (‘But this is how it is.’) Other similarities come to mind, but again, there are incommensurabilities between the systems, and I would have to spend some long, enjoyable hours making charts before I could say more.