Tag: William Butler Yeats

A Vision: Anima Hominis

John Michael Greer105 Comments

At this point in our exploration of Yeats’s great occult synthesis A Vision, it will help to step back and glance at an earlier work of his that provided that synthesis with many of its core ideas. That essay is “Per Amica Silentia Lunae,” and we’ll explore the first half of it here, titled “Anima…

A Vision: Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends

John Michael Greer81 Comments

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…

A Vision 2: A Packet for Ezra Pound

John Michael Greer127 Comments

By the late 1930s William Butler Yeats was an old man. He celebrated his seventieth birthday in 1935; his health, never robust, became increasingly fragile as the 1930s wore on. Gone were the days when he went on lecture tours across the English-speaking world, sleeping on trains to save expenses while giving one lecture or…

A Vision: Preliminaries

John Michael Greer137 Comments

In the autumn of 1917 William Butler Yeats was at a turning point in his life and his two careers, the public one and the other, secret one. In his public career as an author, he had clawed his way up from among the crowd of writers whose work kept the British publishing industry of…

The Castle of Heroes

John Michael Greer223 Comments

I really wonder sometimes how many people nowadays realize just how drastically the great occult revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century has been scrubbed from the officially approved histories of our time. It’s hard to discuss the matter without bringing in words like “censorship.”  Whole chapters of the cultural history of the…

The Death of God: A Speculation

John Michael Greer324 Comments

I have been reading William Butler Yeats’ strangest book, A Vision, for the—how many times has it been now? At least once for each of his twenty-eight phases of the Moon, surely, since I first picked up a battered paperback copy from a used book store in Seattle, one of those cramped and marvelous places…