Yeats and the Golden Dawn: the Irish poet in the Hermetic order
William Butler Yeats, Theosophy, the Golden Dawn and A Vision: how ceremonial magic entered the work of the Irish poet who won the 1923 Nobel Prize.
In March 1890 a young Irish poet was initiated in London into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. His name was William Butler Yeats, he was twenty-four, and he would receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. For more than thirty years esoteric research was for him a serious and constant discipline, one that deeply shaped his ideas of poetry, of the symbol and of history.
From Theosophy to the Hermetic order
Yeats's interest in the occult began in Dublin, where in 1885 he helped found the Dublin Hermetic Society. After moving to London he frequented Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, but the Theosophists found him too inclined to experiment, and in 1890 his ties with the Esoteric Section came to an end. In that same period he joined the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888 by William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and William Robert Woodman.
In the order Yeats took the Latin motto Demon est Deus inversus, «the demon is God reversed», and passed through the grades of its initiatory system, studying Kabbalah, tarot symbols, astrology and the correspondences between elements, colours and planets. Work on symbols, which according to the order acted upon the imagination, coincided for him with poetic research.
The crises of the order
Around 1900 the Golden Dawn went through a deep crisis. The London members rebelled against the authority of Mathers, who lived in Paris, and the conflict culminated in a struggle for possession of the premises in Blythe Road, in which the young Aleister Crowley also took part, siding with Mathers. Yeats, who held a leading role in the London group, found himself at the centre of the dispute.
After the schism the order split into several groups, and Yeats remained attached to one of them, the Stella Matutina, until the 1920s. For him magic was no pastime: in the essay Magic, written in 1901, he declared his belief that the borders of individual minds are shifting and that our memories are part of one great memory of nature.
A Vision and automatic writing
In October 1917, a few days after their wedding, his wife George Hyde-Lees began practising automatic writing. For years the couple gathered thousands of pages of communications, which Yeats attributed to spiritual instructors and reworked into a singular book, A Vision, published in 1925 and then in a thoroughly revised version in 1937.
The work proposes a cyclical theory of history and personality, organised according to the twenty-eight phases of the moon and a system of rotating cones called gyres. Many readers find it obscure, but some of Yeats's most famous poems, written in the same years, openly take up its images and structures.
Yeats's story shows how deeply the ceremonial magic of the late nineteenth century marked European culture. For the Irish poet the symbols of the Golden Dawn were not a collection of curiosities, but a language able to connect individual imagination with the great images of tradition, and through it he built one of the highest bodies of work of his century.