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Elémire Zolla
Yeats's Esoteric Method*
I shall be dealing with a quality in Yeats which was precisely what Auden believed could be advantageously removed from his poetry, what T.S.Eliot in After Strange Gods considered to be a deplorable stimulation to poetry in general.
This attitude of repulsion towards esotericism has become somewhat outworn however. Even the esoteric experiences which aimed at touching upon timelessness and spacelessness represented in Yeats case a vivid state of mind, and this point is now generally taken for granted. Nowadays we have a very neat exposition of his esoteric system in Graham Hough's The Mystery Religion of W.B. Yeats[1].
In a recent collection of essays, Swedenborg. A Continuing Version[2] there appears a signal contribution by Jennifer L. Leonard, Singing Masters of the Soul, which tackles our topic. It lines up Yeats with a select group of visionaries: de Pasquallis, Saint-Martin, Swedenborgh, and Blake; these visionaries, it says, «believed the soul's resurrection occurs now, in this world, through an act of imagination»[3]. Ordinarily the soul is stifled,imagination may enliven it, jolt it up out of dumbness and squalor. Ms Leonard illustrates this principle by adding her own commentary to the long series of studies concerning Sailing to Byzantium. She quotes as others have done the passage in A Vision in which Yeats maintains that if he were given a month in ancient times, he would choose to pass it in Byzantium just before Justinian closed the Platonic Academy. He would seek out the common inn where he knew he might meet the mosaicist who could express the jist of Plotinus. The artist in Byzantium, said Yeats, was totally immersed in an objective vision of Hellenic purity and wisdom. In Byzantium he was to say that the Byzantine dome disdains «All that man is, / All were complexities. / The fury and the mire of man's veins». Byzantium for Yeats is an archetype which he needs to evoke as an alternative to Rome, in order to support a British or at least an Irish myth; Charles Williams felt the very same urge.
Byzantine art set forth dream-scenes and, at Sancta Sophia especially, described ecstasy. I may add that in a dialogue of 1915 Yeats called ecstasy the end of art in general, which cannot be reached without pain, and consists of a sudden sense of power and of peace, born of a perfect relationship with satisfactory images.
Sailing to Byzantium describes a fourfold ascent beyond our earthly plane up into the realm of dreamful ecstasy. It is the pith of the talk that Yeats had with the mosaicist.
Ms Leonard quotes finally the passage from Swedenborgh's Arcana Coelestia (5182) where the vortical gyres are mentioned: «There are gyres into which newly arrived spirits must be inaugurated».
As for the esoteric level which Yeats aims at disclosing, he was in the habit of reaching out for it by allowing a free flow of his phantasy. He well knew the dangers that hung round him when he was doing so. He was dealing with what Jung called active imagination, a process by which images are allowed to surface and to connect, while one is deeply involved in them. Marie von Franz brutally but correctly called this a voluntary psychosis. Yeats knew that images emerge as we retreat from external stimulation, and that if we plunge into their whirl, we can easily be deceived. In their world, Yeats warns us, lies a «faithless depth» delighting in «inintelligible images». He knew the danger, he had fallen into it more than once, experiencing the insignificance of what had so powerfully attracted him. He also admitted that the communicators or deam-impellers that swayed his trancing wife's mind, were far from impeccable, even if he insisted that they provided him with «stylistic arrangements of experience». A portion of The Vision is actually meaningless. The closets in the construction which we visit one ofter the other are either empty or full of rattling lumber. Anf what a struggle had gone into the composition of the intertwining cones!
In his Essays Yeats sought to set out the rules to be followed in his endeavour. The esoteric level can be attained to, he explains, by meditation, which opens up the mind to a first rush of images. To help them emerge, an initiatory symbol should be used and meditated on. One should also employ scents to help the mind to fantasize, by spreading plants on one's pillows. Hawthorn for instance is apt to infuse wisdom to our imaginings. Marsilio Ficino had written the first treatise on the various levels of reality. In Per amica silentia lunae Yeats instructs us to suspend not only our critical faculty so as to make images drift through our mind, but also our desire, in fact all feelings, so that they become clearer, more articulate, «drawing down upon them a powerful light».
He also suggests that we allow the images to mesh and concur. One day he was meditating and his head seemed to be surrounded by the sun's rays. The following night he dreamed of a woman with her head on fire. He awoke, lit a candle, and discovered in so doing that he had burnt his hair. This was the first time that, thanks to an intersection, a twinement of his dreams, he came up against the vision of a flaming head. But, in his youth in Dublin he had met an American hypnotists who had dwelt among the Zuñis, and told of a Zuñi who was so irritated by the praise of telephones and telegraphs, that he cried out: «Can they do that?» and threw above his head some sand, which burst into a flame, wrapping his head in fire. It is as if a distant memory of the Gnostic baptism of fire which crowned the heads of adepts, came forth through the mesh of dreams and memories. Another day Yeats dreamed that he was writing a story and that he was also one of the story's characters, bent on courting a girl against his intention as an author. He was also trying to strike a china jar with the button of a foil.
Much in Blake's Prophetic Books recounts such interpenetrations of different dreams, and many of Yeat's poems show such fusions, which are common in our dreamworld and also in any easy-flowing imagination. Yeats insists also on keeping in our mind an image and on working on it to make it persist and acquire force. This opened up a range of possibilities which he described in a section of his autobiography entitled Hodos chameliontis, the chamelion's path. The chamelion was one of Ficino's and Pico's favourite images, and for them it represented the instinct of syncretism, whereby thought will accept in succession and blend all philosophies and creeds. I believe though that there exists a closer source, in Keats' letter to Woodhouse, in which the poetic character is described as impersonal, delighting both with light and with shadow, conceiving at the same time Iago and Imogen, perverse and highly characters with equal joy. In brief, says Keats, a poet must be a chamelion and never a moralist. Yeats added in The Celtic Twilight that phantasy as much as caprice must keep away from good and evil. The chamelion was for him a symbol of the marriage of heaven and hell.
When all these notions are acquired, the frontiers of imagination can be explored.
Yeats recounts that he was walking one day along the Irish seaside with his uncle, and he imagined a red idol being worshipped. He said nothing about it, and his huncle testified that he saw in his mind an austere,immense being sitting upon a throne, shrouded in a reddish opalescence. Later the two of them went home to discover that their imaginative exercises had triggered their maid's fantasising. Once when they had handled images dealing with the marriage of heaven and earth, she dreamed that the bishop had disappeared with a lady, and that the whole clergy was about to rush off to marry.
At a reception Yeats wrote on a piece of paper that someonew would mention a fire. He hid the paper and sat quietly aside. Someone started to talk and ended by describing a fire.
Yeats also mentions Gemma Galgani, the mystical girl in Lucca, who was want to dig wounds into her body by imagining the sufferings of crucified Jesus.
Yeats also tells us that he practiced with friends the evocation of what were interpreted as episodes from their former lives. The players would take turns in mentioning details of a scene which all of them saw hazily at first, and little by little the scene would develop into a complex story.
Yeats also summed up all such experiences in a leaflet concerning a magical Order published in London in 1902. If we formulate an image with sufficient strength, it will be realized in the circumstances of life, acting through our souls or through the spirits of nature. What Yeats stated in a secret document, Charles Williams would transform into a novel in 1932. In the Place of the Lion recounts that a lion escaped from a circus, and an occultist then proceded to evoke in his garden the archetypal force of the Lion. When this became visible, he fainted away. Others were struck in various forms by the apparition, and turned into beasts. Havoc was soon all over Britain.
Yeats concluded that the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another. Likewise memories can flow into one another.
This must have sounded shocking at its time. It should appear generally more acceptable today, with Rupert Sheldrake's The Presence of the Past igniting controversy and promoting research ever since it appeared last year. It is based on facts which belong with Yeats's personal esoteric experiences, such as the greater ease with which items are learnt by certain species after a given isolated section of them has been instructed. Or the fact that blue-tits start collectively licking the tops off milk-boxes deposited at doorsdteps in theearly morning. Or the relative ease with which a sporting feat is equalled all over the world. Sheldrake assumes that all natural systems, from crystals to animals, share a collective memory which is common to their whole kind and that they communicate with each member by means of a morphic resonance similar to acoustic resonance, which makes stretched strings vibrate in sympathy, or to electro-magnetic resonance, which tunes a radio to a given frequency. Memories do not seem to be only stored in brains, but are given by morphic resonance, and are therefore collective.We end up in a vast, superhuman cosmic Mind and Memory, an entity which was known as Soul of the world to Henry More the Platonists. Thoughts are to Yeats like a line of foam at the shallow edge of a vast luminous sea. He tells us that he was once working on a poem and dropped his pen. When he stooped to pick it up, he recollected a dream adventure. On understanding that it had been just a dream, he sought to remember the facts of waking life but in doing so, the memory of the dream vanished. So if the pen had not fallen down, he would not have realized that he was entranced.
Do we actually always know who, what, when we are?
Imagination can take us to the immense sea of the Cosmic Soul or Mind, ("When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi/Troubles my mind"), but it can also become a god. Gods can be called forth by using proper symbols, sounds and odors. Also this was taught by Ficino, and was practiced by occultists, such as Yeats's arch-enemy Alistair Crowley, Yeats recounts in Rosa alchemica that he would call up Eros, or Ate, who might pour madness on unquiet dreamers, or Hermes ("that if you powerfully imagined a hound at your bedside, it wouldkeep watch there"), Aphrodite ("that if you made, by a strong imagining, a dove crowned with silver and bade it flutter over your head, its soft cooing would make sweet dreams").
In considering Yeat's development in time, one notices that he constantly sought for a system to guide him. He heaped together a series of magical methods from the whole Western tradition, and believed that his wife put him in contact with new extrahuman sources. But actualkly the only coherent and traditional system which he ever used, was the Hindu one, first taught him when he was eighteen in Dublin by Mohini Chatterji ("I asked if I should pray, / But the Brahmin said, / 'Pray for nothing…'"). The Golden Dawn afforded him with his main elementary symbols, the Hindu series: the yellow square of earth, the blue circle of water, the red triangle of fire, the silver crescent of air, and the black oval of ether. Gazing at them firmly, until their after-image was fixed upon his retina, opened for him a doorway onto vision. He finally made contact with a true teacher, Shri Purohit in 1935, and becane his spokesman, and his helper in translating the Upanishads.
Shri Purohit was a Marāthi who attained unconscious bliss, sushupti: an identity between idea and fact, thought and sense. Through sushupti one acquires a perception of what Yeats described in Idea of Good and Evil: the flow of our blood, the constant repairs to our ocular lenses, the modifications of our brain tissue at every ray of light or sound which reaches us, become one with the forces which rust iron or make wheat grow. As is said in A Dialogue of Self and Soul, "for intellect no longer knows / Is from the Ought, or Knower from the Known / That is to say, ascends to heaven".
Shri Purohit however had gone beyond this state, into savikalpa samādhi, a timeless act when light becomes complete and all objects are lost in it, when one can truly say "I am", and one is conscious but bound to no object, blissful but focussed on no aim.
Sushupti is like a full moon, savikalpa samādhi like a moonless night.
Yeats came up against the difficulty of arranging his Hindu teachings into the lunar system he had adopted with his wife's revelations. Unluckily he could not benefit from the knowledge of the yoginī system which had been studied only recently by Professor Heinrich von Stietenkron of Tübingen, who refers back to texts of the 6th century to illustate the cult of the yoginīs which surround in their circular temples an inage of Shiva or of a shaman. The main termple is in Orissa, at Hīrāpur, where the lunar and the solar calenders are harmonized.
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Whoever sets forth through the two supreme stages, without having liberated previously his mind of all passion, may project his passion-driven soul into some archetypal shape, Yeats added. He thus summed up the general practice of magic and of shamanism as an offshot of the Hindu sequel.
Yeats's life had not been spent in vain. At its end he had gained a neat view of the possibilities of trained imagination and had learnt the windings of the path leading beyond everyday experience.
He had reached "the mysterious vision won by toil", he had discovered what he termed daringly "the face he had before the world was made".
In a poem of The Rose (1813), a druid advises king Fergus:
«Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams;
Unloose the cord, and they will lap you round».
From this first trace Yeats proceded up to the finale of All Soul's Night (1928) in which this binding of dreams which entwine round a soul and transform it, becomes clear and more detailed:
«Such thought – such thought have I that hold it tight
Till meditation master all its parts,
Nothing can stay my glance
Until that glance run in the world's despite
To where the blessed dance;
Such thought, that in it bound
I need no other thing,
Wound in mind's wanderings
As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound»..
The transit from the former to the latter passage shows Yeats's inward achievement at its core: the penetrated, radically explored thought or image which turns into a mummy-cloth and transforms the thinker, represents the summation and the crowning of his esoteric life.
Zolla's essay was published in Yeats oggi. Studi e ricerche, Carla de Petris ed., Department of Comparative Literatures, University of Rome III, 1993.
© Grazia Marchianò 2011. All rights reserved.
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