The Ark

The occult involvement of W.B. Yeats was a sustaining element of his life and poetry, although scholars have largely downplayed this fact. Susan Johnston Graf, whose interest in the occult led her to the Magical Diaries of the Irish bard, reveals the complex of ideas and practices which gave his poetry a layer of meaning often hidden to the reader.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

THEME

Rachael Kohn: One can speak of the magic of poetry. But with William Butler Yeats, possibly Ireland's greatest poet, it's more accurate to speak of the poetry of magic.

Hello, this is The Ark, and I'm Rachael Kohn.

In 1885 Yeats established the Dublin Hermetic Society. Five years later he studied the magic of the Golden Dawn and became an active member of that Order, always seeking to fulfil his youthful desire to be 'a sage, a magician or a poet'. Scholars have known of Yeats's occult involvement but few have been as sympathetic to them as literary scholar, Susan Johnston Graf. She's the author of W.B. Yeats: Twentieth Century Magus.

Susan Johnston Graf: I think I realised it as I was reading his work and myself, I was studying occultism, I was interested in it and I knew that Yeats was, because there had been enough scholarship by this time, which I would say was the early 1980s, that I knew that there was a connection there, but scholars had not really wanted to explore that. And in fact tried to downplay that.

But in 1992 three volumes were published and they were called Yeats's Vision Papers, and they were actually the automatic writing that Yeats and his wife did, and I think that validated it. I took him seriously I guess, I didn't just think that his occultism was something that we should sort of hide or be embarrassed about as W.H. Auden once said. I saw it has his religion, and I saw it as something that should be taken seriously.

Rachael Kohn: Why do you think the literary establishment was squeamish about it? Do you think it was prejudice or do you think they thought that it would somehow discredit his literary stature?

Susan Johnston Graf: I'm not sure, but I think it was probably more squeamishness and personal prejudice. Because I don't think that anything could do anything to Yeats's stature as a poet. It's self-evident and it's undeniable, but I think that here we have this great man who we should put on a pedestal, and somehow if he is a ceremonial magician, wearing robes and intoning all sorts of things, that just didn't quite fit with what the literary establishment thought their man should be doing I think.

Rachael Kohn: Now you mentioned the publication of the Vision Papers, did that include the Magical Diaries?

Susan Johnston Graf: That is what it is. Yeats and his wife from 1917 until 1922 engaged in sexual magic and media mystic voyages, and Yeats of course, meticulously recorded all of it in diaries. There were 50-some of them supposedly.

Rachael Kohn: I gather that some of the diaries went missing?

Susan Johnston Graf: Some of them did. I don't remember the exact number but I think there were 30-some that were finally handed over in the late 1980s to a scholar.

Rachael Kohn: What about Yeats himself? How much did he have to downplay his involvement in the Order of the Golden Dawn for example, especially when there were some rather untidy stories going around about the sexual rituals.

Susan Johnston Graf: There was a scandal in I think 1902 involving a couple called the Horos; yes, they were doing something terrible, you know, child abuse or some kind of awful thing, but I think that even before that, Yeats had to be careful.

I mean people got wind of what was going on in the Golden Dawn which was nothing untoward, but to staid, upstanding Englishmen, Irishmen, it could be viewed that way.

The coroner of London for example, Wynn Westcott, was one of the founding members of the Golden Dawn, and he had to quit because it got around that he was posturing, I think as they said, as some sort of Magus, and it just wasn't good for his reputation. So Yeats did have to be careful, and then in 1904 of course, he was beginning the Abbey Theatre and he was the Administrator there, and so he was high profile and he needed to be taken seriously.

Rachael Kohn: Yes, and I guess someone like Aleister Crowley could have really ruined his reputation, because he was a pretty infamous member of the Order.

Susan Johnston Graf: Whom Yeats detested. And in fact that is how some of the publicity came to the Order because Crowley was, some of the members, Yeats included, thought was being promoted through the grades, initiated through the grades too quickly. And so a fight developed over this, and it ended up with MacGregor Mathers sending Crowley to the offices of the Golden Dawn in London, and Crowley of course made this into some kind of theatrical performance; he was in full Highland regalia, and he showed up to take over the offices of the Golden Dawn and the Temple. Police were called, and Yeats was there too, and that just capped it. They hated each other in fact.

Rachael Kohn: Well Yeats was pretty high up in the order, but I gather it had to change its name to Stella Matutina?

Susan Johnston Graf: Matutina. It did, because after the scandal that I referred to a little bit ago, the Order split anyway into I think three different branches, and Yeats's was the Stella Matutina.

Rachael Kohn: How important was his position in that group and what sort of things would he be called upon to do?

Susan Johnston Graf: Well he was the Imperator of the Temple at the time that all of the troubles were happening in 1900. So he was pretty important, I mean he was essentially running the order.

Rachael Kohn: Susan, your book gave me a very strong sense that the occult law involving studies of the Kabbalah and Rosicrucianism gave Yeats a very rich source of imagery and ideas for his poetry.

Susan Johnston Graf: That's right. It really did. His major images, his symbols, and remember that he really is a symbolist poet. I mean he started writing in the 1880s really, but publishing strongly in the 1890s, and he was very much influenced by the symbolist movement, and his symbols of the rose, the gyre, the mask, I don't know if I want to say they come directly out of his occultism, but certainly their meaning is attached to his occult beliefs.

Rachael Kohn: Wasn't the mask very important in his own rituals, getting in touch with the other side of himself, the anti-self?

Susan Johnston Graf: Absolutely. Well I think that Yeats first and foremost was a poet. In his own mind he was. That was his main reason for being. So he was always concerned that his inspiration was leaving him. He always worried about it.

He considered himself a bard, so the inspiration was this divine energy that came into him. He used his magic because that's what magic is, I mean evoking divine energies, and he used that to try to bring inspiration to himself, and what he thought, and he wrote about this in Per Amica Silentia Lunae , which he wrote in 1917, he thought that he would have to become his anti-self, which meant becoming the opposite of what he naturally was. And if he could find that anti-self, and he could find that by finding his mask, that was his anti-self. It was the opposite of himself, he could call a Daimon to himself, and that was the source of his inspiration.

Rachael Kohn: The Daimon, was that his reed-throated whisperer?

Susan Johnston Graf: I think so, yes, I think it was. And so he wrote a poem about being with a lover who wears a mask of burning gold, with emerald eyes. Because he was told that his own nature was too lunar, having to do with the moon and darkness, and so he needed a mask that was solar, that was the opposite of what his nature was.

Rachael Kohn: He was silver?

Susan Johnston Graf: He would have been silver, yes, he would have been lunar, so he's with a lover who wears a burning gold mask.

Rachael Kohn: What poem would you choose as having the most, I suppose redolent, occult images?

Susan Johnston Graf: It's difficult. I don't know if I can even -

Rachael Kohn: Well how about gyre, you mentioned the gyre.

Susan Johnston Graf: When I think of the gyre I think of the 'Second Coming', in fact that's the poem I had marked for today. "Turning and turning in the widening gyre". Because to Yeats, the gyre, I think what that meant to him was transmutation and change. He's thinking about changes not only birth and death and conception and those kind of changes which also involve thinking about a gyre, but also the aeons in human history, the Christian era. He said every 2,000 years the gyre would spin to its opposite and reverse. And that's what the 'Second Coming' is about.

Rachael Kohn: So was Yeats looking forward to a new age, a kind of polytheistic paganistic new age? Was there any room there for a Christ consciousness?

Susan Johnston Graf: He was looking for a new age. He thought that the new age was here. He thought along with all of his fellow occultists that an avatar of that new age was about to be born. But I don't think that he thought that it would be like Christ. Christ was the avatar of the earlier age.

Rachael Kohn: Susan, how much do you think Yeats's poetry can really be understood without the kind of knowledge of his occult involvements that you have, and that you've displayed in the book?

Susan Johnston Graf: I think certainly that his poetry can be read by anyone, and appreciated on whatever level, whatever they bring to it. I think that if you start to read Yeats, and you read his work as a body of work, you can't help but to become interested in the occult aspects, and I think that when you know a little bit about that, the poetry takes on a depth and a richness of meaning that it didn't have before.

Rachael Kohn: Susan, you write a lot about Per Amica Silentia Lunae, 'the friendly silence of the moon'.

Susan Johnston Graf: 'Through the friendly silence of the moon'.

Rachael Kohn: Now that seems to have been a very important work for Yeats, in that it is a kind of exposition of his occult beliefs. How widely known has that book been?

Susan Johnston Graf: Not widely, and it is very important.

Yeats called it his spiritual history, and I think that in writing down the ideas in Per Amica he really centred himself and found what he needed to do, and I think the writing of Per Amica is in some way responsible for his spiritual path anyway, that he took.

The book is not well known because A Vision came after it, and Yeats always said that A Vision came from the work that he did in Per Amica, that Per Amica is a kind of precursor to A Vision. Scholars would read that and just go on to A Vision I think, which in a lot of ways is more understandable because Per Amica is just a prose poem, it's a very wandering mind trip, and so it took me many years to try to understand that.

Rachael Kohn: Is there a poem that encapsulates some of those ideas?

Susan Johnston Graf: There is, actually. There's a poem that Yeats placed at the very beginning of Per Amica as the poem that embodies what he's trying to say, and that poem is 'Ego Dominus Tuus'. Here's a few lines, where he's talking about finding his anti-self, which remember is what he has to do to find his Daimon who will give him poetic inspiration.

I call to the mysterious one who yet
Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream
And look most like me, being indeed my double,
And prove of all imaginable things
The most unlike, being my anti-self,
And, standing by these characters, disclose
All that I seek; and whisper it as though
He were afraid the birds, who cry aloud
Their momentary cries before it is dawn,
Would carry it away to blasphemous men.

Rachael Kohn: Susan, I wonder whether William Butler Yeats is something of the bard for Theosophists and for Jungians and for all kinds of people who are interested and involved in the occult tradition?

Susan Johnston Graf: If he's not, he should be. I know that I think he is for me. Certainly there's a lot of depth and a lot of study that's required I think, to see his occult illusions, but I hope that Yeats at least becomes that, if he isn't now.

Rachael Kohn: Susan Johnston Graf, speaking there from the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches English. Her book is W.B. Yeats, Twentieth Century Magus.

Next week on The Ark, a new acquisition for Australia, early Christian papyri from Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.

Till then, so long from me, Rachael Kohn.

THEME

Guests

Susan Johnston Graf
holds a Ph.D. in English and has trained as a literary scholar, but esoterica has been her preoccupation. She is Assistant Professor of English at Penn State University in the US, and is currently at work on a second book about Yeats and his occultism.

Further Information

Yeats Society Sligo web site
http://www.yeats-sligo.com/

Publications

Title: W.B.Yeats: Twentieth-Century Magus
Author : Susan Johnston Graf
Publisher: Samuel Weiser Inc, 2000