[New-Poetry] Yeats, Bircumshaw, Sphinx

[Roger Day]

Bored at work, I did a few searches.

1. Yeats was grand master flash at the *London* temple of the GD
Order. Prior to this, he formed the Dublin Hermetic Club.

2. Although he *talked about an Irish GD Order based on mystical
principles and legends - and there are vague references to an Irish GD
order[1] - a point against WB joining/creating an Irish temple is that
Maud Gonne came to dislike the Order because of it's connections with
British Freemasonry and she regarded it as a British Imperialist plot.
Some say that's why she resigned in the end; some say that Yeat's
membership of the Order is the reason she refused to marry him first
time around.

The links between Astrology and Fascism are well established. Whether
or not the Irish fascists had any *continuing* connection with
Astrology, I don't know. I got sick of bad HTML by the time I'd
finished my searches :-) As is in walks of life, you get the
occasional oddball who doesn't like the way things are run.

An interesting point is that Yeats, apparently, found the certainties
of this stuff to be quite liberating. I reserve the right to have no
certainties, and not to worship at the feet of any guru.

Roger

[1] I can find no Irish temple until 1976. The three main ones are in
London, Edinburgh and Paris, with an offshoot in New Zealand.

On 8/2/06, elemenope at icubed.com <elemenope at icubed.com> wrote:
> Dave,
>
> Yeats didn't found the Order in Ireland?  Wasn't it his doing as part of
> his "secret" activities there?
> I'll have to read the new collected papers to get his dealing with
> Blatvatsky and Orage and Waite straight.
>
> I'm interested in probing the occult facts, not in engaging in pedantic
> sniping.  So, it's not merely "fascinating" to me.  It's important.
>
> So, if you can deliver updates on relevant views of "The Vision" that
> don't dismiss it out of hand because it is seen as gobbledegook or
> whatever,  I'm all ears.  I knmow you have access to this kind of
> information, but I don't know whether you take it seriously.  I do, and I
> believe that poetry ought to.  I'm tired of poets assuming that
> Probability Theory is the appropriate ground for their tests of reality.
> That was one of the issues that caused me to not identify, at bottom, with
> the Language Poets, for instance.
>
> Remember the heroism of Witte when he refused to work for Hitler.  The
> great astrologers are animated by liberty.  Yeats, as well, was not a
> fascist, he was an astrologer and occultist.
>
> Richard
>
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