[New-Poetry] Yeats, Bircumshaw, Sphinx

[Roger Day]

It's important to point out that the GD Order was formed by three
chancers: Dr. William Robert Woodman, William Wynn Westcott, and
Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, who were Freemasons and members of
Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia.

The original Dublin Hermetic Society was formed in 1885, affiliated
with the Theosophical Society. It was reformed and renamed by AE in
1886 as the Dublin Lodge of the Theosophical Society. This is based
around the commune in Upper Ely Place. Yeats didn't seem to be
interested in the reformed organisation.

According to my sources, there was no Irish Order of the Golden Dawn
in Yeats' day. Howeveer, he tried to set-up the School of Celtic
Mysteries:
http://www.epwijnants-lectures.com/nat_occult.html

this part is worth quoting:

<quote>
Yeats worked for Irish independence, but he conceived of it in terms
that were primarily related to his occult studies. And Yeats hoped to
gain intimate knowledge of a sacred or "hidden" Ireland through his
occult practices. He saw occult practice as a source of reliable
information about the connections between the symbols he used in his
literary work and the wellsprings of national and occult knowledge. In
order to claim this secret knowledge, he and several other students of
the occult planned to revive the Druidic mysteries as mentioned, in a
stone castle on Trinity Island, in the middle of Lough Key in County
Roscommon. Maud Gonoe, William Sharp (who wrote under the oame of
Fiona Macleod), George Pollexfen, Annie Horniman, Dorothea Hunter, AE,
and Maty Briggs all worked closely with Yeats to design the Castle's
rituals and symbolism. Yeats also consulted with the founder of the
Golden Dawn, MacGregor Mathers. ( John Kelly ed, The Collected Letters
of W.B. Yeats. Volume Two, 1997, p. 663-69.)

The Castle was never built, but Yeats and his collaborators hoped to
establish it as the spiritual center of Irish culture. For six years,
they worked tirelessly designing its rituals, symbols, ornamentation,
and teachings. They read scholarship about Irish myths and borrowed
from Golden Dawn teachings, but their primary research methods were
the visionary explorations they recorded in their private notebooks.
Yeats,Maud Gonne, George Pollexfen, Annie Horniman, and  other
members of the Castle described "astral" journeys in which they
penetrated the recesses of a "bidden" Ireland and extracted its sacred
power. As a rite of passage, the labyrinth gave shape to the Castle's
underlying political fantasy: that a devoted cabal of 'initiates'
could work secretly to shape Irish imaginative culture using the
symbols they drew from Celtic myths and occult experience. For Yeats,
the labyrinth reflected the imperfect conditions of human knowledge
and the lengthy process by which self awareness is achieved. As he
wrote in Per Amico Silentia Lunae, the fate of human knowledge is to
follow the winding "path of the serpent" and hope for "sudden
lightning" flashes of illumination. (W.B. Yeats, Per Amico Silentia
Lunae, 1918, p. 39.)

Yeats's claim to inhabit a sacred nationalist tradition required him
to engage in constant struggle with his fellow students of the occult.
This struggle and the knowledge born of it were what distinguished
Yeats and his collaborators from an 'uninitiated Irish public'. To
further distinguish themselves, they implicitly compared their
struggles to Oisin's battle with the demon, the lives of saints, and
the convention of the "long night of the soul."
</quote>

Note that Yeats consulted with MacGregor Mathers in trying to start the school.

So, no Irish Golden Dawn. However, Yeats did a lot of research trying
to create a Celtic School of Mysteries, which does not appear to have
survived his involvement.

I wholley reccommend

http://www.yeatsvision.com/

This contains a heckova lot about Yeats and his mage-tendancies.

An interesting round-trip, with some strange snippets on the way.
Mondrian latched on the theosophic idea of grids. Pound was friendly
with Yeats (not much about this in the Kenner book); it's been
asserted that Pound based the Cantos on theosophic teachings,
something which deserves more research on my part.

Roger

On 8/10/06, Roger Day <rog3r.day at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
> >
> --
> http://www.badstep.net/
> http://www.cb1poetry.org.uk/
> "From the waist downwards, Bloodnok was tattooed with a pair of false
> legs... facing the wrong way."
>


-- 
http://www.badstep.net/
http://www.cb1poetry.org.uk/
"From the waist downwards, Bloodnok was tattooed with a pair of false
legs... facing the wrong way."