W. B. Yeats and the Golden Dawn: The Poet as Magician

The Irish poet W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) was for more than thirty years a practising member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its successor, the Stella Matutina. Initiated in London in March 1890 under the motto Demon Est Deus Inversus, he studied ritual magic, the Kabbalah and visionary techniques, planned an order of Celtic Mysteries, and played a leading part in the order's crisis of 1900. In 1892 he told a friend that the mystical life was the centre of everything he did, thought and wrote, and the symbolic system of his late work, set out in A Vision (1925, revised 1937), grew from the automatic writing of his wife, herself a Golden Dawn initiate.

Dublin Hermetic Society and Madame Blavatsky§

Yeats grew up between Dublin, London and County Sligo, and his interest in the unseen began early, nourished by the fairy lore of the Sligo countryside and by his reading of Romantic poetry. In 1885, as a young art student in Dublin, he helped to found the Dublin Hermetic Society with his school friend Charles Johnston, and among the people drawn into that milieu was the poet and painter George William Russell, who wrote as "AE". The society read Theosophical books, above all A. P. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism, and discussed Indian philosophy and the hidden wisdom that Theosophy claimed lay behind all religions.

When the Yeats family moved to London in 1887, Yeats went to see Helena Blavatsky, whose Theosophical Society was then at the height of its fashion. He joined her circle and, in 1888, its Esoteric Section, but his wish to test occult claims by experiment, including attempts to raise the ghost of a flower from its ashes, fitted poorly with the Section's discipline, and he was asked to leave in 1890. By then he had found another path.

Initiation into the Golden Dawn, 1890§

Through the occultist Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, whom he met in the British Museum Reading Room, Yeats was introduced to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded two years earlier. He was initiated into its Isis-Urania Temple in London on 7 March 1890, taking the motto Demon Est Deus Inversus, "the devil is God reversed", a formula current in late nineteenth-century occultism that also heads a section of Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine (1888). He advanced through the grades of the outer order and in January 1893 was admitted to the Second Order, the Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis, whose adepts worked in the ritual chamber described in our article on the Vault of the Adepti.

The Golden Dawn gave Yeats a training rather than a creed. Members learned Hebrew letters and Kabbalistic correspondences, the symbolism of the tarot, and techniques of "scrying in the spirit vision", in which a coloured symbol such as an elemental tattva was used as a doorway into imagined landscapes that were then explored and recorded. Yeats practised these visions with friends, including the actress Florence Farr and his uncle George Pollexfen in Sligo, and kept notebooks of the results.

During the same years he edited, with the painter Edwin Ellis, a three-volume edition of the works of William Blake (1893), reading the prophetic books as a system of occult symbolism. The project confirmed his conviction that poets and magicians shared a common language of images.

The Celtic Mysteries and the Castle of Heroes§

The most ambitious occult project of Yeats's early career was an order of Celtic Mysteries. From about 1895 he worked, with Maud Gonne, with MacGregor and Moina Mathers in Paris, and with George Pollexfen, on rituals that would do for the ancient Irish gods what the Golden Dawn had done for Hermetic and Kabbalistic symbolism. The four treasures of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the cauldron, stone, spear and sword, were linked with the four elements and the four suits of the tarot, and visions were sought of Irish deities and heroes.

Yeats imagined a "Castle of Heroes" on an island in Lough Key, County Roscommon, which would serve as a retreat and initiation centre for an Irish spiritual and national revival. The castle was never acquired and the rituals were never completed, but the project fed his poetry, his Irish Literary Revival and his lifelong belief that a nation's myths could be awakened as living powers. Its background in early Irish belief is discussed in our article on Celtic religion.

The Crisis of 1900 and the Stella Matutina§

By the late 1890s the London adepts had grown restless under Mathers's autocratic leadership from Paris. In 1900 the crisis broke: Mathers claimed that the order's founding documents had been forged by his co-founder William Wynn Westcott, and the London members rebelled. When Mathers sent the young Aleister Crowley, whom the London adepts had refused to advance, to seize the order's rooms and property in April 1900, Yeats was among those who resisted him, and he took a leading part in reorganising the London temple.

Yeats then found himself opposing Florence Farr, who had encouraged small private "groups" within the order. In 1901 he circulated a privately printed pamphlet, Is the Order of R. R. & A. C. to Remain a Magical Order?, insisting that the order must keep its hierarchy, examinations and collective discipline. The quarrel helped to split the London membership, and after 1903 Yeats joined the faction that became the Stella Matutina, led by Robert Felkin and John William Brodie-Innes. He remained a member, though with declining activity, into the early 1920s.

Symbols, Magic and the Poetry§

In 1901 Yeats published the essay "Magic", which opens with a plain declaration: "I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic." He reduced that philosophy to three doctrines: the borders of individual minds are always shifting, so that many minds can flow into one another; the borders of memory shift in the same way, so that individual memories are part of one great memory of Nature; and this great mind and memory can be evoked by symbols. The essay explains why Yeats regarded poetry as a kind of evocation, and why his verse returns again and again to a fixed set of symbols: the rose, the tower, the moon, the tree.

The lyrics of the early 1890s later grouped as The Rose, and the collection The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), are full of Rosicrucian and Kabbalistic imagery, and stories such as "Rosa Alchemica" (1896) describe initiation into an imaginary order of alchemical adepts. Later poems such as "The Second Coming" (1920), with its Spiritus Mundi or "great memory" from which images arise, apply the doctrine of the essay to history itself.

A Vision and the Automatic Script§

In October 1917 Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Lees, known as George, who had been initiated into the Stella Matutina in 1914. A few days after the wedding she began to produce automatic writing, and over the following years she and Yeats held hundreds of sessions in which questions were answered by communicators whom the couple called "instructors". The resulting script, thousands of pages long, became the basis of A Vision, privately printed in 1925 and substantially revised in 1937.

A Vision presents a symbolic geometry of interpenetrating cones or "gyres" and a wheel of twenty-eight phases of the moon, which classify human personalities and describe the cycles of history in roughly two-thousand-year eras, as well as the soul's journey after death. Yeats was careful to say that he did not take the scheme literally as a description of the world; it was, he suggested, a set of stylistic arrangements of experience. Scholars continue to debate how far George Yeats shaped the system, and her role is now recognised as central. The book is the most substantial work of occult philosophy written by a major modern poet, and its symbols run through the poetry of his last years, written after he had received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

Frequently asked questions§

Was W. B. Yeats really a member of the Golden Dawn?§

Yes. Yeats was initiated in March 1890, entered the Second Order in 1893 and stayed in the Golden Dawn's successor order, the Stella Matutina, into the early 1920s. Surviving rituals, letters and notebooks document his active participation.

What was Yeats's magical motto?§

His motto was Demon Est Deus Inversus, "the devil is God reversed", often abbreviated D.E.D.I. Golden Dawn members were known within the order by such Latin mottoes.

What is A Vision by Yeats?§

A Vision is Yeats's prose account of a symbolic system of history, personality and the afterlife, based on automatic writing produced by his wife George from 1917. It was first published in 1925 and revised in 1937.

Did Yeats know Aleister Crowley?§

They met through the Golden Dawn and were on opposite sides in 1900, when Yeats helped resist Crowley's attempt, on Mathers's behalf, to take over the London order's rooms. Yeats is reported to have thought little of Crowley's poetry, and the two were never friends.

Sources and further reading§

• A Vision — W. B. Yeats, 1925
• Yeats's Golden Dawn — George Mills Harper, 1974
• The Magicians of the Golden Dawn — Ellic Howe, 1972
• Women of the Golden Dawn: Rebels and Priestesses — Mary K. Greer, 1995
• Yeats the Initiate — Kathleen Raine, 1986
• The Unicorn: William Butler Yeats' Search for Reality — Virginia Moore, 1954
• George's Ghosts: A New Life of W. B. Yeats — Brenda Maddox, 1999