The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (23 page)

W. B. Yeats was fortunate in having an educated and reflective father. In his early years he reacted against many of the elder Yeats’s views, in particular his skepticism. But those views help partly to explain the poet, as does the general intellectual climate of the time. Because, as W. B. came
onstream as a poet and as an individual, developments in Europe and America were influencing young men like him (see the following chapter for details). These events caused Yeats to react against his father’s skepticism, but not to embrace what we might call the
status quo ante
—Christianity. Instead, like many others, in an attempt to combat the “materialists,” as he called them, he turned to semi-mystical thought, which refused to accept the universe identified by the scientists and the rationalists. He subscribed to a variety of occult theories, joined occult societies, and formulated a mystical nationalism which, while it resulted in some magnificent poetry, at this distance might seem embarrassing.

The point of Yeats is that the system he tried to adopt was far more all-embracing, far more ambitious, attempting to explain far more than anything that, say, Shaw or Valéry tried to do.
But Yeats ultimately failed
. In retrospect this was—and perhaps still is—his greatest significance, and it is the subject of the next chapter.

8

“The Wrong Supernatural World”

Y
eats would probably not have turned to the occult sciences with such alacrity had not a movement in that direction already been well under way. As Richard Ellmann describes it: “All over Europe and America young men dropped like him, and usually without his caution, into the treacherous currents of semi-mystical thought. . . . Since Christianity seemed to have been exploded, and since science offered to Western man little but proof of his own ignominiousness, a new doctrine purporting to be an ancient and non-European one was evolved by a strange Russian lady. The new movement called itself Theosophy and offered a ‘synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy’ which opposed the contemporary developments of all three.”
1

The “strange Russian lady” was Madame Helen Blavatsky, born in 1831 in Yekaterinoslav, who advanced “with certainty” her theories that “man had never been an ape” and that Herbert Spencer was in fundamental error, and accused in particular the Christian priesthood of modern materialism. Modern religion, she insisted, was but ancient thought
distorted
; and to uncover what such thought really was, she turned to comparative mythology, which, since about 1860, had been highly developed in books by such scholars as Max Müller, a German who taught at Oxford, and culminated in James Frazer’s
The Golden Bough
(1890).

In an early work of her own, Madame Blavatsky drew attention to what she saw as the similarity in the fundamental beliefs across all religions, and attributed this “to the existence of a secret doctrine which was their common parent.” She claimed access to an oral tradition, for the true doc
trine according to her had never been allowed to be set down. “Now,” she said, “an ancient brotherhood was keeping the secret wisdom high in the mountain fastnesses of Tibet.” The members of this brotherhood had no interest in spreading their wisdom, but should they choose to do so, she confided, they would “astonish” the world. And they had at least shown certain things to Madame Blavatsky, for the onward transmission of their secret doctrine via the “Theosophical Society.” “As these mysteries were gradually revealed, the world would slowly progress towards the greater spirituality that had been prophesied for it.”
2

One of the reasons the movement was popular—it was a “magnet” for disaffected members of the educated public, says the Yeats scholar Margaret Mills Harper—was that it was both anti-atheist and anti-clerical. It attacked science but used scientific concepts where it suited the moment; it espoused fatalism, yet also offered hope of progress. “Spiritual evolution restored the hope which natural evolution had removed.”

And it was Blavatsky’s
The Secret Doctrine
, her chief work, that drew Yeats to Theosophy, the first of several forms of occult reasoning that attracted him. Her doctrine proposed three main ideas. First, she said, there was an “Omnipresent, Eternal, Boundless and Immutable Principle on which all speculation is impossible”—the Theosophists paid little attention to deity. Second, the world is essentially a conflict of polar opposites, contraries without which life cannot exist. Third, she proclaimed the fundamental identity of all souls with the “Universal Oversoul,” which carried the implication that any soul might, under proper conditions, partake of the Oversoul’s power, a heady possibility. The soul had seven elements, or principles, and it evolved through these elements over time. Heaven and hell were to be considered as “states,” not actual places.

During this spiritual evolution humankind progressed from a more intuitive way of thinking to a more intellectual style, growing more conscious. This is where the world is at present, she said, in the fourth stage. In future stages—five, six and seven—intuition, intelligence and consciousness will fuse into an intense spirituality that, at present, we cannot imagine. When it suited them, the Theosophists reinforced their arguments with examples from Eastern religions—for instance, they espoused
the idea of Nirvana.

Several of Yeats’s school friends became interested in Theosophy, which is how he learned of it. He met Blavatsky herself in London, in 1887, and she persuaded him to join her “lodge.” He was impressed by the fact that she was “so fully herself.” Yeats was not altogether convinced of her occult powers (he was enough of his father’s son) but he was impressed by the fact that, as he saw it, she “held in her head all the folklore of the world and much of its wisdom.”
3

Blavatsky warned her followers to beware of black magic, but not all of them went along with her, including Yeats, who took his friend Katharine Tynan to a spiritualist séance, “where he was so upset by the supernatural phenomenon that he lost control of himself and beat his head on the table.” However, by that time the demand for “magical instruction” was growing, and Blavatsky consented to form an “esoteric section” of the society to accommodate it; Yeats joined enthusiastically. He hoped that it would prove to the satisfaction even of skeptics like his father that occult phenomena were possible.
4
Several experiments were carried out, which sound ridiculous now but were taken seriously then. The esotericists tried (unsuccessfully) to raise the ghost of a flower, and to evoke certain kinds of dreams by sleeping with special symbols under their pillows. Madame Blavatsky took objection to these efforts, and Yeats was asked to resign from the Theosophists, which he did.

But he had now been introduced to a system—and to other people who like him were opposed to scientific materialism and who accepted that there was a secret and ancient wisdom to be had. He hoped that he could bring into this wisdom all the fairy tales and folklore he had heard in his childhood—for he regarded Ireland as a mystical land. In addition to Madame Blavatsky’s doctrines, Yeats subscribed to those of Jacob Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg, and their concepts of cyclical history. Above all, he was taken with the inherent secrecy of the movement and its idea that reality could not be “facilely explained” as the perceptions of five senses; he felt sure that scientific rationalism had ignored or “superficially dismissed” many important matters.

Some months before he left the Theosophists he had joined the Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn, a smaller organization with essen
tially similar beliefs, though its members paid more attention to the European tradition of Kabbalistic magic than to the wisdom of the East. The aim of many members of the Golden Dawn was to show their power over the material universe.

France was especially susceptible to cults, where one sect gave degrees in Kabbalah. The Golden Dawn was run by a triumvirate of people, one of whom was married to the sister of Henri Bergson. Despite several factional disputes, Yeats joined the order in 1890 because the leaders’ magical feats impressed him, some of which he was able to execute for himself. On one occasion, when he placed a death symbol on a fellow member’s forehead, that individual, without knowing what the symbol was, immediately reported seeing an image of a hearse. Yeats later said that this kind of influence stayed with him until he was at least forty.

Some of his friends feared that he was veering “far from life.”

In his first collected poems he stressed his intense concern with—and belief in—the occult, saying in a letter to Florence Farr (actress, mistress of George Bernard Shaw and a fellow member of the Golden Dawn) in 1901, “All that we do with an intensity has an origin in the hidden world.”
5
He loved the rituals of the Golden Dawn and its central myth, the mystical death and resurrection of the adept. It was, as Ellmann says, a strange mixture of paganism and Christianity, and Yeats, dissatisfied with himself, as he arguably was throughout his life, was eager to be born anew.

THE CASTLE OF THE HEROES

Alongside these activities went Yeats’s involvement in nationalism. He was a romantic, largely ignorant—as many romantics were—of economics, history, politics and sociology; but he yearned for a heroic life, regarded Ireland as a “mystical land,” and saw his opportunity to help create an Irish literature that would define both what the country was and what it wanted to be, while serving as the best kind of propaganda. But it proved more difficult than he had thought, because Irish nationalism was bred of seven hundred years of hatred of the occupying authority, and such well-ingrained attitudes were, as Ellmann nicely puts it, “difficult to bridle.”

Yeats was in particular concerned that “delicate qualities of mind” might be destroyed in a mob movement. There were many battles to be fought, but he gradually came to see that his own role was to set standards, to keep the movement intellectually respectable, while all the time exalting patriotism and heroism. He even argued at times that there were “truths of passion that were intellectual falsehoods.”

His idea of the Ireland of the future was to re-create the Ireland of the past. “Ireland . . . will be a country where not only will the wealth be well distributed but where there will be an imaginative culture and power to understand imaginative and spiritual things distributed among the people. We wish to preserve an ancient ideal of life. Wherever its customs prevail, there you will find the folk song, the folk tale, the proverb and the charming manners that come from ancient culture. . . . In Ireland alone among the nations that I know [Britain, America, France] you will find, away on the Western seaboard, under broken roofs, a race of gentlemen who keep alive the ideals of a great time when men sang the heroic life with drawn swords in their hands. . . . We must so live that we will make that old noble kind of life powerful among our people.”

What Yeats did was to mold both occultism and nationalism into his art. His father thought his interest in the occult was absurd and his patriotism a waste of energies that would have been better spent on his poetry; and certainly, as Ellmann observes, most of what Yeats wrote at that time was “ostentatiously Irish and occult.” He even made speeches declaring his belief in fairies, though when pressed drew back and described them as “dramatizations of our moods.” He considered combining Druidism with Christianity, as the Golden Dawn had comprised Rosicrucianism and Christianity, convinced that “all lovely and loving places were crowded with invisible beings, and that it would be possible to communicate with them.”
6

“The vague dream of an Irish cult slowly possessed Yeats’s mind,” and he thought of new forms of worship. It was against this background that he found an island with an unoccupied castle in Lough Key in the west of Ireland, and had the idea to turn it into the headquarters of a new cult through which the truths of the spirit might be disseminated to the materialistic nations. The doctrines would be the same as those of Theosophy and the Golden Dawn but associated specifically with Ireland. They would
“unite the radical truths of Christianity to those of a more ancient world.” To the “Castle of the Heroes” would come the finest men and women of Ireland for spiritual inspiration and teaching, and they would return, fortified by the supernatural powers which the Irish mystical order had consecrated, to act, in the words of Florence Farr, as living links “between the supernal and terrestrial natures.”
7

Yeats spent a great deal of time researching and developing a special rite for this new order, eventually deciding that the candidates must pass through the “initiations of the cauldron, the stone, the sword and the spear,” symbolizing the four elements and their spiritual equivalents.
8
Underneath it all, he was arguing that Irish life must have a basis in faith such as existing churches could not provide.

It was not dissimilar to his plan for a mystical theatre. The story of the founding of the Abbey is well-known: a group of playwrights and actors wanted to establish a national theatre for the small nation that was Ireland, and they were phenomenally successful, in that the plays they produced appeared all over the world. Yeats’s goal was to show that Ireland was a holy land and one full of holy symbols, “not in the orthodox clergyman’s sense but in the poet’s sense, which was also the mystic’s sense; here alone in a degenerate Europe would spiritual realities be understood.”
9
Many of his early plays, such as
Countess Cathleen: A Miracle Play
(1899),
The Hour-Glass: A Morality
and
Where There Is Nothing
(both 1902), followed these ideas of fusing the occult and national interests.

He began to change again in the early years of the twentieth century, when his letters to friends begin to reflect his poetry and plays, when the language becomes less elaborate, more “homely,” more the idiom of common speech. “All art is in the last analysis an endeavor to condense as out of the flying vapor of the world an image of human perfection, and for its own and not for art’s sake.”
10
Here he had recourse to his famous notion of the mask: that the face we present to the world is designed to conceal as much as to reveal. He still maintained his obsession with spiritual struggle, that this was the way, eventually, to discover the meaning of life; and he was still conscious of the divisions within himself, as within people generally, getting in the way of any sense of unity—a sense that he badly wanted to achieve, that he thought was the very point of life.

In 1909, and especially from 1911, he began to take a serious interest in spiritualism, attending séances in an attempt, as he put it, to reunite the “mind & soul & body.” Ellmann accepts that Yeats was more credulous than most, his investigations leading him to research alleged miracles; whether “automatic [or ‘free’] writers” could transcend the boundaries of their own minds and knowledge; the nature of spirits and of the afterlife.
11
(And he was not above “less formal goals” such as the answer to the question “Am I to marry Maud Gonne?”) There are countless examples of Yeats’s collaboration, or attempted collaboration, with automatic writers, but despite this, Ellmann says, he did not see himself as “particularly superstitious.” Rather, “Unable to give full consent to the doctrines of psychical research, Yeats more and more inclined to the use of myth and metaphor which somersaulted over the question of literal belief.”
12