Yeats, The Tarot and The Golden Dawn

Yeats, the Tarot, and the Golden Dawn
Author(s): Kathleen Raine

Source: The Sewanee Review, Vol. 77, No. 1 (Winter, 1969), pp. 112-148
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27541704
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YEATS, THE TAROT, AND
THE GOLDEN DAWN
By KATHLEEN RAINE
1 became curious about Yeats's use of the Tarot cards because

my attention had been caught by an observation in Hone's
Life that among the young poet's few and treasured posses
sions in his rooms in London in the 1880's was a Tarot pack. His
allusions to certain Tarot symbols?Tower, Wheel, Magician,
Chariot?are bound to strike anyone who has played at fortune
telling with Madame Sosostris's "wicked pack of cards". What
I did not know thirty years ago, when under the spell of The
Waste Land I bought myself a Tarot pack, was that the set I
used with instructions and commentary by A. E. Waite, had been
designed for the use of members of the Hermetic Society of the
Golden Dawn, of which both Waite and Pamela Coleman-Smith
(who executed the emblems) were members. So of course was
Yeats, who also published, with Masefield, Synge, and others, in
Miss Coleman-Smith's little magazine, The Green Sheaf. So I
found myself at the very first step in the deep waters of those
magical studies about which Yeats knew so much and his academic
commentators know so little; for the kind of knowledge to which
members of that Order aspired cannot in its nature be understood
in academic terms. The merely academic study of magical
symbolism may be likened to the analysis of musical scores by a
student who does not know that the documents he meticulously
annotates are merely indications for the evocation of music from
instruments of whose very existence he is ignorant.
The Tarot, although associated with Gypsy fortune-tellers,
*I wish to thank Mr. Gerald Yorke for the^ loan of unpublished documents from his
collection of Golden Dawn material, and of his own essay on the Order; Mr. Geoffrey
Watkins, for much firsthand information, and for the loan of books; Mr. John Symonds,
for the trouble which he took to borrow for me Israel Regardie's four volumes of the
Golden Dawn rituals; and, above all, the lender of unpublished Golden Dawn manu
scripts, who wishes to remain anonymous.
KATHLEEN RAINE 113
especially in Italy and the South of France, was clearly not in

vented by the Gypsies. That it embodies, in the form of em
blems, ancient Egyptian mythology is also unlikely, though Court
de G?belin, the first scholar to come under the spell of the Tarot,
put forward this theory as long ago as 1781.
Another theory of the origin of the Tarot associates it with
the Jewish esoteric tradition of the Cabbala. This is the view of
Eliphas L?vi, from whose Histoire de Magie Mathers (that
"learned but unscholarly man", as Yeats calls him) quotes:
The absolute hieroglyphical science had for its basis an

alphabet of which all the gods were letters, all the letters
ideas, all the ideas numbers, and all the numbers perfect
signs.
A. E. Waite suggests another possible origin of the Tarot sym

bols, among the Albigensians; some of them, he points out, cor
respond very closely with those watermarks which Harold
Bayley in his New Light on the Renaissance and The Lost Lan
guage of Symbolism (a book Yeats knew) had so ingeniously and
convincingly shown to have embodied in emblematic form many
of the beliefs of the persecuted and scattered heirs of the Trouba
dours. He instances the Ace of Cups, which resembles the
Albigensian device that represents the grail.
In any case, the practice of the Golden Dawn, like that of the
Theosophical Society, was an unbounded eclecticism: if several al
ternatives exist, accept all. Eclecticism may be unscholarly but
must lead to enrichment of connotation. Such moments of im
passioned syncretism have (as at the time of the Renaissance)
often accompanied vital movements of the arts. The Egyptian
theory of the origin of the Tarot formed at once a justification
and a bridge for the introduction of the Egyptian pantheon into a
system basically Cabbalistic. H. P. Blavatsky had already woven
into her own eclectic theosophy an exotic strand of Egyptian
wisdom; she quotes continually from the Book of the Dead. For
114 THE TAROT AND THE GOLDEN DAWN
the theosophist, Egyptian mythology had the double charm of

antiquity and novelty. Plato, Pythagoras, and Moses had vener
ated the wisdom of the Egyptians, of which so little is known
and so much surmised. The legendary Egyptian magus Hermes
Trismegistus remained a venerated figure throughout the Chris
tian Middle Ages, and the Herm?tica has at all times been a
sacred book in the canon of the Western esoteric tradition. At
the same time, it was all new; the pantheon of the land of magic
?Thoth, Isis, Osiris, Horus, Hathor, and Maat?had not be
come, like Venus and Cupid and Apollo, a currency worn thin by
use, their numinosity long since faded. For the poet in search of
valid symbols there is, besides, much to be said for theriomorphic
gods. Animal forms belong not to history but to timeless nature;
a universal language still new when pantheons are old, and yet
still able to form a link with ancient sacred meaning. The
"Golden-Eyed Hawk of the Sun", the moon-ruled cat, "the
Great Cackler", tggy lotus, or familiar donkey?all Egyptian
symbols?enabled Yeats to mask esoteric themes in forms accept
able in their own right.
Since what follows belongs to the teachings and rituals of the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, it will be convenient to
give here a short summary of the history of the Order. This be
gins in 1884, when from a bookstall in Farringdon Street?so
the story goes?the Rev. A. F. A. Woodford bought some cypher
manuscripts. These he showed to two friends, both eminent
Freemasons, and members also of the Societas Rosicruciana in
Anglia: Dr. Woodman and W. Wynn Westcott. They were
also shown to a Scotsman, S. Liddell Mathers, who was soon,
under the spell of the Celtic movement, to become MacGregor
Mathers, then MacGregor; and later still, living in France (his
wife was the sister of the philosopher Bergson), he revived the
title of some ancestor and became the Comte de Glenstrae. Be
fore Yeats met him he used to see him in the British Museum
reading-room where he copied manuscripts on magical ceremonial
KATHLEEN RAINE 115
and doctrine (Yeats himself must at this time have been work
ing on Blake) : "a man of thirty-six or thirty-seven, in a brown
velveteen coat, with a gaunt resolute face, and who seemed, be
fore I heard his name, or knew the nature of his studies, a figure
of romance". "It was through him mainly," Yeats has written
in The Trembling of the Veil, "that I began certain studies and
experiences, that were to convince me that images well up before
the mind's eye from a deeper source than conscious or subconscious
memory."
The Rev. Mr. Woodford's cypher manuscripts proved to con
tain instructions to the finders to communicate with "a continental
adept" through a certain Fr?ulein Sprengel, whose address in
Hanover was given. How the manuscripts found their way to
a bookstall in Farringdon Street is not explained. A. E. Waite
in his Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross gives it as his view that the
manuscripts were post-1880 and emanated from a continental
society of Rosicrucians.
Yeats in A Vision tells how the legendary Michael Robartes,
following from Rome a ballet-dancer with whom he had fallen
in love, parted with her at last in Vienna. "To make the quarrel
as complete as possible I cohabited with an ignorant girl of the
people and hired rooms ostentatious in their sordidness. One
night I was thrown out of bed and saw when I lit my candle that
the bed, which had fallen at one end, had been propped up by a
broken chair and an old book with a pig-skin cover. In the morn
ing I found that the book was called Speculum Angelorum et
Hominum, and had been written by a certain Giraldus and been
printed at Cracow in 1594." Yeats's fiction is obviously based
upon the actual events leading to the foundation of the Golden
Dawn and the miraculous manuscript which finds its way into the
hands for which it is intended.
On March first, 1888, a warrant was drawn up for the constitu
tion of the Order of the Golden Dawn in the Outer, with two
higher degrees, the Roseae Rubeae and the Aureae Crucis; a
perhaps mythical Third Order of Masters was also said to exist.

In 1889 a letter was published in Lucifer announcing that "this
society studies western traditions . . . the Theosophical Society
has friendly relations with them." Yeats says in his Auto
biographies that his initiation took place "in May or June 1887
in a Charlotte Street studio", nearly a year before the official
foundation of the Isis-Urania Lodge in London. His name in
the Order was Demon est Deus Inversus, Frater D. E. D. I.
Apart from the cypher manuscripts and others unearthed from
the British Museum and various continental libraries by Mathers,
most of the early teaching of the inner order of the Roseae Rubeae
and the Aureae Crucis was received clairvoyantly by Mrs.
Mathers?a situation repeated long afterwards when Yeats's A
Vision was similarly received by Mrs, Yeats. The more im
portant rituals and instructions have been published in full by
the Aries Press, Chicago, by Dr. Israel Regardie, who was a
member of the Order in its later years.
For the first few years all went well and the Order flourished.
Among its early members were A. E. Waite, Florence Farr, the
artist Horton, Edwin J. Ellis, the novelist Arthur Machen,
Yeats's uncle George Pollexfen, Miss Horniman (who after
wards endowed the Abbey Theatre), Maud Gonne, Allen Ben
nett (who was later to become famous at a Buddhist Bhikku under
the name of Ananda Metteya, whom Florence Farr followed to
Ceylon), W. Peck the Astronomer Royal of Scotland, Algernon
Blackwood. A. E. (George Russell), though a member of the
Theosophical Society, was never a member of the Golden Dawn.
New temples came into existence, in Paris, Edinburgh, Bradford,
and Weston-Super-Mare.
However, the Order soon ran into difficulties; MacGregor,
living in Paris, became increasingly autocratic; the last straw was
his sending as his delegate, to take command of the Lodge, the
notorious Aleister Crowley. Yeats was the leader of the success
ful ejection of Crowley; the deposition of Mathers followed, in
KATHLEEN RAINE 117
1900. In the following year Yeats held the office of Imperator

in the Lodge. But that was only the beginning of the end. A. E.
Waite and a group of his followers seceded in 1903, objecting to
occultism and saying that they must work on purely mystical lines.
Yeats, Wynn Westeott, and Arthur Machen resigned in 1905;
Florence Farr died. In 1905 Crowley broke with Mathers and
in 1907 founded his own Order of the A. A. or Silver Star.
Various splinter-groups survived for a while; but the First World
War swept away, among many other lost illusions, the enchant
ment out of which had arisen the Order of the Golden Dawn
Outer, the Roseae Ruheae and the Aureae Crucis.
During the seven years of his membership in the order Yeats
laid the foundation of the spiritual knowledge and the system
which is the rock upon which all his subsequent work is built; a
learning of the imagination not taught in the schools, but com
prising the gnostic, hermetic, neoplatonic, and alchemical tradi
tions. G. R. S. Meade, A. E. Waite, and other fine scholars were
at that time editing, under the direct or indirect auspices of the
Theosophical Society, the principal texts of western tradition. In
"All Souls' Night", written more than twenty years after, Yeats
summons in a ritual he had perhaps performed in their living com
pany, his companions of the Order?Horton, the artist, Florence
Farr, and MacGregor himself. These ghosts would understand
the poet's "mummy truths", "whereat the living mock", for they
had been initiated, in life, into the mysteries of the Egyptian
Book of the Dead.
Magic was only one of the subjects to which the neo
phyte of the Golden Dawn aspired when he swore "to prosecute
the Great Work: which is to obtain control of the nature
and power of my own being". According to some of the texts
(dating, however, from a later period, and doubtless under
Waite's influence) the purpose was even more specifically Chris
tian: "To establish closer and more personal relations with the
Lord Jesus, the Master of Masters, is and ever must be the ulti
mate object of all the teachings of our Order."2 Yeats, writing

for once for those who shared his own knowledge and beliefs, in
the pamphlet published under the signature D. E. D. I. (a de
fence of the system of examinations which Waite and his sup
porters wished to abolish) and entitled Is the Order of R. R. and
A.C. to Remain a Magical Order? ^ wrote that
. . . the passing by their means from one degree to another is

an evocation of the Supreme Life, a treading of a symbolic
^n the question of the degree to which the Society was Christian the experts differ.
Mr. Geoffrey Watkins believes that it was strongly so from the first; Mr. Gerald
Yorke that A. E. Waite, who rewrote the ritual extensively when he broke away from
the original Order, was mainly responsible for the Christianization. "Where the G. D.
called itself a Hermetic Order, Waite called his version a Rosicrucian Order, and
the Rosicrucians were always more Christian than the Hermetists. In the original
G. D. the Christianised Rosicrucian material did not come until the 5=6 degree in
the Inner Order. Here for the first time you find the Calvary cross, but with a rose
on it instead of the figure of Christ." This I quote from a letter from Mr. Yorke;
who further writes: "Now Hermetic Orders as such are only Christian in that they
include some Christianity but do not stress it. Rosicrucian orders on the other hand
are primarily Christian but draw on other pre-Christian sources. In other words the
Hermetists always try to become God in his anthropomorphic or in some instances
theriomorphic form. They inflame themselves with prayer until they become Adonai
the Lord . . . whereas the Christian approached God the Father through Christ
(Adonai) but never tried to become Christ, only to become as Christ. Thus the
Hermetic (or pagan) approach is as Adonai to order the averse hierarchy about, the
Rosicrucian approach is to order them about through the grace of Christ or through
the power of His name. . . . Now the G. D. used the pagan formulae, the Hermetic
formulae and the pre- or non-Christian names of power, taken from Hebrew,
Greek, Coptic, and Egyptian sources. The Rosicrucian substitutes names from
the Christian system, from the Christian Trinity, etc. Both systems combine when
it comes to the archangels Gabriel, Auriel, Michael and Raphael. They also agree
on the Cherubim, Seraphim, etc. The G. D. way of becoming the god is the dangerous
one, as it leads at once to inflated ego, witness Mathers and Crowley et al. The
occult orders are full mostly of people who are for the time being in revolt against
or not at home with Christianity. When they find that the occult, Hermetic pre
Christian way of doing things at its best is no better than the Christian way, they
often find their final home back in Christianity or in Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism.
For the major religions are major because they have stood the test of time better.
"Thus my conclusion is that the Hermetic way of the G. D. is primarily Hermetic
and not Christian, since it is reverting to pre-Christian methods and attitudes, but
some of the members will have done it all in a Christian way. I am fairly certain
that these were in a minority at any given moment and seldom remained in the
Order all their lives. But this of course is a personal opinion."
I quote this valuable opinion of Mr. Yorke for the light it throws on the imponder
ables of an ambiance, an emphasis, within an Order at best ambiguous. Mr. Watkins's
view of the predominance of the Christian emphasis may be founded upon the fact
that two of the founder-members (not Mathers) were members of the English
Rosicrucian Order. As regards Yeats, we must be left wondering, as Thomas Butts
wondered about Blake, whether his angels were black, white, or grav: but the colour
o? the ane?is themselves may perhaos lie in the eve of the beholder. In any case,
from a Catholic point of view the Order of the G. D. would stand condemned if only
on the grounds of the vow of secrecy imposed upon its members.
KATHLEEN RAINE 119
path, a passage through a symbolic gate, a clim

the light which it is the essence of our syste
flows continually from the lowest of the invisi
to the highest of the Degrees that are known t
ters nothing whether the Degrees above us are
or out of the body, for none the less must w
path, and open this gate, and seek this light
less must we believe the light flows dow
tinually. . . .
And later in the same pamphlet:
... It is by sorrow and labour, by love of all liv

and by a heart that humbles itself before the An
and by a mind its power and beauty and quiet f
without end, that men come to Adeptship an
multiplication of petty formulae.
Yeats is here speaking with a simplicity imposs

the common, or indeed in the literary, world in wh
only among the like-minded could he speak with c
ness of the things nearest his heart.
The central teaching of the Golden Dawn w
(especially the Christian Cabbalism of Dee and Agr
numerology and complex system of correspondence
diagram of the Tree of Life; the Tarot was used
according to L?vi's view that these cards represe
Life in pictorial form. Yeats in The Trembling of t
of that symbol with which he was himself so
Tree of Life is a geometrical figure made up of
spheres called Sephiroth joined by straight lin
must have thought of it as like some great tree co
fruit and foliage, but at some period, in the thirte
perhaps, touched by the mathematical genius of
likelihood, it had lost its natural form." The d
flows continually from the uncreated source throu
vine names, numerations, or powers, emanating from force into

form throughout the four worlds of Aziluth (the world of
deity), Briah (the world of creation), Yetzirah (the world of
formation), and Assiah (the world of action). These four worlds
correspond to the Platonic traditional hierarchy of the exemplary
or archetypal world, the intellectual, celestial, and elemental
worlds. These terms were used by Agrippa and other authorities
whose works were studied by the G. D. Blake's four worlds of
Eden, Beulah, Generation, and Ulro derive from the same tra
dition.
Yeats restores to the tree its foliage in an early poem, "The
Two Trees", when he writes of
The flaming circle of our days,

Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways. . . .
The Tree is repeated and reflected in every created being;

Yeats somewhere writes of spirits with mirrors in their breasts:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,

The holy tree is growing there ....
The Holy Tree casts its image even in the world cut off from
God:
In the dim glass the demons hold,

The glass of outer weariness ....
Those "straight lines" which join the Sephiroth are twenty

two in number and correspond to the letters of the Hebrew alpha
bet. Thus the symbolic structure of the Tree resolves itself
into the numbers four, ten, and twenty-two. The Tarot pack also
consists of four suits each of ten numbered cards, and four court
cards; and the twenty-two trumps or keys, whose symbols are
so haunting and evocative. The numbers one to ten correspond
KATHLEEN RAINE 121
to the Sephiroth and each of the suits corresponds to one of the

four elements and the four worlds. The twenty-two Tarot trumps
are assigned each to one of the twenty-two paths by which "the
Way of the Serpent" goes "gyring, spiring to and fro" among the
Sephiroth.
Even allowing for the tendency of all the magical systems
to relate everything with everything else?letters with numbers,
with cycles of months, years, and the signs of the zodiac, with
parts of the body, celestial and infernal hierarchies of angels, with
minerals, metals, plants, animals, and whatever else may be con
tained in the whole of manifested being?we see that there are
many possible correlations between the Tarot and the diagram
matical Tree. These correlations, by which the qualitative as
pects of being may be explored, are at once complex and exact.
One of the most striking?and to the novice surprising?features
of magic is its meticulous precision. One of the instructions given
to the Golden Dawn initiates is: "Above all things in everything
occult we must earnestly beseech you to cultivate the greatest pos
sible exactness. Every word should be accurately learned, every
symbol accurately drawn." Whatever else the study of magic may
be, it is a rigorous discipline of all the faculties of the human
mind.
Yeats, when he became a member of the Golden Dawn, was al
ready a student of Blake, and familiar therefore with the Four
Zoas, of reason, passion, prophetic imagination, and sensory life?
well known to us since, through the writings of Jung, as the four
functions of the psyche. Blake himself refers his Zoas to the
four Living Creatures of Ezekiel's vision; and Eliphas L?vi
makes a similar attribution of the four Tarot suits. This can be
seen in an emblem of the Cherub of Ezekiel, prefaced to West
cott's The Magical Ritual of the Sanctum Regnum. In this em
blem, the faces and wings of the Cherub are related to the ten
Sephiroth, while four hands carry cup, wand, sword, and pentacle.
These four recur in the ritual of the Golden Dawn as the four
elemental weapons of the magician: the lotus-headed wand of

fire, the cup of water, the dagger for air, and the pentacle for
earth. Every adept had to make for himself, according to pre
cise directions, these four weapons for the evocation and control of
those elements and aspects of the universe to which each corre
sponds; and, in addition, to consecrate a sword. "The consecrated
blade upon my knees/Is Sato's blade . . ." no doubt refers to this
rite of consecration.
Yeats in his stories of Red Hanrahan makes an association be
tween a magical pack of cards and the four sacred objects of
Irish mythology. He dreamed of founding a magical Order
with a ritual appropriate to Ireland; and this story suggests per
haps one symbolic substitution which might have been made had
he done so. Indeed, the figure of Hanrahan himself seems re
lated to the Tarot card Le Mat, the fool, the zero of the pack,
to whom no number is assigned?perhaps the motley-clad Joker
of the familiar deck of playing cards. The neophyte of the Order
of the Golden Dawn was assigned the number 0 = 0, which by
implication identifies the uninitiated man with the Tarot's Fool.
He carries a wallet and a staff, his clothes are ragged, and a dog
or other animal is attacking him from behind. In the traditional
Marseilles and Italian packs the Fool is represented as a dull
stupid figure; in other variations he is the court jester with cap,
bells, and motley. In Waite's pack the Foolish Man is repre
sented as a dreamer, who, about to step over the precipice of the
world, carries a white rose in his hand.
His countenance is full of intelligence and expectant dream.

He has a rose in one hand and in the other a costly wand,
from which depends over his right shoulder a wallet curi
ously embroidered. He is a prince of the other world on
his travels through this one. . . .
He signifies the journey abroad, the state of the first

emanation, the graces and passivity of the spirit. His wallet
is inscribed with dim signs, to show that many sub-conscious
memories are stored up in his soul.
KATHLEEN RAINE 123
He is everyman, born into the world "not in entire forgetfulness",

who must make the journey of the thirty-two paths. He is, ac
cording to Aleister Crowley, "the initial nothing" who must make
his way to "the terminal all", the twenty-first key, called The
Universe.
And I myself created Hanrahan

And drove him drunk or sober through the dawn
From somewhere in the neighbouring cottages.
Caught by an old man's juggleries
He stumbled, tumbled, fumbled to and fro
And had but broken knees for hire
And horrible splendour of desire;
I thought it all out twenty years ago:
Good fellows shuffled cards in an old bawn;

And when that ancient ruffian's turn was on
He so bewitched the cards under his thumb
That all but the one card became
A pack of hounds and not a pack of cards,
And that he changed into a hare.
Hanrahan rose in frenzy there
And followed up those baying creatures towards?
O towards I have forgotten what?enough!
The purposeful "towards", followed by forgetfulness, expresses

the amnesia of the generated soul who has forgotten eternity
and the destination of the pilgrimage of life; and who, like Han
rahan, stumbles, tumbles, fumbles to and fro on the journey back
to that other world where he is a prince.
Perhaps it is the magician?the first card or key of the Tarot
trumps?who dealt the magic pack as he "muttered to himself
as he turned the cards, Spades and Diamonds, Courage and
Power; Clubs and Hearts, Knowledge and Pleasure". The
Juggler or Magician of the Tarot is depicted with the four
magical instruments on a table before him?cup, wand, sword,
and pentacle; signifying, according to Waite, "the elements of

natural life, which lie like counters before the adept, and he adapts
them as he wills". Bewitched on the night of the full moon,
Hanrahan, when the juggler set the hounds after the hare, "went
stumbling out of the door like a maniac, and the door shut after
him as he went". If we are right in believing that Hanrahan is,
like the Unwise Man, the "first emanation", the soul who leaves
eternity for the journey of time, the door that shut after him as
he went might seem to signify the irrevocability of birth into
this world.
When the fairy hounds vanish into the air, Hanrahan falls
asleep and is led by an old man into a visionary world. There
he sees "sitting in a high chair a woman, the most beautiful the
world ever saw, having a long pale face and flowers about it".
"And there sitting on the step below her chair four gray old
women, and the one of them was holding a great cauldron in her
lap; and another a great stone on her knees, and heavy as it was
it seemed light to her; and another of them had a very long spear
that was made of pointed wood; and the last of them had a
sword that was without a scabbard".
The old women offer the four objects in turn to Hanrahan;
but, like the knight in the Mabinogion who does not ask the mean
ing of spear and grail, Hanrahan chooses none, and presently is
overcome once more with the irresistible sleep of forgetfulness.
The figure of the wandering fool appears again and again in
Yeats's poems and mythologies, as the Fool by the Roadside,
Crazy Jane and Tom the Lunatic, or that statesman who is Yeats
himself, and who exchanges the illusion of permanence, security,
and identity for the blind pilgrimage which is everyman's destiny,
and therefore in some sense sacred:
With boys and girls about him,

With anv sort of clothes,
With a hat out of fashion,
With old patched shoes,
KATHLEEN RAINE 125
With a ragged bandit cloak,

With an eye like a hawk,
With a stiff straight back,
With a strutting turkey walk,
With a bag full of pennies,
With a monkey on a chain,
With a great cock's feather,
With an old foul tune.
Each image here suggests the wanderer of the Tarot with his
rags and his wallet; even perhaps the attendant animal, "a
monkey on a chain", a symbol of man's chattering, fickle mind,
no less apt than the dog, tiger, or crocodile, who in various ver
sions of the Tarot signify the lusts which are the travelling com
panions of man on his journey.
This journey may be understood as relating to this present
life, or to many lives; and Yeats would have understood the
symbol in both senses, since rebirth is assumed in all his thought
from first to last. We see therefore in the fool's journey a fore
shadowing of the Phases of the Moon, in which the soul travels
the circuit of the Wheel of Fortune. Yeats had early under
stood that man's only abiding identity is that of the pilgrim of
eternity, the zero:
I see my life go drifting like a river

From change to change; I have been many things?
A green drop in the surge, a gleam of light
Upon a sword, a fir-tree on a hill,
An old slave grinding at a heavy quern,
A king sitting upon a chair of gold?
And all these things were wonderful and great;
But now I have grown nothing, knowing all.
The successive incarnations of Fergus the King remind us of

the traditional incarnations by which the Buddha rises from the
lowest forms of life to the highest, and so to release. The con
cept of the Wheel of the hells and the heavens through which
all souls must travel is most highly developed in Buddhism, but

it is common, in some form, to all religions. Dante's ascent of
the Mountain from the hells, through purgatory, to the heavens,
is a Christian equivalent of the Buddhist Wheel, as are Sweden
borg's and Blake's "twenty-seven churches". To the same sym
bol we must assign the "gyring, spiring" "Way of the Serpent",
which in the Cabbalistic Tree of Life passes in succession through
the mansions or stations of the twenty-two paths of the Tarot. To
quote Blake: "These States Exist now. Man Passes on, but States
remain for Ever; he passes thro' them like a traveller who may
as well suppose that the places he has pass'd through Exist no
more?Everything is Eternal." The spires of that Serpent must
certainly be one among the many sources of Yeats's image of the
Wheel as not a circular but a spiral revolution (the gyres).
According to Mathers the twenty-two Tarot trumps will give,
taken in order of their numbers, a connected sentence, or story,
which is capable of being read thus: "The Human Will (the
Juggler or Magician) enlightened by Science (the High Priest
ess) and manifested by Action (the Empress) should find its
Realization (the Emperor) in deeds of Mercy and Beneficence
(the Pope). The Wise Dispensation (the Lovers) of this will
give him Victory (the Chariot) through Equilibrium (Justice)
and Prudence (the Hermit) over the fluctuations of Fortune (the
Wheel of Fortune). Fortitude (the eleventh trump) sanctified
by Sacrifice of Self (the Hanged Man) will triumph over Death
Itself (the thirteenth card) and thus a wise Combination (Tem
perance) will enable him to defy Fate (the Devil). In each Mis
fortune (the lightning-struck Tower) he will see the star of Hofe
(key number seventeen) shine through the twilight of Deception
(the Moon): and ultimate Haffiness (the Sun) will be the Re
sult (the Last Judgement). Folly (the card of the foolish man)
will on the other hand bring about an evil Reward (the Uni
verse)."
Eliphas L?vi gives another arrangement, even closer to Yeats's
KATHLEEN RAINE 127
own phases of the moon; for he assigns the twenty-eight days of

the moon to the twenty-two Tarot keys and the seven planets?
twenty-eight in all (since the Fool counts as zero). I have been
unable to find any exact correspondence between L?vi's phases of
the moon and Yeats's unless L?vi's last three, Luna, Sol and the
Fool, correspond to Yeats's "hunchback, Saint and Fool"?per
haps the "hunchback" is the "man in the moon" with his bundle
of faggots on his back. Yeats was not following in an exact way
either Mathers or L?vi, but the type of arrangement, so bewilder
ing to his readers, was one familiar to him in many forms, as a
path or wheel, or a path running round a wheel, or a spiral path.
That diagrammatic arrangement of experience which Jung calls
the m?ndala recurs again and again in the esoteric tradition. Papus
for example (the pseudonym for G?rard Encausse), whose work
The Tarot of the Bohemians was translated into English by
Waite, correlates the Tarot with the twenty-two constellations
with their fine Yeats-like names?the Virgin, Hercules, Eagle,
Sagittarius, Ox-driver, Lion, Balance, Dragon of the Pole, and
the rest?names which are themselves a record and witness of
that abiding human instinct to project upon the universe of the
macrocosm the archetypal configurations of the soul.
//
In the initiatory ceremonies of the Order, the various Tarot
keys were used. The second grade led the Zelator into the first
path, that of the twenty-second trump, the Universe, assigned
to the path that leads from Malkuth (the lowest point on the
Tree) to Yesod. There followed the grade of Practicus, with
the Tarot keys of the Last Judgment, and the Sun; at this stage
the title of Mono cero s de Astris was conferred. In the rite of
initiation into the fourth grade, the symbolism is that of water,
and the Tarot key the Moon; figures wearing the masks of Osiris,
Isis, and Horus speak, and the symbols of the card are expounded
at length.
The moon described and, above all, evoked in this ceremony

bears little relation to earth's arid satellite upon which the d?bris
of modern technology is already accumulating. It is nonetheless
real for it is the moon of human and pre-human experience count
less times repeated, the moon of the changing eyes of the cat, the
qualitative moon, one of those "moods" which belong less to the
individual than to the collective mind, and which can there be
evoked as an experience of our inherited rather than of our indi
vidual humanity.
The incantatory style of the rituals is determined by their
evocative purpose: "The priest with the mask of Osiris spake and
said: I am the water stagnant and silent and still; reflecting all,
concealing all, I am the Past, I am the Inundation. He who
rises from the Great Waters is my Name"?and so on. We may
recall countless examples from the sacred writings of all races and
periods in which supernatural beings declare themselves, making
themselves known to human consciousness from some region
beyond. In many folk-tales the hero must ask the name and the
nature, so obtaining power over some supernatural power. Un
deniably there is a kind of poetry whose purpose and whose means
are the same; and none knew better than did Yeats how to "hail
the superhuman".
Yeats is known to have helped Mathers in the writing of the
Golden Dawn rituals and ceremonies of initiation, which owe
much to the Egyptian Book of the Deady the Chaldean Oracles,
and Blake's Prophetic Books. Only Yeats could have written a
passage so full of paraphrased Blake as this:
And Tetragrammaton placed Kerubim at the East of the

border of Eden and a Flaming Sword which turned every
way to keep the path of the Tree of Life, for He had created
Nature that man being cast out of Eden may not fall into
the Void. He has bound man with the stars as with a chain.
He allures him with the scattered fragments of the Divine
Body in bird and beast and flower. And he laments over
KATHLEEN RAINE 129
him in the Wind and in the Sea and in the Birds, And
when the times are ended He will call the Kerubim from
the East of the border, and all shall be consumed and be
come infinite and holy.
The last phrase is taken almost verbatim from "The Marriage

of Heaven and Hell"; the chain of stars is from Vala.
Thus were the stars of heaven created like a golden chain

To bind the Body of Man to heaven from falling into the
Abyss.
For the rest, the passage is a paraphrase of the beautiful speech

of Enion at the end of Vala Night the Eighth. Blake had in
this passage himself drawn upon the alchemical tradition of the
deus absconditus. In the ritual of the Golden Dawn the gather
ing of the fragments of the Divine Body comes back full circle
into a ritual in which Osiris, prototype of all dismembered gods,
is evoked anew. Ellis and Yeats believed that Blake had himself
been a Rosicrucian initiate; whether or not this was so they
rightly believed that they were themselves within the same tra
dition as that from which Blake had gained his knowledge and
derived his symbols.
The rituals and ceremonies, with their figures of the Egyptian
gods Horus, Osiris, and Isis, who speak through masks as from
some superhuman state of being and knowledge, bear a striking
resemblance, in this respect, to Yeats's "drama of the soul". The
idea that in religious ceremonial the gods themselves speak from
a superhuman world is old and universal, but at the end of the
nineteenth century the concept of the oracular was as absent from
poetry as it was from religion, and for the same reason: the
conception of a collective unconscious, of "personifying spirits"
who speak with cosmic voices from "the age-long memoried self"
of anima mundi, was unknown to all but a few theosophists and
students of the Hermetic tradition, who have since proved to be
the forerunners of a rediscovery of those gods which William
Blake, a century before, had discovered as the residents of "the

human breast". Yeats and his fellow-students of the Hermetic
tradition unsealed fountains which had long been hidden. "The
blessed spirits," Yeats wrote in A Vision^ "must be sought within
the self which is common to all"; and to Florence Farr he had
written, many years before, in a postscript to the address to the
Hermetic Order already quoted, "Individuality is not as im
portant as our age has imagined." The gods are figures of the
collective consciousness. Writing in aHodos Chameleontosyy of his
association with "some experimental circle" (evidently the Golden
Dawn), Yeats asks a question that Jung and others later were to
ask?"how trust historian and psychologist who have for three
hundred years ignored in writing the history of the world, or of
the human mind, so momentous a part of human experience?";
"I had even created a dogma: because those imaginary people
are created out of the deepest instinct of man, to be his measure
and his norm, whatever I can imagine those mouths speaking
may be the nearest I can go to truth." These are the archetypes
whose evocation was the object of the symbolic ritual of the
Golden Dawn.
For Yeats magic was not so much a kind of poetry, as poetry
was a kind of magic, and the object of both alike was evocation of
energies and knowledge from beyond normal consciousness.
"Symbols and formulae," he wrote to Florence Farr, "are powers,
which act in their own right and with little consideration for our
intentions, however excellent. Most of us have seen some cere
mony produce an altogether unintended result because of the
accidental use of some wrong formula or symbol."
The literalness with which Yeats believed that symbolic forms,
or even symbolic sounds, have this evocative power is proved by
the statement by Ellis and Yeats in their work on Blake that "the
writers of this book have summoned the great symbolic beings?
Ololon, Urthona, Ore, and others?into the imaginations of en
tranced subjects by merely pronouncing and making them pro
nounce the words."
KATHLEEN RAINE 131
Yeats calls these "personifying spirits" Moods and also Gate

Keepers, a term which may seem strange if we overlook the allu
sion to their initiatory character, as given in these rites, them
selves based upon instructions given in the Egyptian Book of the
Dead, to the soul who must pass in turn the gods who guard the
gates of the Underworld, or of the Collective Unconscious, which
is perhaps the same thing. "There are, indeed, personifying
spirits that we had best call but Gates and Gate-Keepers, because
through their dramatic power they bring our soul to crisis." Yeats
himself relates these figures to their Egyptian origin when he
writes: "The masks of tragedy contain neither character nor
personal energy. They are allied to decoration and to the ab
stract figures of Egyptian Temples. Before the mind can look
out of their eyes the active will perishes, hence their sorrowful
calm." He was speaking as an initiate.
Time drops in decay,

Like a candle burnt out,
And the mountains and woods
Have their day, have their day;
What one in the rout
Of the fire-born moods
Has fallen away?
To those realists who find symbolist art lacking in "humanity"

(whatever that means to them) the initiate can but reply that
the archetypal world of symbolic images is the form of our collec
tive humanity; the symbolist poet is always addressing us at the
level of that universal human experience of which every indi
vidual life is at best a partial and imperfect expression. Through
identification with that world we are able to participate in that
cosmic whole which lends dignity and meaning to even its most
insignificant parts, each of which reflects the whole in that "mirror
in the heart" of which Yeats has written, as in a microcosm. Of
that archetypal order the Tarot is a full and effective formula
tion, valid even?perhaps especially?at a time when mythologies

are a dead language. The archetypes?if we encounter them at
all?are likely to appear as figures mysterious and nameless,
belonging to no pantheon, no theological system. The Tarot
symbols gave to the members of the Golden Dawn the freedom
to evoke, in their living essence, those personifying spirits which
by different nations have been variously named. To the poet
especially this freedom is essential?freedom to clothe the Moods
in the dress of history, of locality, of dreams, of learned mythol
ogies, or?as with Yeats above all?with all these together.
Eclecticism may be bad for theology but it is indispensable to
poetry.
Yet the incantatory style of the Magus is most perilously
poised on the knife-edge which divides the sublime from the
ridiculous; and there is no denying that the hieratic style of Yeats,
both at its best and and at its worst, is like nothing so much as
this magical ritual, woven of strands from the Egyptian Book of
the Deady the Chaldean Oracles, those grandiose voices we some
times hear in dreams, or truths "out of a medium's mouth". In
an unsympathetic mood we might see in the turgid style of Yeats's
b?te noir Aleister Crowley a caricature of Yeats's own. Indeed,
between these two magicians there is the similarity of man and
shadow; Crowley, the more talented magician, if reports of his
misdoings are to be believed, wrote many volumes of bad verse
and resented Yeats's poor opinion of it. Yeats must on his side
have resented the distortion of all that to him was sacred, in the
priapic rites of the "Great Beast" (Master Therion).
The Mathers ritual is, by comparison, restrained and scholarly;
Crowley's concern was sensationalism. He had his own "evil"
Tarot, executed according to his instructions by Frieda Harris, in
marked contrast with the rather insipid art nouveau of Pamela
Coleman-Smith's designs. Crowley claimed that his Book of
Thoth is the only symbolically complete and authentic Tarot; but
it seems likely that it contains some purely personal interpreta
KATHLEEN RAINE 133
tions; his statement, for example, that key number eight?Forti

tude?is "Lust" seems on the face of it unlikely!
Crowley believed himself to be a prophet of Antichrist, under
the sign of the Apocalyptic "Great Beast" (Master Therion) and
the number 666. Was he an aspect of Yeats's "rough beast, its
hour come round at last" that "slouches towards Bethlehem to
be born"? Yeats cannot have been unaware of his b?te noires new
Satanic cult, "Thelema". And did Yeats himself, in some of his
latest poems with their priapic themes and implicit "sex-magic",
adopt certain of Crowley's views on the holiness of what in the
Christian era has been deemed unholy? Crowley was in his way
a prophet, and sometimes an eloquent one, often in a sense
complementary (or antithetical) to Yeats himself. In Yeats's
prophetic lines from The Resurrection:
Another Troy must rise and set,

Another lineage feed the crow,
Another Argo's painted prow
Drive to a flashier bauble yet
is there a more than coincidental echo (besides Shelley's Hellas)

of Crowley's Liber Legist "Another prophet shall arise, and
bring fresh fever from the skies;/another woman shall awake the
lust and worship of the Snake :/another soul of God and beast
shall mingle in the globed priest;/another sacrifice shall stain
the tomb. . . ."
In Crowley's comment on the seventeenth Tarot trump (the
Star) there is a passage strangely reminiscent of Yeats's image
in "The Second Coming", of the falcon "Turning and turning in
the widening gyre". "It will be seen" (Crowley writes) "that
every form of energy in this picture is a spiral. Zoroaster says
'God is he, having the head of a hawk; having a spiral force.'
It is interesting to notice that this oracle appears to anticipate the
present Aeon, that of the hawk-headed Lord, and also of the
mathematical conception of the shape of the Universe as calcu
lated by Einstein and his school." Whether or not Master

Therion had a part in the inspiration of the poem, Yeats and
Crowley drew upon a common fund of esoteric tradition and
shared a belief that a Second Coming is at hand. Both write of
the ending of one Great Year, and of the advent of an antithetical
phase; but whereas Crowley placed himself in the service of Anti
christ, "the savage God" of the new cycle, Yeats's fidelity was
to "the old king", to "that unfashionable gyre" the values about
to be obscured, to the "workman, noble and saint" of Christian
civilization.
Yeats tells in his Autobiographies how he himself invoked the
spirit of the moon. He tells how he made the invocation "after
night just before I went to bed, and after many nights?eight or
nine perhaps?I saw between sleeping and waking, as in a
cinematograph, a galloping centaur, and a moment later a woman
of incredible beauty, standing upon a pedestal and shooting an
arrow at a star." He did not use these images in any poem until
twenty or twenty-five years later; but the experience seems to
have been one of those unforgettable openings of a visionary
world which poets remember and draw upon for a lifetime. It is
necessary again to remember that no reading of the score of sym
bolic forms can enable us to hear the music. It is one thing to
know of, another to know, the anima mundi. Magic is, above all,
an evocation of the numinous; and whether in dream, in vision,
or in ritual invocation, the experience itself is its own mode of
knowledge and the keys are used only in order to awaken their
sleeping counterparts in the mind. In his essay on Anima Mundi
Yeats writes that he "was seldom delighted by that sudden lumi
nous definition of form which makes one understand almost in
spite of oneself that one is not merely imagining". Edwin Muir,
who never in his life made a magical invocation, describes in his
autobiography, The Story cmd the Fable, how he too was "over
whelmed by miracle" and flung into a world where "the dragon
and the Sphinx seemed to be completely self-created; so far as
KATHLEEN RAINE 135
I know there was no subject-matter in my mind from which I

could have fashioned them. And the whole atmosphere of the
dream was strange and astonishing: its exhilarating speed, its
objective glory, above all its complete lack of all that is usually
meant by human."
That such visions come not from the personal but from the
collective unconscious seems confirmed by what Yeats tells of a
series of what would by some be called coincidences, by the Sur
realists the operation of "pananoia", by Jung the unknown laws
of "synchronicity". Several friends gave Yeats related symbols,
from dream or literature: Arthur Symons a poem of his own
describing a similar goddess-figure, and a story by Fiona Mac
leod entitled The Archer: "Someone in the story had a vision of
a woman shooting an arrow into the sky and later of an arrow
shot at a fawn that pierced the fawn's body and remained, the
fawn's heart torn out and clinging to it, embedded in a tree." The
child of a friend dreamed of a woman shooting an arrow into
the sky which "killed God"; and in another dream, a star is shot
by an arrow; later the star was seen "lying in a cradle".
The apparent objectivity of such visions?Edwin Muir wrote,
"It was not CV who dreamt it but something else which the
psychologists call the racial unconscious and which has other
names"?makes explicable Yeats's method of dealing with all
these related symbols as an archaeologist might piece together the
fragments of a broken statue. He regards the whole constellation
of symbols as an objective reality, in its own world. He set out
to discover more about the mythological antecedents of each ele
ment?the Child and the Tree, the Woman who shot the Arrow,
the Heart torn out, the Star, the Centaur, and the constellations
Sagitta and Sagittarius; the learned sources from which he
gathered examples from folklore and mythology are given in
notes to the Autobiographies. He also took his vision with its
related svmbols to "a London coroner learned in the Cabbala"?
Wynn Westcott: "he opened a drawer and took out of it two
water-colour paintings . . . one was of a centaur, the other of a

woman standing on a stone pedestal and shooting an arrow at
what seemed a star. He asked me to look carefully at the Star,
and I saw that it was a little golden heart." Westcott told him
that these symbols belonged to a part of the Christian Cabbala
unknown to Yeats, and related the centaur and the woman to
one of the paths of the Tree, and the heart to the Sephira Tipher
eth. Yeats does not say?though he must have known it?that
the Tarot key to this path, which ascends from Yesod to Tipher
eth, is No. 14 (Temperance) : a winged robed female figure with
a sun or star symbol on her brow. The Tarot key of the Star
(No. 17) is a somewhat similar female figure, but nude, who is,
according to L?vi, "the psyche of the world'*?Anima Mundi
herself.
Only some thirty years later did these symbols, long pondered,
appear in Yeats's poetry. At the time of the experience Yeats had
asked himself, "Had some great event taken place in some world
where myth is reality and had we seen a portion of it?" When
later he used symbols which had for him a sacred significance, it
was in this sense that he used them. The play The Resurrection
was written to formulate certain traditional teachings on the Great
Year, and to express, in terms of the Orphic theology and the
myth of Dionysus, the esoteric doctrine that the Christian revela
tion signified the beginning of a cycle now approaching its end,
and the possibility that the antithetical cycle is about to begin.
Was that vision of the virgin and the star slain and reborn, per
ceived by more than one mind and not long before the First
World War, a sign of that impending revolution? In the passage
from Aleister Crowley above, the Tarot key of the Star was as
sociated with the spiral gyre and with the ascending falcon, sym
bols which had for Yeats such profound significance in his thought
upon the theme of historical cycles which dominated his poetic
vision.
I have written elsewhere of the traditional mythology to which
KATHLEEN RAINE 137
Yeats in the choruses of The Resurrection strictly adheres, and of

its relation to Blake's poem on the historic cycles, "The Mental
Traveller". Here I wish only to add that Yeats, who had
pondered his own vision for half a lifetime, was writing of an
ancient myth with the authority of one who had himself seen
the mysteries, had seen the slaying of the god, the torn-out heart.
There is only one symbol in these choruses which apparently re
lates only to the dream material and not to the Orphic or some
other mythology; the star itself, in the line
. . . that fierce virgin and her Star. . . .
The symbolic tradition to which the star belongs is that of the

Tarot, and Yeats, following his practice and his vows of silence,
does not disclose this source. The arrow, on the other hand, is
absent; the Child Dionysus was slain by the tearing out of his
heart, not by an arrow. But there is another dying god?a myth
ological synonym, so to say, of Dionysus?in whose myth the
arrow appears; and Yeats had noted at this time the myth of
Balder, slain by the arrow of mistletoe.
The "way of the arrow" on the Tree of Life is the direct way
of ascent, by sacrifice, which goes up the center of the Tree and
not by the "gyring, spiring" way of the Serpent. Upon this di
rect path of ascent, from Malkuth to Kether, is the Sephira
Tiphereth, the potency to which are assigned all those dying gods
of whom Dionysus, Attis, and Balder are types. In "The Phases
of the Moon", whose theme is the Wheel of Fortune, or rebirth,
the journey through the States, Yeats names this direct way of re
lease from the wheel:
The burning bow that once could shoot an arrow

Out of the up and down, the wagon-wheel
Of beauty's cruelty and wisdom's chatter. . . .
These various sacrificial figures are comprised, in the Tarot,
under the symbol of the Hanged Man. The Tarot card of the
Hanged Man is not another Dying God, but may be taken to
represent, in a particular aspect, all those myths of sacrifice. The
Hanged Man is suspended by his foot between two trees (in the
Marseilles pack) or on the cross-tree of a Tau cross (in Waite's
pack). Waite's card shows the head of the martyred figure
surrounded by a nimbus; and he says that the card is related to
the mystery of death and resurrection, and to "the relation, in
one of its aspects, between the divine and the Universe". This
aspect seems to include the descent (head downwards, as we are
born) of the divine into generation, as in the myths of Dionysus
and the rest; and the martyrdom of the divine principle upon the
Tree of creation, whose roots are above, in the divine mystery, and
whose branches below.
The Dying God on the Tree was a symbol to which Frazer's
Golden Bough had lent new meaning and richness in the last
decade of the nineteenth century. The priest of the woods of
Nemi who guarded the sacred tree, and himself personified the
tree-god, is the starting-point of that wide-ranging exploration of
folklore and primitive religion that made Frazer's generation
aware of the continuity and universality of the basic themes which
underlie a multitude of myths. When Yeats chose the figure of
Attis, in the poem "Vacillation", as the Dying God on the Tree,
his principal source was no doubt Frazer; the Tree upon which
he hangs is of course the Tree of Life, enriched with all its
multiple Cabbalistic implications, and the figure is that of the
Tarot Hanged Man:
A tree there is that from its topmost bough

Is half all glittering flame and half all green
Abounding foliage moistened with the dew;
And half is half and yet is all the scene;
And half and half consume what they renew,
And he that Attis' image hangs between
That staring fury and the blind lush leaf
May know not what he knows, but knows not grief.
KATHLEEN RAINE 139
There are, of course, other elements in this poem: the Heracli

tean fire of nature, parts kindling, parts going out; Blake's Tree
of Nature, which consumes in flames at the end of time. Frazer
describes Attis as a tree-spirit, and he is hung between the green
leaf and the fire: "At the spring equinox a pine tree was cut in
the woods and brought into the sanctuary of Cybele where it was
treated as a divinity . . . and the effigy of a young man was affixed
to the middle of the tree." At a later stage the effigy of the
Dying God was solemnly burned: and "the fourth day [25th
March] was the Festival of Joy (Hilaria) at which the resur
rection of Attis was probably celebrated." At the end of a year
the offering from the tree was burned.
All or much of this symbolism is explicit or implicit in "Par
nell's Funeral", the second poem in which Yeats draws upon the
symbols constellated about the sacrificial figure of the Dying God
in the Tree and about his own vision of the Star. By implication
Parnell's sacrifice is identified with that of Dionysus, Attis, and
the rest:
Under the Great Comedian's tomb the crowd.

A bundle of tempestuous cloud is blown
About the sky; where that is clear of cloud
Brightness remains; a brighter star shoots down;
What shudders run through all that animal blood?
What is this sacrifice? Can someone there
Recall the Cretan barb that pierced a star?
Rich foliage that the starlight glittered through,

A frenzied crowd, and where the branches sprang
A beautiful seated boy; a sacred bow;
A woman and an arrow on a string;
A pierced boy, image of a star laid low.
That woman, the Great Mother imaging,
Cut out his heart. Some master of design
Stamped boy and tree upon Sicilian coin.
In the myth of Dionysus it was Juno by whose command the

heart of the god was torn out; it was preserved, as in the opening
choruses of The Resurrection, by the "fierce virgin" Pallas Athe

ne, who bore "that beating heart away" from whose life the god
was reborn in a new cycle. Attis is similarly sacrificed to Cybele;
and Yeats noted at the time of his vision Cretan coins of the fifth
century B. C. which depict aspects of this myth. Yeats is think
ing of the cannibalistic savagery of these ancient cults (so vividly
described by Frazer) when he writes
. . . popular rage,
Hysterica passio dragged this quarry down.
None shared our guilt; nor did we play a part
Upon a painted stage when we devoured his heart.
A letter from Yeats to Sturge Moore (September 6, 1921) is

revealing in more ways than one. He is writing on the subject of
a book-plate Moore was designing for him, and he is clearly
thinking of the magical character of symbols when he writes:
. . . don't nail the hawk on the board. The hawk is one of

my symbols and you might rather crudely upset the sub
consciousness. It might mean nightmare or something of
the kind for some of us here. Life when one does my kind
of work is rather strange. . . . My main symbols are Sun
and Moon (in all phases), Tower, Mask, Tree (Tree with
Mask hanging on the trunk) ....
The Tree with the mask hanging on the trunk is clearly related
to the Tarot key of the Hanged Man. To the Tower symbol
we shall presently return.
We may discover other hints of the Tarot cards:
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,

Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.
The card of strength, or Fortitude (the eleventh key), shows a

woman closing the mouth of a lion. The coach upon which
Martin is working in The Unicorn from the Stars may be the
KATHLEEN RAINE 141
Tarot Chariot, symbol of conquest on the external plane. Mar

tin abandons his work on the glittering coach (which was to be
sent to Dublin Castle for the use of the conquerors) as the result
of a vision of the inner aspect of things. There are doubtless
other instances; but I shall describe only one other symbol, or
constellation of symbols.
Is Michael Robartes the Hermit of the Tarot, the ninth key?
Like the Fool, the Hermit is a traveller; but whereas the Fool
stumbles and fumbles in ragged clothes, with the dogs after him,
the Hermit is a venerable figure, bearing a lantern half-concealed
in a fold of his cloak. In the other hand he carries the staff on
which he leans, as if on a long journey. In Jungian terms he is
the archetype of "the wise old man"; the same figure who as
Shelley's Ahasuerus "dwells in a sea-cavern 'mid the Demonesi"
and had captured Yeats's imagination and fired the "secret fanati
cism" of his boyhood:
Some feign that he is Enoch: others dream

He was pre-Adamite, and has survived
Cycles of generation and of ruin.
The sage, in truth, by dreadful abstinence,
And conquering penance of the mutinous flesh,
Deep contemplation and unwearied study,
In years outstretched beyond the date of man,
May have attained to sovereignty and science
Over those strong and secret things and thoughts,
Which others fear and know not.
Mathers's continued hold over Yeats's imagination helped to

create, it may be, the figure of Robartes as the mysterious wander
er in whose power it lies to appear to whom he pleases, or to sum
mon to him those whom he wishes, in a manner which appears
the work of chance but is in reality magical power. So
the legendary Rosicrucians were imagined, by Fludd and by
Vaughan, to make themselves known; and so in Rosa Alchemica
Robartes knocks at the narrator's door in Dublin; brings to
gether at the Caf? Royal the persons he needs for the communi
cation of A Vision; and in "The Phases of the Moon" for a last
time stands at the foot of the Tower, unsuspected by the philos
opher at his books.
The Society of the Golden Dawn presumed the existence of
adepts, those magi "in the body or out of the body" in whose re
ality Yeats, in the pamphlet which he wrote as Imperator of the
Order, declared his belief. Mathers himself had, in that fantastic
correspondence which resulted in his expulsion from the Order,
based his claim to be its supreme head on the authority vested in
him by these strange figures who continued to hold Yeats's imagi
nation under a lifelong enchantment. "Every atom of the knowl
edge of the Order has come through me alone," Mathers wrote;
"it is I alone who have been and am in communication with the
Secret Chiefs of the Order"; and in his manifesto declares that
he has received instructions from the secret chiefs of the Order
of the Rosy Cross, whose very names are unknown to him. We
can catch, from Mathers's impassioned style, some glimmer of
that enchantment which had held the young Yeats spellbound.
When such a rendezvous has been in a much frequented

place, there has been nothing in their personal appearance or
dress to mark them out as differing in any way from ordi
nary people except the appearance and sensation of transcend
ent health and physical vigour (whether they seemed per
sons in youth or age) which was their invariable accompani
ment: in other words, the physical appearance which the
possession of the Elixir of Life has traditionally been sup
posed to confer.
On the other hand, when the rendezvous has been a place
free fom easy access by the Outer World they have usually
been in symbolic robes and insignia.3
^eats himself was far from credulous; in The Tragic Generation he discusses
Mathers's visitations from the Masters: "He, like all that I have known who
have given themselves up to images, and to the speech of images, thought that
when he had proved that an image could act independently of his mind, he had proved
also that neither it, nor what it had spoken, had originated there. Yet had I need
of proof to the contrary, I had it while under his roof. I was eager for news of the
KATHLEEN RAINE 143
Mathers wrote the manifesto from which this is taken in

October, 1896; Rosa Alchemica, in which the figure of Robartes
first appears, was written soon after. In A Vision, dictated to
Mrs. Yeats through those same Instructors who had formerly
used as their medium Vestigia (Mrs. Mathers), the figure of
Michael Robartes reappears with a kind and degree of conviction
which recalls that of Mathers half a lifetime before. ( Crowley's
first wife and a succession of concubines also acted as his mediums
in a similar way.) The figure of the unknown Rosicrucian had
not faded for Yeats, but ripened with his own wisdom.
The official who introduced the initiate in the ceremonies of
the Golden Dawn bore as his insignia the lamp and staff of the
Tarot Hermit, as perhaps had Mathers himself at Yeats's initia
tion. In an early story it is Robartes who initiates the narrator
into the Hermetic order of the Rosa Alchemica; the initiation
takes place on a lonely rocky coast in the west of Ireland; and
there indeed is the sea-cavern of the Demonesi, where "every
mortal foot danced by the white foot of an immortal," and the
poet himself danced with "an immortal august woman, who had
black lilies in her hair". The narrator of Rosa Alchemica is not
quite Yeats himself, for he flees magic to "carry the rosary about
his neck". In that story Robartes is killed; but the archetypes are
deathless, and he had to be, like the immortal Sherlock Holmes,
resurrected, for Yeats had need of his instruction again when he
wrote A Vision.
The grand poem on "The Phases of the Moon" which prefaces
A Vision brings Robartes, with his travelling companion Aherne,
to the foot of the tower where the philosopher sits late; the same,
we are to presume, who had refused his "strong and secret things
and thoughts" in Rosa Alchemica.
Spanish-American war, and went to the Rue Mozart before breakfast to buy a New
York Herald. As I went out past the young Normandy servant who was laying
breakfast, I was telling myself some schoolboy romance, and had just reached a place
where I carried my arm in a sling after some remarkable escape. I bought my paper
and returned, to find Mathers on the doorstep. 'Why, you are all right,' he said.
'What did the bonne mean by telling me that you had hurt your arm and carried it
in a sling?' "
The symbolic scene is set in the poem "The Phases of the Moon"
for the poet's supreme statement of those undisclosed esoteric
truths which had been the inspiration of his life's work. The
speaker is Michael Robartes, a "master" in the sense in which
H. P. Blavatsky and Mathers had understood the word. "For
my part I believe them to be human and living upon the earth;
but possessing terrible superhuman powers," Mathers had written.
In any case Robartes possesses that "knowledge absolute" to which
the philosopher in vain aspires. Aherne asks,
. . . Why should not you

Who know it all ring at his door, and speak
Just truth enough to show that his whole life
Will scarcely find for him a broken crust
Of all those truths that are your daily bread;
And when you have spoken take the roads again?
The Tarot Hermit, symbol of initiatory "superhuman wisdom",

like Shelley's Ahasuerus "as inaccessible as God", has come to
the Tarot Tower, symbol of that "human wisdom" to which alone
Socrates laid claim.
The citadel of wisdom is one whose origins are lost in an
tiquity; Alexandria's was a beacon-tower, and
.... Babylon's
An image of the moving heavens, a log book of the sun's
journey and the moon's. . . .
And Shelley had his towers, thought's crowned powers he

called them once. . . .
Yeats's tower is the same
. . . where Milton's Platonist
Sat late, or Shelley's visionary prince:
The lonely light that Samuel Palmer engraved. . . .
Seldom has a symbol passed through such a succession, in direct
KATHLEEN RAINE 145
descent from Plato, through II Penseroso, to Yeats himself.

Palmer too was a Platonist; and for Yeats, seeing on all sides the
rise of ignorance, the most important thing was that one phi
losopher should still keep watch in the High Lonely Tower.
Wisdom, for Yeats, is essentially lonely, because for him
wisdom is the esoteric knowledge of the initiate, possessed by few;
and the custodians of truth become the more lonely as they ad
vance in knowledge. In other societies than our own, on the
presence of sage or hermit in his lonely cell the well-being of
the many has been held to depend. Yeats knew this to be none
the less true because few now believe it to be so, and in the
pamphlet addressed to the Order of R. R. and A. C, already
several times quoted, he wrote what he most deeply believed:
The great Adept may indeed have to hide much of his

deepest life, lest he tell it to the careless and the indifferent,
but he will sorrow and not rejoice over this silence, for he
will be always seeking ways of giving the purest substance of
his soul to fill the emptiness of other souls. It will seem to
him better that his soul be weakened, that he be kept wander
ing on the earth even, than that other souls should lack any
thing of strength and quiet. . . . He will remember, while he
is with them, the old magical image of the pelican feeding
its young with its own blood; and when, his sacrifice over,
he goes his way to supreme Adeptship, he will go absolutely
alone, for men attain to the supreme wisdom in a loneliness
that is like the loneliness of death.
In an earlier poem Yeats has with his Tower associated the

scala coeli, "the winding ancient stair" of the ascent to Heaven,
depicted by Blake in one of his greatest paintings. This is a
symbol which in Ireland, land of high lonely monastic towers,
could not fail to find a response.
When Yeats wrote, "Is every modern nation like the tower,/
Half dead at the top?" the symbol is in contrast to those monastic
bell-towers with their pointed roofs, and with Shelley's crowned
10
towers of exalted thought; the top, like the summit of the

Mountain of Paradise, being man's spirituality, that by which he
is joined to what is above and beyond thought. Yet the Tower
(in contrast with the Tree) is what man himself builds, and the
prototype of all towers is Babel, type of all civilizations and
systems that man has built or can ever build?the tower that falls
into ruin before it can be completed. In "My Descendents" Yeats
invokes the divine anger against succeeding generations if they
should fall away from "thought's crowned powers":
May this laborious stair and this stark tower

Become a roofless ruin that the owl
May build in the cracked masonry and cry
Her desolation to the desolate sky.
The owl?Athene's bird?comes by way of Milton and of Pal

mer's engraving of II Penseroso, which gave Yeats also the
"bellman" passing in the night, the "dwindling and late-risen
moon" whose waning set the mood for his own "Phases of the
Moon", oracular utterances on a declining civilization. Even in
Yeats's own Tower the archetype of Babel affirms itself in the
"ancient crumbling battlement".
The Tower of the Tarot trumps, the Maison Dieu, is, above
all, the Tower of Babel struck by the lightning of divine wrath,
and signifies catastrophe and downfall. This emblem shows a
tall tower, whose burning roof, which is also a crown, is struck
off by a zigzag of lightning. Two figures are falling headlong
and there are breaches in the walls. It is assigned to Mars, god
of war, or, in Cabbalistic terms, to the divine anger whose de
scending lightning is, with the meander of the Serpent and the
direct upward Path of the Arrow, the third "way" on the
Sephirotical Tree of God.
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead.
KATHLEEN RAINE 147
The symbol of the Tower appears in Yeats's later work; the

Tree of Life gives place to the edifice of wisdom, whose "winding
ancient stair" becomes the "steep ascent" of gnosis; as the Biblical
Garden of Eden gives place to the terminal image of the City
"coming down from heaven", man's completed work. Arche
typal symbols have a life of their own apart from and beyond any
assigned meaning; and the Tower, whether taken to represent his
own achievement, the nation "half dead at the top", or the empty
ruin of "The Black Tower", retains its mystery. In this late poem
the poet foresees a phase of history soon to come when "the savage
god" reigns; the beacon-light of wisdom is out. The "men of
the old black tower" of a no longer heeded wisdom must
. . . feed as the goatherd feeds

Their money spent, their wine gone sour ....
?but even then the high lonely tower must not be surrendered
to the banners of an age that declares "God is dead":
If he died long ago

Why do you dread us so?
A man's last duty is to die for his "right king":
... all are oath-bound men:

Those banners come not in.
In the rituals of the Golden Dawn mention is made of four watch

towers that guard the north, south, east, and west. For Yeats
there was no more potent symbol than the Tower he himself set
up to withstand the siege of "the savage god" or the flood of
modern ignorance:
In mockery I have set

A powerful symbol up
And sing it rhyme upon rhyme
In mockery of a time
Half dead at the top.
What has most astonished me in even this most superficial study

of Yeats's use of the symbolism of magic acquired through the
Hermetic Society of the Golden Dawn is the great background
of undisclosed knowledge from which he wrote. He gave away
no secrets of the Order; and yet he used continually a method
won by long and hard work in a language studied today by few,
but intrinsically valid, and which will therefore outlast the ig
norance of the time. Even since Yeats pursued truths in his
time and in our own so unfashionable, that revolt of the soul
against intellect which he himself predicted has manifested itself
in many ways, and at the time of writing wears the aspect, even,
of revolution among the younger generation, prepared to take
the archetypal world by storm. Truths so vital, so intrinsic to
our very nature, cannot with impunity be denied. Jung wrote
that "consciousness torn from its roots and no longer able to ap
peal to the authority of the primordial images, possesses a Prome
thean freedom, it is true, but it also partakes of the nature of a
godless hybrisP

Yeats, The Tarot and The Golden Dawn

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Yeats, The Tarot and The Golden Dawn

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Yeats, the Tarot, and the Golden Dawn

Author(s): Kathleen Raine

1 became curious about Yeats's use of the Tarot cards because

especially in Italy and the South of France, was clearly not in

The absolute hieroglyphical science had for its basis an

A. E. Waite suggests another possible origin of the Tarot sym

the theosophist, Egyptian mythology had the double charm of

perhaps mythical Third Order of Masters was also said to exist.

1900. In the following year Yeats held the office of Imperator

mate object of all the teachings of our Order."2 Yeats, writing

. . . the passing by their means from one degree to another is

path, a passage through a symbolic gate, a clim

And later in the same pamphlet:

... It is by sorrow and labour, by love of all liv

Yeats is here speaking with a simplicity imposs

vine names, numerations, or powers, emanating from force into

The flaming circle of our days,

The Tree is repeated and reflected in every created being;

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,

In the dim glass the demons hold,

Those "straight lines" which join the Sephiroth are twenty

to the Sephiroth and each of the suits corresponds to one of the

elemental weapons of the magician: the lotus-headed wand of

His countenance is full of intelligence and expectant dream.

He signifies the journey abroad, the state of the first

He is everyman, born into the world "not in entire forgetfulness",

And I myself created Hanrahan

Good fellows shuffled cards in an old bawn;

O towards I have forgotten what?enough!

The purposeful "towards", followed by forgetfulness, expresses

and pentacle; signifying, according to Waite, "the elements of

With boys and girls about him,

With a ragged bandit cloak,

I see my life go drifting like a river

The successive incarnations of Fergus the King remind us of

all souls must travel is most highly developed in Buddhism, but

own phases of the moon; for he assigns the twenty-eight days of

The moon described and, above all, evoked in this ceremony

And Tetragrammaton placed Kerubim at the East of the

The last phrase is taken almost verbatim from "The Marriage

Thus were the stars of heaven created like a golden chain

For the rest, the passage is a paraphrase of the beautiful speech

Blake, a century before, had discovered as the residents of "the

Yeats calls these "personifying spirits" Moods and also Gate

Time drops in decay,

To those realists who find symbolist art lacking in "humanity"

tion, valid even?perhaps especially?at a time when mythologies

tions; his statement, for example, that key number eight?Forti

Another Troy must rise and set,

is there a more than coincidental echo (besides Shelley's Hellas)

lated by Einstein and his school." Whether or not Master

I know there was no subject-matter in my mind from which I

water-colour paintings . . . one was of a centaur, the other of a

Yeats in the choruses of The Resurrection strictly adheres, and of

. . . that fierce virgin and her Star. . . .

The symbolic tradition to which the star belongs is that of the

The burning bow that once could shoot an arrow

These various sacrificial figures are comprised, in the Tarot,

A tree there is that from its topmost bough

There are, of course, other elements in this poem: the Heracli

Under the Great Comedian's tomb the crowd.

Rich foliage that the starlight glittered through,