In Our Time - Yeats and Mysticism

Episode Date: January 31, 2002

Melvyn Bragg explores the strange and mystical world of the poet W B Yeats. Celtic folklore, the Theosophical society, the Golden Dawn group, seances and a wife who communicated with the spirit world all had a huge effect on the work of this great Irish poet. He published his first collection in 1889 and won the Nobel prize for literature in 1923.At the close of the nineteenth century he published one of his best known works. He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven: “Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,Enwrought with golden and silver light,The blue and the dim and the dark clothsOf night and light and the half-light,I would spread the cloths under your feet:But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” But Yeats the dreamer and the poet was also a mystic, a philosopher and a practitioner of magic. From the occult subcultures of Victorian London to the outlandish folklore of the Irish Peasantry, Yeats’ obsession with the spiritual world infused his poetic mind and even drove him to describe his own religion. Why was the period so alive with spiritualism? And how did the poems reflect the dreams? With Roy Foster, Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford University; Warwick Gould, Director of the Institute of English Studies, University of London; Brenda Maddox, author of George’s Ghosts: A New Life of W B Yeats.

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please go to BBC.com. uk. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, At the close of the 19th century, the great Irish poet William Butler Yates, published one of his best-known works, called He Wishes for the Cloths of Heavens of Heavens of Heavens for the Clothes of Heavens of Heavens of your feet. I, being poor, have only my dreams. I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly, because I, being poor, have only my dreams. I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly, because,

you tread on my dreams. But Yates, the dreamer and the poet was also a mystic, a philosopher, and a practitioner of magic. From the occult subcultures of Victorian London to the pre-Christian, as he saw it, mysterious folklore of the Irish peasantry, to influences from the East. Yates' obsession with the spiritual world infused his poetic mind, and even drove him to describe his own religion. Why was he? Why was the period so alive with spiritualism? And how did his poems reflect the dreams? With me to tread softly through mysticism, magic and W.B. Yeats, this is authorised biographer Roy Foster,

the Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford University, who's published the first part of his life of Yates called The Apprentice Mage. Also here is Warwick Gould, director of the Institute of English Studies at the University of London, and the biographer Brenda Maddox, author of George's Ghosts, a new life of WB.B.H. Roy Foster, Yates started publishing books on folklore in 1888, but he wasn't alone in being interested in magic and fairies,

Who else was writing on these subjects at the end of the 19th century? And why was there such an interest in this? Well, it's a golden moment for, I suppose, anthropology and studies of comparative religion. And, you know, Yates is coming in from outside. He's very much an autodidact. He hasn't been to university. He's taught himself. But it's against the background that Max Muller and Fraser's Goldenbow

and Andrew Lang's studies of fairy law is also happening. It's that post-positivist moment people have been through in a sense the if not rejection, rereading of Victorian religion and from the 1880s and more especially the 90s something else is being looked for.

That's how you dig into it, you're against a Victorian idea of the Victorian sort of neo-religion of like Victorianism. I dig into it as far as Yeats is concerned from that angle because he said so himself when he writes his autobiographies he says, I am very religious, but Darwin, Huxley, that whole background,

which his father very much went for, had done away with what he calls the simple religion of my youth. So he says, I made myself a new religion out of an almost an infallible tradition. And it's partly a poetic tradition, but also its tradition of secret wisdoms and the supernatural. Let's take the secret wisdoms. Did he find some of those when he went with Lady Gregory Augusta, his friend, 1890s, they went to the West of Ireland to study folklore. He accessed, I suppose,

a kind of supernatural secret tradition through folklore, as many did at the time, and if you're, in a sense, marginalised Irish Protestant as both he and Gregory were, it's an interesting way to access Irish authenticity as well. He didn't speak, the Gaelic,

did he? She did. She collected the folk... What did he get out of them? Can you just give us some instances, Roy, So we know what sort of things he was getting. Well, he was getting therapy in a way. It was a very sad part of his life. He'd been, he'd fallen out with Maud Gahn. He was poor.

He was making his name. He was in a state when he first of all finds this sanctuary. In Cool Park, this beautiful, isolated house in the West of Ireland. And he finds a way into local folk tradition, which of course he's encountered. in his boyhood holidays and his mother's home in Sligo, but this is much more intensive. And by gathering stories in the cottages around,

he is able to link them, as he thinks, to stories that go back to other great mythologies, Homeric and elsewhere, and to therefore believe in, as he very deeply believes in, a great fund of common memory out of which poetic and spiritual inspiration come. These are stories of Irish heroes, stories of great legendary figures,

stories of magic doings in the past. Yes. That sort of folk, is that loosely and generally described it? Yes, it's a blend in a sense of fairy story and Celtic myth, but he's also very much primed to intuit the mythological essences of it because, of course, he's been studying the rediscoversies of Celtic mythological cycles that are being published in transactions of learned societies.

It's not all quite as kind of innocent and one level as going around the cottages, listening to fairy stories. It's tapping into a prepared intellectual field as well. Brenda Maddox, something that Roy Foss referred to, Yates found in his own... Sorry, his own hermetic society in Dublin about the age of 2021, and then he became involved with the Theosophical Society and Madame Blavatsky. What did Madame Blavatsky and her theosophists get up to, and why was Yates'A attracted to them?

Well, it seems to me that Yates was attracted to almost anything that was going, and he was, Madam Blavatsky was very active in West London, and he fell into that. But he didn't get on with her very well. He was too individualistic and wanted to make his own rules, and so she threw him out, but he was very much a mix-and-match philosopher. He was a great poet, but he wasn't a great philosopher, and he took what he needed.

So he was able to blend the Theosophy with the Golden Dawn, with astrology, he went to seances. He put everything together. For people who don't know, what did Madame Blavatsky stand for? Bury Gould, can you explain? Well, I can explain what Theosophy stood for for Yates.

In Yates' case, he got interested, rather, as Brenda said, he got interested very early. He got interested in the Dublin Hermetic Society in the early 1880s. And in 1884, a young Brahmin lawyer came from India to defend Madame Blavatsky in one of the trials that she was involved in called Mohini Chatterjee. Mohini Chattagy was invited to Dublin on the inspiration of Yates. They wrote to him, he came, and he spent a week in Dublin, talking to the Dublin Humetic Society about his beliefs.

Now, central to what Yates got out of all of this was an interest in, to use the title of a book he read at the time, Nature's Finer Forces. He's interested in the notion that there might be mysterious forces, physical in operation, but impalpable. He'd read a book by Baron Reichenbach called Odick Force. He practiced passing crystals over his hands and looking at cases full of crystals in the Irish National Museum with a friend called Charles Johnston. And they came to believe in occult forces through a scientific mode.

Now, the theosophical literature on these kinds of forces involved the possibility that one could invoke them and that one could invoke them through the study of symbols. So reading this book by Rama Prasad called Nature's Finer Forces, Yates became interested in the practice of invoking forces via meditation on certain fixed symbols. Now, this was a matter that was being explored in the esoteric section of the theosophical society, but it also became one of those beliefs that was taken up in the Order of the Golden Dawn. So it is, if you like, practical experiments in invoking high-endums. are forces in clairvoyance in meditation.

And that goes right back to his 20th year. Brenda, was there anything, Brenda Mullerick, was there anything in Yates' family background that might have disposed him to spiritualism? Almost everything. I mean, his mother really introduced him, his mother's family, the Polluxans, who lived in Sligo. And Yates, I think it's very easy to forget,

was basically a West London boy. His father had, that was a barrister who decided to become an artist and left Dublin and brought the family to London. They didn't have enough money. They lived in rather dreary quarters around Earl's Court and Olympia. But in the summer, children went back to Sligo. They lived well back in their grandfather's house, and the people there, the supernatural was very close.

It wasn't only the servants, but the family all had seen things. They'd seen fairies sliding down moonbeams and various things, and he fell into this. And his own mother, who was her least favorite child. And she was very sad and depressed, and she had a lot to be depressed about. But she came alive when telling stories of Sligo, and she had a wonderful narrative gift, and it was his way of getting through to her. And then when he went back in the summer and saw them, and I'm a total non-believer,

but when I get to Sligo, the west of Ireland, and you see the great hills of Nogne and Bun Bulbin with the clouds running over, you begin to see, actually the line does begin to blur very much. And his imagination, the richness. of all this was in such contrast to his London life, and he was a dreamy boy, and he was very open to that kind of experience, and he got a lot of background in it before Lady Gregory came. I mean, his credentials for knowing the West of Ireland

and the really sense of the other world being very, very nearer there than certainly in London, just was part of him, and he was personally very unsure of himself, as it turned out in his sexual development, and at school. He was at the Godolphin school, and a dreamy boy was staring off at the wall. And he had every need to construct a private belief system. Also, I think it's important to say Yates did believe in magic all his life, and that was the magic of the word, the mesmerizing power of sound of the voice. And if you found the right words, let alone the right triangles or daggers or whatever, but the right sound of the word would actually invoke this universal memory. You could

cause things to happen by getting the right word. Okay, got its background there, and Warwick Gould brought us along with Theosophy. And that might bring us, Roy Fossett, to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which he joined in 1890. Can you, and he stayed there with various permutations for 30 years?

What attracted him to it? And what, in essence, I'm afraid, was it? Well, the Golden Dawn was a magical order. And I think we should very early on, well, if not define, isolate or separate magic from mysticism. Many of Yates' friends were mystics. He at this point of his life went for magic.

He wanted to control knowledge. He wanted to find out things. He wanted to learn by study how to evoke. And that's magic. That's not mysticism. The Golden Dawn were magicians. And they wanted to, through a series of rituals and magical properties

and intensive study of sacred books, equip themselves to have magical powers, essentially. At the same time, it's rather more intellectual than that may make it sound. It's one of a number of movements that have links with Rosicrucianism and fringe, actually fringe Christian cults as well, but essentially are deeply inspired also by Egyptology and the craze for things Eastern in the very late 19th century. So what are they trying to control,

and what are they doing with this magic? What are they getting at? What results do they get from their magic? They want to control spiritual experience, and they want to put themselves in the great, as they see it, traditions of neoplatonic wisdom, where by intensive study leading towards a revelation, you can understand the perfect forms of things above, which are only imperfectly represented or reflected in things below. that's the platonic or neoplatonic element in it. They do so by methods of both group and individual study and by hierarchies.

And in a sense, the order appeals to people who are, I think, in many ways, marginalised who are ambitious, who are like Yates, autodidacts, who haven't been to university, but have often been to art college, who operate in inner CD suburb, of London in the late 19th century like Camden and Hammersmith

there's a slightly obviously ridiculous element to all this They were accused of being mediocre and charlatan some of them and they were worse when you get some like Alistair Crowley as part of it There is an element of charlatanry and there's an element of manipulation and Maud Gahn who when she

tangled with them for a bit rejected them partly because they were so irredeemably middle class and you could see their dreadful clothes as she said under their robes and their clothes certainly weren't from Paris, like Maud Gahn's clothes. So it's...

That brings it down to us? It's operating at a very particular cuch social in the late 19th and early 20th century. What is the relationship between this, between the spiritualism and sexuality to you, Brenda Maddox? Well, it was very useful. It was a way of solving

what was to be always a problem for him. But I think one of the things about the Golden Dawn is the fact that it was unisex. It was unlike the Masons, it was just for one gender only. The Golden Dawn was a marvelous kind of night out for adventurous middle-class women. It was a place to meet people,

and they went through these rituals together full of chains and daggers. Anyway, it was a sexual excitement in it. What was the sexual excitement in it? There were the rituals of entry. You had to be lashed to a cross and so on and so forth. Yes, I think, all in a very genteel manner, but it was at the Golden Dawn.

or that he met the old woman, young woman, who eventually became his life. But are you saying that the relationship of Yates, the conjoining idea of sex and spiritualism was a way, his spiritualism was a way to meet women, or are you saying there's something more profound in it? Well, there's something more profound in it, in the sense of something more basic in it,

that for Yates always equated poetic potency with sexual potency. If he could do one, he could do the other. And he needed the symbols to produce his post. poems. And so if he went through these rituals and felt sexually excited, it also inspired him. And I mean, the thing is, as you said, he's easy to make fun of, but the fact that these symbols worked for him and they worked for us and he put them into poems. To me, the bottom line of Yates and all his philosophy is he had a number of crises in his personal life, which always, which were really, as Rizroy says, therapy. He went to these sessions and he felt better afterwards.

and he wasn't really terribly clean on consistency and order. I mean, he did all kinds of conflicting things. The Golden Dawn looked down very much on vulgar seances with trumpets and table wrapping, but he went into Soho and chambermaids and all this and got in contact with the other side. At the same time, he tried a more rational approach with a society for psychical research, which is collecting evidence of life after death.

Daily Mail is still doing it, and the Society of the SPR is still active on Marla's Roe. in Kensington people. He kept a skeptical eye on it at the same time he got the benefit of the stirrings of magic and he met women as well. Could I put another angle here?

One of the members of the Order of the Golden Dawn, Dorothea Hunter, who had indeed Dorothea Butler as she was and who had been very close to Yates in West London, said the order was my university. it was a mode of learning and a mode of progression for those who didn't go to university

and what has to remember, Yates is in that number. A man with a very powerful desire to put different systems of thought together. He's what we would call a syncretist. And there is, of course, an almost objective interest in comparative religion. There is also an interest in comparing systems of belief as they're maintained in peasant communities, with the latest in intellectual conjecture about the other world.

So the order is very important there. But it's not, and here we have to remember that whilst he's interested in magic, he remains interested in the other thing which he was not particularly good at, mysticism. the direct experience of God's subjection to an overwhelming sense of the supernatural, not something conjured in experiments or magical invocations, but the sudden presence of God. There is a sense, in fact, that he was once a youthful scientist

with a Linnaean desire to classify, to discover, and this is why, though, as Brenda correctly said, the Golden Dawn didn't like all that table-tapping and seance stuff, Yates went for that as well. It's part of a highly Scientized search for evidence which of course the Society of Recycle Research revolved around. A lot of eminent scientists were in it. Yates could take it to astonishing levels. He gets involved with a deranged solicitor and

St. Leonard's and C who thinks he finds a machine that can listen in to the other world, a wireless machine which Yates thinks is the greatest discovery in the history of the world for a few crazy weeks during the First World War. Unfortunately, the wireless machine picks up messages in German from the other side and is impounded by the police and the whole thing goes into reverse mode. But he did believe or wanted to believe recurrently in his life

that you could actually prove that the soul continued an existence beyond the grave and that messages could come back. When he was asked about this interest in the occult, and the spiritual and so on. And when he was vaguely tested or mocked by friends, he always insisted how very, very important it was to him. Next to his poetry, it was the most important thing. And the clearest evidence, if we want, if we need evidence,

or proofs for it, is this marriage to George Hyde list in 1917, which is said to be on the rebound from Morgon and from Morgon's daughter. And the marriage is going very badly after four days. And instead of leaving, which you thought of doing, George Heidelis started and faked, as I understand it, an impromptu seigne saying that if Yates asked her questions, she would bring back messages from the other world. And extraordinarily, she did. It worked for him. Can you just explain that?

Well, yes, again, as a non-believer, but I would take issue with that word faked. I'm not convinced. I think I'm quoting you. I think I raise a lot of speculation about that. The fact is she certainly... I think the first saying she said, you said after that she believed. She did tell Richard Elman. She told Richard Elman that the first, in the first days. So I was right there. After that she said it was genuine. Well, we didn't dwell on that.

Her hand was seized by an unseen power and began making words on page. In fact, a lot of pages. I think she did 93 pages even in the first day or the first few days, which is quite remarkable. But the point is that she said, and it saved the marriage, that the first time she did, she did, she did fake it. After that she said it was genuine. And she said to him, you ask me questions, and I will bring about messages from the other. the world. And the extraordinary thing was that she seemed to do that to his satisfaction, but more importantly, she deeply informed his poetry. Here we have a clear example. In five

years, she brought messages and stuff back, which has now been examining great data, and it's full. As I understand it, you're going to tell me about the material of the materials went into some of his finest and most important poems. Was that right? Yes, absolutely. He gave her the question to ask the spirits, you know, why have you chosen us? Why are you doing? this and her hand wrote, we have come to bring you metaphors for poetry and they delivered. I mean, he got the phases

of the moon, the cycles of history. I mean, the poem that no leader, writer would be without the second coming is full of images of one era of civilization coming to an end and a new wild anarchic and Hustas say he was wrong era

starting. It codified things for him and they did go at it seriously for five years. And it was based on phases of the moon and he made, which I think is, you know, a book that was

very important to him, his least read book, a vision. He made and to explain his own, at last, he had made his own religion, his own system of philosophy. And, I mean, he's one of the few artists who grow better as he grew older, like Milton and Verdi, or so very few people

reached their peak in old age, and these symbols actually helped him to do it. He even wrote a little poem, which he published in the Winding Stair, called Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors. Have you got that? Yes. Not too much, because we haven't got too much time, but if you give us a taste. Well, Yates keeps it short for you.

It's only four lines. Oh, that's a bit better. What they undertook to do, they brought past, all things hang like a drop of dew upon a blade of grass. And it was that sense that the system had been delivered in its fullness. Can we just go into this? Because it's absolutely fascinating. She's sitting there, he's asking her questions.

She's writing. She's saying, this is what the spirit says. Is she second-guessing? Does she know him so well? Is she so brilliant? Roy Foster, what's going on? Can you give us, as it were, more meat that went into the performance? She is brilliant.

She is brilliant, but she has access to privileged information. He has published before all this, or he's written before all this, his, I think, rather wonderful short, spiritual primer, called Paramacus, Salentia, Lune. I think a lot of the answers she is producing come from an intensive reading of that. She has read Young, she's read Freud, she's a very intelligent, indeed, brilliant woman in many ways. She knows what he reads, what he likes, what he wants to hear. I think there's a lot of subconscious collusion going on.

When she gets tired or runs out of answers, she'll come back with a pretty snappy retort. You know, it's not only spiritual stuff that's coming through here. It's transferential psychotherapy. The stuff does stop in the 1920s. He doesn't want her to do much more automatic writing. It peters out. Okay, the great poems, the great last poems, still owe something to these patterns of thought.

But I think a vision serves its purpose. And even for Yates doesn't quite answer. because he spends 12 years trying to rewrite it. I think a lot of what comes out of it isn't actually the tapping into, the final tapping into supernatural knowledge which he'd always wanted. I think at the end he turns back to mysticism for that.

Can we just conclude this discussion then, very good, by talking about, I'm fascinating, how this fed into the poetry. He clearly believed in this, the occult, although he retained his right to be distanced from it as well. but he said he couldn't do without it. What was it giving him? And can you give us specific examples

from these particular series of seances? Well, he uses the phrase somewhere in the poems of the tower that the half-red wisdom of demonic images satisfies the aged man as once the growing boy. I think one has to accept that a poet needs, even to write the most distilled lyric poetry, needs an enormous amount of substance. For Yates, that was symbolism.

It was indeed, and symbolism was not something that he was prepared to use in a random way. Symbolism had to be organized into a symbology. This is coming back to this idea that folklore or the supernatural, knowledge of the supernatural, is a code of art. And I think that it's enormously important for him to have that continual refreshment in the deeps of the mind,

continual refreshment of spiritual substance, those images that yet fresh images begette, he says in one of his most famous poems. And that necessity is a constant necessity of his life as an artist. And when it comes back to the idea that first and foremost he's an artist, when he says,

next to my poetry, My belief in magic is the important thing. It is next to the poetry. The most important thing is the continual feeding of the creative mind. Roy Foster. Images is the key word and symbolology. And again, a very late poem addressed in fact to a fellow poet where he says,

I never bad you go to Moscow or to Rome. Renounce that drudgery. Call the Muses home. Seek those images that constitute the wild, the lion and the virgin. the harlot and the child. There's Christian imagery in there, there's Christian imagery in there, there's the old search

for a set of symbols which will release the muses and call them home. Orden wrote, You were silly like us, your gift survived at all. Do you think there was silliness there as well as everything else? Yates was never silly in the way Odden was silly. It was a different kind of silliness,

and it wasn't a Californian. Well, this is rather a sympathetic remark, is it? You were silly like us. Like us. But it wasn't like us. No, it was very different. It was very different. And part of that difference, it seems to me,

is that Yates is always a skeptic among believers and a believer among skeptics. And it's that tension, really tension between two halves of his mind that's the important thing. He's a marginalized figure in many parts of his life, in his Irish background, in his early sexual relationships,

in his bohemian situation in England, Even late in life when he's such a grand figure, there is always a sense of marginality about him, which he deliberately cultivates in many ways. The what Auden called the silly side, the supernaturalist, the occultist side, is part of, in some ways, a deliberate marginalising of himself where he can retreat. He goes up in a balloon. He's like a man on the top of a mountain surrounded by lesser creatures. If that's silliness, he's silly. Thanks very much, Roy Foster. Thank you to Brendan Maddox and Warwick Gold.

and thank you very much for listening.