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: Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27541704
Accessed: 16-12-2015 15:06 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Sewanee Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 YEATS, THE TAROT, AND
THE GOLDEN DAWN

By KATHLEEN RAINE

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

my had been caught by an observation
attention 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 with Masefield, Synge, and others, in
published,
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. merelyThe academic study of magical

may be likened to the analysis of musical scores by a

symbolism
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 loan of unpublished documents from his
the^
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 manu
Golden Dawn rituals; and, above all, the lender of unpublished
scripts, who wishes to remain anonymous.

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 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 ago as 1781.
long
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 quotes:
him)

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 AceCups, of
which resembles the

Albigensian device that

represents the grail.
In any case, the practice of the Golden Dawn, like that of the

Society, was an unbounded eclecticism: if several al

Theosophical
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
once a justification
theory of the origin of the Tarot formed at
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 an exotic strand of Egyptian
theosophy
she quotes continually from the Book of the Dead. For
wisdom;

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 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 still new when are old, and yet
language pantheons
still able to form a link with ancient sacred meaning. The
"Golden-Eyed Hawk of Sun", the
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

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 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 a gaunt resolute
coat, with 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 source than conscious or subconscious
deeper
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 whose address in

Sprengel,
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
were and emanated from a continental
manuscripts post-1880
society of Rosicrucians.
Yeatsin 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
et
ing I found that the book was called Speculum Angelorum
Hominum, and had been written by a certain Giraldus and been
at Cracow in 1594." Yeats's fiction is obviously based
printed
upon the actual events leading to the foundation of the Golden
Dawn and the miraculous which finds its way into the
manuscript
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 the Roseae Rubeae and the Aureae Crucis; a
degrees,

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 116 THE TAROT AND THE GOLDEN DAWN

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

In 1889 a letter was published in Lucifer announcing that "this
studies western traditions . . . the
society 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 in London. His name in
Lodge
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
was The more im
Vision similarly received by Mrs, Yeats.

portant rituals and instructions have been published in full by

was a
the Aries Press, Chicago, by Dr. Israel Regardie, who
member of the Order in its later years.

For the first few years all went well and the Order flourished.
its early members were A. E. Waite, Florence Farr, the
Among
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
to become at a Buddhist Bhikku under
nett (who was later famous
the name of Ananda whom Florence Farr followed to
Metteya,
Ceylon), W. Peck the Astronomer Royal of Scotland, Algernon
Blackwood. A. E. (George Russell), though a member of the
a member
Theosophical Society, was never of the Golden Dawn.
New came into existence, in Paris, Edinburgh, Bradford,
temples
and Weston-Super-Mare.
the Order soon ran into difficulties; MacGregor,
However,
in Paris, became increasingly autocratic; the last straw was
living
his as his delegate, to take command of the Lodge, the
sending
notorious Aleister Yeats was the leader of the success
Crowley.
ful ejection of Crowley; the deposition of Mathers followed, in

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 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 under the direct or indirect auspices of the
editing,
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.
was one of the subjects to which the neo
Magic only
Dawn aspired when he swore "to prosecute
phyte of the Golden
the Great Work: which is to obtain control of the nature
and power of my own
being". According to some of the texts
from a later and doubtless under
(dating, however, period,
Waite's influence) the purpose was even more specifically Chris
tian: "To establish closer and more personal relations with the
Master of is and ever must be the ulti
Lord Jesus, the Masters,

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 118 THE TAROT AND THE GOLDEN DAWN

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 Order? ^wrote that
Magical

. . . the means from one degree to another is

passing by their
an evocation of the Supreme a of a symbolic
Life, treading
^n the question of the degree to which the Society was Christian the experts differ.
Mr. Watkins believes that it was strongly so from the first; Mr. Gerald
Geoffrey
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
but never tried to become Christ, only to become as Christ. Thus the
(Adonai)
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, and Egyptian sources. The Rosicrucian substitutes names from
Coptic,
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.

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 KATHLEEN RAINE 119

a passage through a symbolic gate, a towards

path, climbing
the light which it is the essence of our system to believe
flows continually from the lowest of the invisible Degrees
to the highest of the Degrees that are known to us. It mat
ters nothing whether the Degrees above us are in the body
or out of the body, for none the less must we tread this
path, and open this gate, and seek this light and none the
less must we believe the light flows downward con
. . .
tinually.

And later in the same

pamphlet:

... It is by sorrow and love of all

labour, by living things,
and by a heart that humbles itself before the Ancestral light,
and by a mind its power and beauty and quiet flow
through
without end, that men come to and not by the
Adeptship
multiplication of petty formulae.

Yeats is here speaking with a simplicity impossible to him in

the common, or indeed
in the literary, world in which he moved:
only among the like-minded could he speak with
complete open
ness of the
things nearest his heart.
The central teaching of the Golden Dawn was Cabbalism
(especially the Christian Cabbalism of Dee and Agrippa), with its
numerology and complex system of correspondences based on the
diagram of the Tree of Life; the Tarot was used in this sense,
according to L?vi's view that these cards represent the Tree of
Life in pictorial form. Yeats in The Trembling of the Veil writes
of that symbol with which he was himself so familiar: "The
Tree of Life is a geometrical figure made up of ttn circles or
spheres called Sephiroth joined by straight lines. Once men
must have thought of it as like some great tree covered with its
fruit and foliage, but at some period, in the thirteenth century,
perhaps, touched by the mathematical genius of Arabia in all
likelihood, it had lost its natural form." The divine energy
flows continually from the uncreated source the ten di
through

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 120 THE TAROT AND THE GOLDEN DAWN

vine names, numerations, or powers, from force into

emanating
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 the and elemental
archetypal world, intellectual, celestial,
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 ways. . . .
great ignorant leafy

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 of outer weariness ....
glass

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
and the twenty-two trumps or keys, whose symbols are
cards;
so haunting and evocative. The numbers one to ten
correspond

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 KATHLEEN RAINE 121

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

Sephiroth
four elements and the four worlds. The twenty-two Tarot trumps
are each to one of the "the
assigned twenty-two paths by which
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 else?letters
numbers, with
everything
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 and exact.

complex
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 was al

Dawn,
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 toWest
cott's The Magical Ritual of the Sanctum Regnum. In this em
the faces and of the Cherub are related to the ten
blem, wings
Sephiroth, while four hands carry cup, wand, sword, and pentacle.
These four recur in the ritual of the Golden Dawn as the four

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 122 THE TAROT AND THE GOLDEN DAWN

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

and, in addition, to consecrate a sword. "The consecrated

sponds;
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 of cards and the four sacred objects of
pack
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. the figure of Hanrahan himself seems re
Indeed,
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
identifies the uninitiated man with the Tarot's Fool.
implication
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 the Fool
Italian is represented as a dull
packs
in other variations he is the court jester with cap,
stupid figure;
and motley. In Waite's pack the Foolish Man is repre
bells,
sented as a dreamer, who, about to step over the precipice of the
carries a white rose in his hand.
world,

His is full of intelligence

countenance and expectant dream.
He has in one hand and in the other a costly wand,
a rose
from which over his right shoulder a wallet curi
depends
embroidered. He is a prince of the other world on
ously
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.

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 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 followed

"towards", 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 magicpack as he "muttered to himself
as he turned the and
cards, Spades Diamonds, Courage and
Power; Clubs and Hearts, and Pleasure".
Knowledge The
Juggler or Magician of the Tarot is depicted with the four
magical instruments on a table before him?cup, wand, sword,

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 124 THE TAROT AND THE GOLDEN DAWN

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 weare 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
ever a
world saw, having pale face and flowers
long about it".
"And there on
step the
below her chair four gray old
sitting
women, and the one of
them was holding a great cauldron in her
and another a great stone on her knees, and heavy as it was
lap;
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 theMabinogion who does not ask the mean
chooses none, and presently is
ing of spear and grail, Hanrahan
overcome once more with the irresistible sleep of forgetfulness.
The of the wandering fool appears again and again in
figure
Yeats's poems and mythologies, as the Fool by the Roadside,
the Lunatic, or that statesman who is Yeats
Crazy Jane and Tom
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,

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 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 fickle mind,

chattering,
no less apt than the or who in various ver
dog, tiger, crocodile,
sions of the Tarot signify the lusts which are the travelling com

panions on
of man his journey.
This journey may be understood as to this present
relating
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
a sword, a fir-tree on a hill,
Upon
An old slave grindingat a heavy quern,
A king a chair of gold?
sitting upon
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 theWheel of the hells and the heavens through which

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 126 THE TAROT AND THE GOLDEN DAWN

all souls must travel ismost highly developed in Buddhism, but

it is common, in some form, to all religions. Dante's ascent of
the Mountain fromthe 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 through Exist no
pass'd
more?Everything is Eternal." The spires of that Serpent must
be one among the many sources of Yeats's image of the
certainly
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 a connected sentence, or story,
numbers,
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 eachMis
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)."
L?vi another arrangement, even closer to Yeats's
Eliphas gives

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 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 as
the Fool
zero). I counts
have been
unable to find any exact correspondence between L?vi's of
phases
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. was not Yeats in an exact way
following
either Mathers or
the type of but
arrangement, so bewilder
L?vi,
ing to his readers, was one familiar to him in many forms, as a

path or wheel, or a round a or a

path running wheel, 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.

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
128 THE TAROT AND THE GOLDEN DAWN

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
moon, one of those "moods" which belong less to the
qualitative
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,
I am
the Past, I am the Inundation. He who
concealing all,
rises from the Great Waters is my Name"?and so on. We may
recall countless from the sacred of all races and
examples writings
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

there is a kind of poetry whose purpose and whose means
deniably
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 which owe
initiation,
much to the Egyptian Book of the Deady the Chaldean Oracles,
have written a
and Blake's Prophetic Books. Only Yeats could

passage so full of paraphrased Blake as this:

And placed Kerubim at the East of the

Tetragrammaton
border of Eden and a Flaming Sword which turned every
way to keep the path of the Tree of Life, forHe 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

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 KATHLEEN RAINE 129

him in theWind 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 whether or not this was so they
initiate;
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 and for the same reason: the
religion,
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

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 130 THE TAROT AND THE GOLDEN DAWN

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, is not as im
"Individuality
as our age has
portant 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 and others later were to

Jung
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 speaking mouths

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 an unintended result because of the

produce altogether
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."

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 KATHLEEN RAINE 131

Yeats calls these

"personifying spirits" Moods and also Gate
a term which may seem strange if we overlook the allu
Keepers,
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 Before the mind can look
Temples.
out of their eyes the active will hence their sorrowful
perishes,
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 of symbolic our collec
world images is the form of
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

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
132 THE TAROT AND THE GOLDEN DAWN

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 system. The Tarot

theological
symbols gave to the members of the Golden Dawn the freedom
to evoke, in their living those
essence, 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 a caricature of Yeats's own. Indeed,
Crowley
between these two magicians there is the of man and
similarity
shadow; Crowley, the more talented magician, if reports of his
are to be believed, wrote many volumes of bad verse
misdoings
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;
concern was sensationalism. He had his own "evil"
Crowley's
executed according to his instructions by Frieda Harris, in
Tarot,
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 that it contains some personal interpreta
likely purely

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 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

(or antithetical) to Yeats himself. In Yeats's

complementary
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
fresh fever from the skies;/another woman shall awake the
bring
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 Tarottrump (the

there is a passage strangely reminiscent of Yeats's image
Star)
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; a force.'
having spiral
It is interesting to notice that this oracle appears to anticipate the
that of the hawk-headed Lord, and also of the
present Aeon,
mathematical of the of the Universe as calcu
conception shape

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 134 THE TAROT AND THE GOLDEN DAWN

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

Therion had a part in the inspiration of the poem, Yeats and
drew upon a common fund of esoteric tradition and
Crowley
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
I went to bed, after many or
night just before and nights?eight
nine perhaps?I saw between and waking, as in a
sleeping
a centaur, and a moment later a woman
cinematograph, galloping
of incredible upon a pedestal and shooting an
beauty, standing
arrow at a star." He did not use these images in any poem until

twenty or years but the experience seems to

twenty-five later;
have been one of those unforgettable openings of a visionary
world whichpoets remember and draw upon for a lifetime. It is
that no reading of the score of sym
necessary again to remember
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
and the keys are used only in order to awaken their
knowledge
in the mind. In his essay on Anima Mundi
sleeping counterparts
Yeats writes that he "was seldom delighted by that sudden lumi
nous definition of form which makes one understand almost in
that one is not merely Edwin
spite of oneself imagining". Muir,
who never in his life made a invocation, describes in his
magical
The cmd the Fable, how he too was "over
autobiography, Story
whelmed by miracle" and flung into a world where "the dragon
and the Sphinx seemed to be self-created; so far as
completely

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 KATHLEEN RAINE 135

I know there was no in my mind from which I

subject-matter
could have fashioned them. And the whole atmosphere of the
dream was strange and its exhilarating its
astonishing: speed,
objective glory, above all its complete lack of all that is usually
meant by human."
That such visions come not from the but from the
personal
collective unconscious seems confirmed of a
by what Yeats tells
series of what would by some be called the Sur
coincidences, by
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
a similar and a story by Fiona Mac
describing goddess-figure,
leod entitled The Archer: "Someone in the story had a vision of
a woman an arrow into the of an arrow
shooting sky and later
shot at a fawn that pierced the fawn's the
body and remained,
fawn's torn out and clinging
heart 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
dealing with of 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 in its own world. He set out
objective reality,
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 in
given
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

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 136 THE TAROT AND THE GOLDEN DAWN

water-colour . . . one was of a the other of a

paintings centaur,
woman on a stone and shooting an arrow at
standing pedestal
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 of the Tree, and the heart to the Sephira Tipher
paths
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, isNo. 14 (Temperance) : a winged robed female figure with

a sun or star on her brow. The key of the Star
Tarot
symbol
(No. 17) is a somewhat similar female figure, but nude, who is,
to L?vi, "the psyche of the world'*?Anima Mundi
according
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 of the virgin
that vision 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 the Tarot key of the Star was as
Crowley above,
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

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 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 of one who had himself seen
authority
the mysteries, had seen the slaying of the god, the torn-out heart.
There is only one in these choruses which re
symbol apparently
lates only to the dream material and not to the Orphic or some
other mythology; the star itself, in the line

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

virgin

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 the
myth
arrow appears; and Yeats had noted at this time the myth of

Balder, slain by the arrow of mistletoe.

The "way on the Tree
of the arrow" 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 and wisdom's chatter. . . .
cruelty

These various sacrificial are in the Tarot,

figures comprised,

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 138 THE TAROT AND THE GOLDEN DAWN

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 or on the cross-tree of a Tau cross
pack) (in Waite's
pack). Waite'scard 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

as in the myths of Dionysus
born) of the divine into generation,
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 God on the Tree a symbol
was to which Frazer's
Dying
Golden had lent new meaning and richness in the last
Bough
decade of the nineteenth century. The priest of the woods of
Nemi who guarded the sacred tree, and himself personified the
is the starting-point of that wide-ranging exploration of
tree-god,
folklore and religion that made Frazer's generation
primitive
aware of the continuity and universality of the basic themes which
underlie a multitude of myths. When Yeats chose the figure of
in the poem "Vacillation", as the Dying God on the Tree,
Attis,
his principal source was no doubt Frazer; the Tree upon which
he hangs is of course the Tree of Life, enriched with all its
the
multiple Cabbalistic implications, and the figure is that of
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
know not what he knows, but knows not grief.
May

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 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 as a tree-spirit,
Attis 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
. . . and the
treated as a divinity 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
a star shoots down;
Brightness remains; brighter
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 crowd, and where
frenzied 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 as in the
preserved, opening

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 140 THE TAROT AND THE GOLDEN DAWN

choruses of The Resurrection, by the "fierce virgin" Pallas Athe

ne, who bore "that beating heart away" from whose life the god
a
was reborn in 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 stage when we devoured his heart.
painted

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 Moore was designing for him, and he is clearly
book-plate
thinking of the magical character of symbols when he writes:

. . . don't nailthe 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. . . . are Sun
My main symbols
and Moon (in all phases), Tower, Mask, Tree (Tree with
Mask on the ....
hanging 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 return.
presently
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 the mouth of a lion. The coach which
closing upon
Martin is working in The Unicorn from the Stars may be the

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 KATHLEEN RAINE 141

Tarot Chariot, symbol of conquest on the external Mar

plane.
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 one other or
only symbol,
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 of "the wise the same as
archetype old man"; figure who
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 and has survived
pre-Adamite,
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 to

imagination helped
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 So
magical power.
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; to
brings

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
142 THE TAROT AND THE GOLDEN DAWN

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
those magi "in the body or out of the body" in whose re
adepts,
in the pamphlet which he wrote as Imperator of the
ality Yeats,
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
has come me alone," Mathers
edge of the Order through 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 style, some glimmer of
impassioned
that enchantment which had held the young Yeats spellbound.

When such a rendezvous has beenin a much frequented

there has been in their appearance or
place, nothing personal
dress to mark them out as differing in any way from ordi
and sensation of transcend
nary people except the appearance
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
of the Elixir of Life has traditionally been sup
possession
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 themselves up to images, and to the speech of images, thought that
given
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

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 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 with his own wisdom.
ripened
The official who introduced the initiate in the ceremonies of
the Golden Dawn bore as his insignia the lamp and staff of the
Tarot as perhaps had Mathers himself at Yeats's initia
Hermit,
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 coast in the west of Ireland; and
rocky
there indeed is the sea-cavern of the Demonesi, where "every
mortal foot danced by the white foot of an immortal," and the
danced with "an immortal who had
poet himself august woman,
black lilies in her hair". The narrator of Rosa Alchemica is not
for he flees magic to "carry the rosary about
quite Yeats himself,
his neck". In that story Robartes is killed; but the archetypes are

deathless, and he had to be, like the immortal Sherlock Holmes,

for Yeats had need of his instruction again when he
resurrected,
wrote A Vision.
The poem on "The Phases of the Moon" which prefaces
grand
A Vision with his travelling companion Aherne,
brings Robartes,
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.
and went to the Rue Mozart before breakfast to buy a New
Spanish-American war,
York Herald. As I went out past the young Normandy servant who was laying
I was telling myself some schoolboy romance, and had just reached a place
breakfast,
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?'

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 144 THE TAROT AND THE GOLDEN DAWN

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,

. . . should not you

Why
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
a
An image of the moving heavens, log book of the sun's
and the moon's. . . .
journey

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 that Samuel Palmer . . .
lonely light engraved.

Seldom has a symbol passed through such a succession, in direct

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 KATHLEEN RAINE 145

descent from Plato, through II Penseroso, to Yeats himself.

Palmer too was a and for Yeats, on all sides the
Platonist; seeing
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 as they ad
lonely
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 believed:
deeply

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
of and . . He
. will while he
thing strength quiet. remember,
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

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 146 THE TAROT AND THE GOLDEN DAWN

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 civilization. Even in

declining
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 and downfall. This emblem shows a
signifies catastrophe
tall tower, whose roof, which is also a crown, is struck
burning
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 Path of the Arrow, the third "way" on the
upward
Sephirotical Tree of God.

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead.

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 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 the nation "half dead at the top", or the empty
achievement,
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

sour ....
Their money spent, their wine gone

?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 ismade of four watch

towers that guard the north, south, east, and west. For Yeats
there was no morepotent than the Tower he himself set
symbol
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.

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 148 THE TAROT AND THE GOLDEN DAWN

What has most astonished me in even thismost 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 be denied. wrote
impunity Jung
that "consciousness torn from its roots and no longer able to ap
a Prome
peal to the authority of the primordial images, possesses
thean freedom, it is true, but it also partakes of the nature of a

godless hybrisP

This content downloaded from 137.52.76.29 on Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:06:07 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions