Latest / Coffee & Divination / John Michael Greer on W.B. Yeats, Poetry, Magic, and the Fate of Nations

Transcript

John Michael Greer on W.B. Yeats, Poetry, Magic, and the Fate of Nations · Coffee & Divination

• 0:00
  honestly at this point if you were to start practicing magic at the age of six and do it full time until you died at 102 you would not be able to work your way through more than a small part of the practical techniques that are currently available to anybody who's interested in magic go down to your you know go down to any any well stocked bookstore and you've got literally the secrets of the ages causing the shelves to groan beneath their weight we've got the practice this is the philosophy this is talking about how you understand magic as a branch of the creative arts how you understand magic as an ingredient in a way of life and in the case of a vision a way of understanding occultism as as it fits into the cycle of lives and the rise and fall of civilizations and the basic structure of the cosmos that we encounter on on on on an everyday basis but also in our dreams and in the inner world welcome to coffee and divination a podcast about the arts of obtaining hidden knowledge in changing times join me Joanna Ferrar to chat with experts from around the world on tarot runes geomancy and the many ways divination can help us navigate and plan our paths ahead today I'm very happy to welcome back to the show John Michael Greer to discuss his new volume The Magical Writings of W B Yeats which is a collection that returns Yeats's amazing occult essays and the original 1925 version of a vision to the modern world's consideration as a corpus of magical philosophical and creative works John Michael Greer is one of the most prolific and wide ranging writers in contemporary occultism with works spanning ceremonial magic Druidry divination philosophy ecology history and the very long cycles of civilization a number of those topics we consider today in our conversation a lot of us first encounter W B Yeats as one of the great poets of the 20th century which of course he was but he was also a very serious occult practitioner whose magical works and philosophy and experiments were central to his creative life in this episode we explore Yates as a poet but also as a magician and thinker whose works have a great deal to teach us about the nature of philosophy in our magic as well as history and the fate of ourselves and nations we also touched on the power of writers like Yeats and Tolkien who created not really just fiction or poetry but philosophical and imaginal landscapes that are so beautiful and powerful that so many of us are still drawn into them today the Imaginal Realm is very much present for all of us in different ways before we begin I have a few quick announcements I'm excited to say that this weekend on August 15th I'll be doing an event at the Serpents Key in Hanover Pennsylvania and on August 20th I'll be over in Park Slope Brooklyn doing an event at the Barnes and noble there both of those events are free and I'd love to see some of my friends in those areas there so the details are in the show notes there's also more exciting news Elise Wells that I'm sure some of my listeners are familiar with and I are officially able to announce that next year we will be releasing a book we have co written together over the last nine or ten months about our time in Greece last year I'm very thrilled about this project and I'll be sharing much more about it in the coming months on my website Coffee divination.com you'll find many free resources including journeys and exercises things that connect to the book The Diviner's Path and episodes and much more there's also pre registration available for a container course that I'll be offering online this winter so for if you're interested in going deeper there are ways to do that over on the website and thank you so much for your support of the book and this podcast reviews for both make an enormous difference so if the book or the show has meant something to you over time it is always wonderful for us to receive and read those reviews and if you share the episode with those who would enjoy it it also really helps of course you can find me on Instagram where I am at coffee and divination so now here is my conversation with John Michael Greer so it is my pleasure to have back on the show someone that I'm sure many of my listeners are very familiar with John Michael Greer thank you so much for joining us again thank you very much for having me on it's always a pleasure so we are here to talk about the occult writings of a very great author a very famous name and for some of our listeners they will be aware of his occult tendencies shall we say but some may be very surprised so could you kind of just give us a little bit of an introduction to Yeats as an occultist and also like how you got drawn into doing this project okay William Butler Yeats everyone knows almost everyone knows of him as a Nobel Prize winning poet um one of the one of the great poets of in the English language of the 20th century major figure in Irish politics in the period the period of turmoil that LED to Irish independence and thereafter um you know one one of those one of those huge presences in western culture he was also up to his eyeballs in occultism from his youth that's something people don't like to talk about these days there was a long period basically the second half of the 20th century where we don't talk about that you know Victorians don't talk about sex um in the mid second half of the 20th century we don't talk about occultism and it was very awkward because here you have Yates who's who's an inescapable cultural presence you know up and all for what will to this day and he wasn't he didn't just dabble okay by the time he was in his teen he was in his teens he was a deep student of um of theosophy of the writings of um Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and of other theosophical writers he became a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn the most prestigious magical order in Britain at the time he rose straight through its ranks completing all of its studies to become an Adeptus major the highest rank then worked um he was a leading figure in the Golden Dawn he was involved in various other esoteric things at the time when the Golden Dawn blew itself to smithereens in um
• 6:16
  19: 03 in a series of political quarrels he ended up leading the larger or playing a major role leading the larger stuff of the orders that came out of that and went through the whole study program again just you know to to show other people how it's done and this kind of stuff his wife um George Georgiana I think was her her official name but everyone called her George was an even better occultist than he was we would know and I mean she would be an immense presence except he hated publicity Yates loved it so everyone everyone knows about Willie Yates nobody knows about George she was also an Adeptus major she was um extremely Learned and um and extremely skilled in the magical arts um let's see he was also um an investigator working very very heavily with the society for Psychical Research the first great organization for scientific study of parapsychology in Britain he studied quite a number of mediums fraudulent and less fraudulent um he did he did all kinds of stuff he was deeply involved in the whole world and he wrote um a book and quite a number of essays about occultism which have which have been systematically uncollected as such you can find them um the the book is called a vision and that was actually my intro to the whole subject um that that the second edition of that the 1937 I think it was edition um was very popular in certain French literary circles it's been pretty much continuously in print I found a beat up paperback copy in a used book store on in Capitol Hill in Seattle what it would have been the mid 1980s probably and was going okay what the ring tailed Brambley Watson is this it seems exceedingly strange I like it and so um so I took it home and read it and I found it completely baffling and read it again you know the usual process of figuring out how to make sense of something very deeply rooted in the world view of classical late 19th early 20th century goldism and then I started noticing there was a lot of other material that he had written and it's scattered here and there kind of shamefacedly tucked into various collections of his essays for some reason nobody had previously done a a single volume collecting Yeats's important occult writings the guy was a member of the Golden Dawn The Golden Dawn is still one of the biggest deals in the custom today there's a huge community and yet here's Yates major figure major writer major theorist as well a crackerjack practitioner um and his writings were uncollected I figured it was time to fix that and so that's where my book came from yes and that is that is an uh an enormous amount of very valuable material it's interesting because when you're you're mentioning that I feel like you know with the information that I had about Yates I had heard of course about his connection to the Golden Dawn but it's always kind of as an and he was also interested in the stuff on the side and that's about as much attention as it would be given and the the other aspects of his life that I did remember hearing more about and was more aware of was his connection to folklore studies and that he was also a folklorist and so his his interest focused heavily on the folklore of Ireland and kind of the explorations there can you maybe kind of talk to us a little bit about his his folklore side before we delve more into the sure magic side well he had the huge advantage of being um a close friend of Lady Augusta Gregory uh she was a friend a supporter a patron back when he was dirt broke um and at several points in his life when he was before his marriage when he was had bad had ill health as you know malnutrition will do that um he she invited him to come stay with her and the two of them would go out into the Irish countryside because she was she was in the business of collecting folk tales and he would come patting along with her and she'd find you know somebody she'd arranged to listen to and she'd just sit down there and take notes as this this local storyteller would just lay on these amazing tales tales that you know some some of them fairly recent some of them dating back probably to the Bronze Age and Yates was just sitting there going wow it was it was a revolutionary experience for him but he became he became extremely interested in that he wrote um to her collection her her two volume collection of of folk tales and beliefs in the west of Ireland um he wrote an introduction to to each of those and each of those introductions is a major essay in itself he retained a deep interest in the lore of the of of the countryside uh special I mean you know growing up um in a family with a lot of connections in Saigon he would um I mean he talks in one of his essays about his his uncle um who who had a a a you know an old woman who worked for him a domestic who had the second sight and it was perfectly normal every well yes that's that's old Mary Battle she has the second sight you know she she talks to ghosts and things like that no big deal and so that that was another part of his education um dealing with dealing with just as as someone who grew up in the Anglophone Anglophile English descended Protestant descendancy part of the Irish population that introduction to the folk the the world of the folk the world of the ordinary working class Irish and the the traditions that have been passed down there for for so very long um that was a real revelation to him and at first you can see that in his early poetry which is really rather twee yeah um you know I shall arise and go now and go to industry it's it's nicely written but it is it does it does have this slightly yeah yeah yeah I mean but the thing it's still beautiful so we are it's it's it's very beautiful it's very beautiful but no he his he hadn't come into his power yet as a as a poet and when he did he was he was using a lot of the same material but he was fit he was focusing it through um as he says a remarkable experience which we'll be discussing in a bit and it became extraordinary stuff it became it that underlay much of what he was what he came to think of and he came to see that that these Irish folk traditions were not just this quaint little relic of past times but he was he found that many of the same concepts in the Irish in these Irish folk traditions he also found in Japanese folk traditions which he was very interested he also found in the writings of the Cambridge Platonists in the writings of medieval and and ancient Neoplatonists and a great many other things and came to see that there was in fact a coherent philosophy underlying um a vast array of human spiritual experiences across cultures yes it's interesting to to hear him sort of denigrate himself clearly he I mean obviously such an incredibly brilliant genius poet haha um there aren't enough words to describe that but then to hear in some of his essays where he sort of denigrates his his lack of of Greek and Latin so that he clearly grasping at wanting to be able to find more of those connections that he knew were there but he had the Greek or the Latin to necessarily put that forward in his stuff through just through that at least earlier on except through other people that he knew that had done those translations that were friends of his as well so and and there's here's where George comes in because she was extremely gifted in both those languages she did original translations of Greek Neoplatonists and um it was really in in the process of their marriage that he came he you know he came to be able to say things so ignorant a man is a poet and so to to note and to note his own limitations and get a little bit off his own high horse because he was a bit overinflated in his youth before you know the school of hard knocks tapped a little bit of that out of him yes so I feel like we should just dive into talking about George for a little bit because that will also enable us to then talk a little bit about the methods that she used in order to come to some of the revelations that that yeah yeah and what okay so so so George was George was a she was a um relative of his to some extent I mean this is this is the British upper class everyone's related to everyone else um you know I'm I'm a little surprised that more of them don't have like webbed fingers or something like that um but um everyone's but they they they they were acquainted they had um connections and they were both members of the Stella Matutina the the successor organization of the Golden Dawn that I mentioned earlier and she was extremely interested very active very successful worked her way up the grades and she was crazy in love with a man named William Butler Yeats now she was like half his age but that was less of an issue in those days and so she was 20 I think she was in her 20 late 20s he was pushing 50 um he had been making a steaming wreck of his romantic life for years chasing after Ma Gun who was perfectly happy to friendzone him and exploit him for anything anything she could um he also had a an interest in her daughter her daughter is salt who also had thought thought he was a very cute you know Uncle Uncle Willy basically and then finally he had one of those few those few moments of absolute common sense that he very occasionally had and realized that the proper solution was romantic entanglements was to marry the young woman who loved him now George was no beauty she had a rather plain rather stiff face but and and um you know but and of course Maud gone by the standards of the time was drop dead gorgeous but um but he again he was seized with that with that moment of common sense he proposed to him he proposed to her they got married um and while they were on their honeymoon now remember these are these are two occultists okay they're two serious occultists so of course while they're on their honeymoon she decides to do some automatic writing OK it's a very very common very common practice every every medium every student of psychism at the time knew about it it's actually something most people can do relatively well you you sit down you quiet your mind you take a pen in your hand you put the pen down on the on the on a piece of paper and you just wait to feel movements that are not intended by you and with a little practice many people can will find um writing starting to happen now I do not recommend this to anyone who doesn't know how to do a banishing ritual okay you need to do this in the presence of appropriate spiritual protections because otherwise you have no control over what's going to guide your hand and that's that's really an awkward situation not one you want to get into but of course here we're talking again of an adept is major in the in the in the Stella Martina a an exceedingly competent occult she knew what she was doing so she starts writing partly she was well aware of his romantic entanglements he went through a one of his very frequent bursts of depression after the marriage worrying that um maybe he had had had made a mistake after all should have been chasing after Mona gone no willy and so she decided to to consult the spirits and they they first um put him right about that and then started saying these odd things just a few scraps here and there suggesting a body of thought that was completely unfamiliar with to Yeats and completely unfamiliar to George also and as he commented after a very few such sessions he told the the mysterious communicators that he was ready to drop poetry and spend the rest of his life putting together this philosophy that they were passing on to him and and they said no we have come to give you metaphors for poetry now this is what he said later one thing you have to remember about William Butler Yeats is that he edited his experiences for the audience we don't I we don't have I mean nobody had the great common sense to stick a microphone uh you know in the in the parlor of the place where they were staying on that on that well fed honeymoon it would be great if they did so cause we have no idea what actually went down but this is the edited version she presented for public consumption later um but so she continued to do to do these sessions of automatic writing for quite some time and all this strange stuff came boiling up and eventually he switch she switched from automatic writing to actually doing um basically talking in her sleep and she would go to sleep and he would sit by by her bedside with pen in hand and he had to ask questions from the beginning he had to ask questions they would not just give him on prompt and stuff so he had to figure out what questions to ask and so there was this long complex process and and this continued all through for years and years thereafter um when they were on tour in America for example riding the train um all you know across the United States and they crossed it several times of course you know they there they were in the Pullman in in the the Pullman car and he'd be sitting next to her and she'd be busy talking in some slightly unfamiliar voice passing on details of the 28 phases of the moon and what each of them symbolized and how this you know this related to that and how that connected to the cycles of history and the cycles of reincarnation all kinds of other stuff and so yeah this continued for for um a good many years from their marriage was about seven years I think total and left um three well two plump volumes of surviving notes those have been published and then there were there are two more volumes of his initial drafts trying to make sense of it all those have also been published I have the full set and it is all a remarkable complex detailed occult philosophy um a great a large part of it was the function of um George George's trance experiences a lot of the rest was put there by Yates he definitely edited worked on it shaped it um filled it with his own and her um esoteric knowledge and you that's another situation you would love to have a a microphone tucked in at the dinner table in those years wondering what they talked about you know they just you know in above in above the ordinary household gossip of of you know of the 80s you know but so so what do you think about the you know the Hunchback the saint and the fool and away they go chatting you know there they are chatting over you know potatoes and gravy or something like that plunging into the deeps of occult philosophy that's it's the kind of thing that happens when you have an occultist couple that that is very that is very true you never know what kind of interesting conversation you're gonna drop into um but at the same time so for for people that are more modern listeners I mean as you described like these types of techniques I mean this is you know spiritism and and various forms of spiritualism of that time period was a bit more mainstream or at least more widely practiced and known about in these circles would you describe what George was doing more in modern parlance as mediumship or channeling or how do you conceive that that George herself was thinking about those experiences it was it was definitely it was a known form of mediumship and I will say it's not that they did any more of it it's not that they talked about they were less shame faced about it yeah makes sense yes now the thing is an enormous number of people do such things now it's just they don't you don't tell the neighbors you know you pull the curtains is like like Southern Baptists when they want to dance you know they pull the curtains to make sure nobody's watching um nowadays an enormous number of people are into such things but you don't want the neighbors to know you don't want your boss to know and then you know where and the the thing is the same thing was very much true in in in Gates's time if you didn't have to be happened to be a poet or married to a poet you know if you're willing about the Gates you can get away with just about anything um just you know don't don't you know shock and don't frighten the horses but but yeah it was it was an ordinary it was an ordinary part of if you will educated life at that time absolutely so then with this understanding of the the the way that these larger ideas were coming through the conversations and the medium ship that George was going through and the experiences of course of his own as as an occultist and a magician this ties into one of the concepts that he talks about quite frequently which is the Anima Mundi that I'm sure will get us into other topics of of people like young and others but what was Yates's understanding of the Anima Mundi okay he was he was in some ways very much a traditional occultist partly he didn't specify he was but but he was a close student of the Cambridge Platonists for those who don't know them those that was a group of um platonists at Cambridge surprisingly enough um it mostly in the 17th century they were among the last people before and then during the early phases of the Scientific Revolution to hold to uphold a more traditional more magically oriented um vision of the world they were in fact devout Christians but it was a magical Christianity it was a Christianity that coexisted with an understanding of a universe full of spiritual beings of spiritual powers which could be used in harmony with the divine plan and um these are these were very profound writings I I don't have the scholarly knowledge at this point of the Cambridge Platonists among other things to really go into detail and into Yeats's dependence on them but it's very clear he cites them constantly and um cough cough if some scholar out there is looking for a dissertation topic that would be an amazing one so that's just the way you know um but but so in the Cambridge Platonists the Anima Mundi the soul of the world the idea is that every material thing every everything we think of as a material thing is simply the body of some kind of spiritual reality everything has a body a soul a spirit or a body a spirit a soul actually in the way they usually thought of it the soul is the um the consciousness the spirit is the life force the vitality and the body is the material form and everything in the world you know the the little house plant that I see over your shoulder there has has um you know anima Spiritus corpus it has soul spirit body um everything does and so does the entire universe Mundi Mundus in Latin um we translate it as world but keep in mind they didn't really have the concept of a universe separate from the world in ancient medieval times the world the earth as we think of it the solid body at the set was simply the sort of um the pit at the middle of the you know the cosmic Peach and um so the idea was that the cosmos itself had a consciousness it had a spirit a life force it had a material body and that consciousness that that Animamundi was essential to occult thought and practice in ancient medieval Renaissance times it's largely been forgotten now outside of some some very odd corners because you know you know even even our occultists these days very often think of themselves as just these little bubbles of intellect in a vast gaping cosmic void very much the same way that um you know the materialists think of themselves but the older that was not the older tradition the older tradition was that all things are full of consciousness all in in Pythagoras phrase all things are full of gods and that world full of consciousness that world full of life was central to Yates's understanding as he has even followed because it was also something you'll find in those folklore traditions that he was so deeply into you know the that the one of the things that he found that he found most interesting that I find most interesting in his work is the extent to which these very erudite platonic traditions exactly mirror the reality discussed by farmhands in Sligo and no poets in in in writing writing plays in Japan and mediums at the top of a you know in in the garret in a garret in Soho passing on messages to serving girls all sharing the same the same sort of broad understanding of the cosmos absolutely and in one of the I think it's the first essay in the book the the one on magic uh itself he talks about the experience of was it matters that he was um well using a he did not use his name uh uses a pseudonym for him kindly but at the same time it's obviously that that was the practitioner and in that experience of uh seeing hearing and then also being a part of the experience of what was seen by the seer um it was seen as like a collective experience uh huh by all who were present and that he he speaks of a sort of mingling of the those who are present to something that is a collective and I find that very interesting because it's it's it seems to have been and this is where I'm I'm not sure if perhaps of the timing of that essay whether at that time he was already an you know an a very high level addict or whether that was something where he was coming to it from a slightly lower level than Mather's but either way that collective experience was a part of the seeing process uh huh uh huh well keep in mind that one of the weird things about our culture is this this insistence that human consciousness is locked up in these little separate bubbles with um armor plate around them to keep them from blending anybody who has I mean there anybody who has been emotionally close to anybody else knows that this is not true okay we all know that thoughts and feelings flow from mind to mind if you've ever been if you've ever been to a rock concert just as you know as the music really hits and everyone becomes in some sense a single organism caught up in the beat caught up in the power of the music the same that's what that's why people go to sports games they don't care about this you know little lump of this little leather sack being kicked around by people or something like that it's the rush it's the the intoxication of being um part of a unity that reaches beyond the individual we find that we're making love we find that in in in in fights when you're in in a state of combat when you're going at it with someone else that that dyad becomes a greater unity out of which some revolution some resolution can happen and so Yates was talking about that talking about the way that in magical working and here you know of course not that many people even among your listeners will be familiar with what it's like to be in a magical lodge that's really on its contacts but that's a very common experience where you realize that the lodge itself has a collective consciousness and things are shared you'll do a working and you'll sit down afterwards and compare the details of what you saw and sensed and it turned out that yeah everyone pretty much saw and sensed the same thing even when it was unexpected and not part of the script so we're dealing with the places where consciousness is is not rigidly bounded where it is where the the the borderlands of the individual allow a certain amount of flow back and forth and so the the the the work that Mather's was doing with one of the Enochian tablets by the way um was was enabling this this little group of people to tap into that to flow with it and to experience a shared dream and I totally agree with you that's that's also an a shared experience for anyone who plays chamber music or that's a very good point yes I'm sure theater I I don't do theater but I'm sure that for for people who are actors it's also the same kind of shared collective experience that then creates that group mind experience of flow that is similar to magic I mean it's just another form of magic anyway so same thing different form but that so speaking of that when it comes to these types of scrying techniques like there's there's that example in the the Magic Um essay itself and there's also Yates's experiences of you know doing various forms of scrying yet it also does seem at least from my understanding that he was experimenting with other forms of this type of tapping into these things that are from outside of the Golden Dawn like classical structure would you say and is that things that he was drawing on specifically from like that Irish lore of what you were saying or from other places most of what he seems to be working from he got by way of spiritualism because you know if when when you're in if you're into psychical research as he was that was a lot of what was going on in those days there were a lot of mediums a lot of people using different modes of communicating with the unseen and um that was a very in the time that was a very rich um set of resources and you'll see that in the Golden Dawn papers if you get beyond the stuff that regardi put in his book The Golden Dawn there are actually um some papers that have been collected elsewhere that give instructions for using a dowsing pendulum basically and actually instructions for building a special table for classic Victorian table tipping so you know the the you you have the if you know there's this tendency to think of the the sort of austere magic of the Golden Dawn and then these you know the this raffish of you know working class spiritualist but there was no such barrier it was all part of one um upsurge of the magical world view in an age that had convinced itself that um it could tell the universe what was what was what it was allowed to do and um people were the a lot of people in the Golden Dawn were involved in a lot of different aspects of this stuff so yeah well we do love to have those separations between the the high and the low especially I think particularly when they don't actually exist but they exactly exactly they did yes we have we have to we have to drag out the barbed wire and dig you know dig the fence and try to pretend that we're not down there with the with the lowlifes you know hanging hanging out with with spirits or something um yeah and so when it comes to that sort of well I I'm I'm I'm debating when to bring in the his entire project of of attempting to sort of create something out of that lovely castle that he found in Ireland ah yes I OK yeah yes perhaps we will go there next cause then I feel like we can go out of there into sort of creativity and what he was trying to create but but what was that castle and and why was that important for a good chunk of years of Yates's life he was hanging out with a friend and I forget but I forget which Irish like and there was a half ruined castle in the middle on an island of middle age it wasn't a medieval castle some some rich person two generations before I think it was had put this thing up and it was still perfectly viable but nobody was living in it was kind of a white elephant um and he had this he had been kind of mulling over these ideas for something that he could do um combining his passions for occultism for theater and the arts and for Irish culture and the prospect of Irish independence and that's where it struck him he had this idea that he would create an Irish esoteric order an Irish mystery school that would rent that would lease this castle and use it as a base for um for their operations to perform rituals to have instructional work there and so on and this was before the Golden Dawn blue sky high so he went immediately to his other for his Golden Dawn friends including Mathers and said I have this wonderful idea will you help me and they piled into it they piled into it big time and a a very large body of written material came out of this which is still by the way under lock and key I you can get it if you know where to dig but I mean at this point everything practically up to including George's laundry list has been published has there been a critical edition of the um Castle of heroes The Castle of heroes is what they called it for for various reasons there's no there was a doctoral dissertation an obscure doctoral dissertation in 1977 from a university through university in Florida by and it's a good edition by a doctoral candidate there and um if you happen to be able to dig through all the necessary sources you can still order a copy but nobody talks about it nobody wants to even though it includes um initiation rituals written by Yates full of poetry no no no we don't talk about such things you know I'm not in front of the servants or something like that um and I I we'll see what happens there's still some there there's apparently some questions as to access to it even though Yates's stuff has dropped out of copyright but I would like to see it back very much in circulation at this point and um we'll see what I can manage but so that was the Castle of heroes the thing that set it apart the thing that sets it apart from a lot of the esoteric stuff at that time is precisely that it dealt with the interface between esotericism and the creative arts the Castle Heroes material does not include a lot of instructions for say casting spells or making talismans or summoning spirits it includes a lot of material on initiation rituals it includes a lot of material on the Irish gods it includes a lot of material on scrying and various other ways of tapping into visionary experience and Yeats's idea seemed to have been that this the the goal was to use this as a catalyst to take the Irish cultural revival then underway pour rocket fuel into the gas tank and see it take off to so great an extent that um the the the independence of Ireland at that point would become simply a federal plea that there would be no way for anybody effectively to stand against it because Ireland would have become such an overwhelming cultural presence now of course that's to some extent that's the way it happened um there is a fine little a fine book by watch me lose the lose the author's name now but the title is Easter 1916 The Imagination of an Insurrection William Irwin Thompson and Thompson writes about basically how the Irish creative movement the the extraordinary resurgence of the arts and theater and literature in Ireland in the late 19th and early 20th century basically dreamed an independent Ireland into being of course there was a certain amount of lead was involved in the process but that's you know when you're getting when when you've created something on the inner planes and you're bringing it into manifestation on the material plane there are sometimes inconveniences like that but but that's that's basically what it was trying to do and something that I think some to a very real extent he succeeded in doing but the Castle of heroes was was part of that process unfortunately for Yates the um Golden Dawn while he was about you know maybe halfway through the process of developing all this stuff and so on the Golden Dawn blew sky high and Yates ended up on one side in the Mattherses um who were major figures in the process ended up on the other side and so the whole process ground to a halt he remained to the end of his life wishful that it had it had been he'd been able to make it happen but oh well and so those rituals sit gathering dust in the Irish National Library and you know as far as I know the castle is still there although it's in much worse shape than it was in Yates's time maybe someday somebody could um actually do something about it but I'm not holding my breath in the meantime I'd like to get those papers into circulation yeah that is that is really I I knew that it was out of circulation I didn't realize that there was um kind of issues surrounding why it was out of circulation but hopefully well I haven't seen anybody talking about it yeah it's just the conspiracy of silence that surrounds occultism it it's really embarrassing I mean when a while back they um the um I think I forget which major Irish museum it was or library did a Yeats a huge Yeats exhibit and they had a lot of his magical stuff on display they had some things that I found very striking and that they obviously didn't understand um well there was for example there was this this pentacle with um what looked like runes on it they weren't actually runes they were letters in the Druidic alphabet invented by Iolo Morganwg Edward Williams who was a strange Welshman uh from the late late 18th earliest 19th centuries and if you knew the if you knew the the Quran alphabet which I did um which I do you read it and it's it's um the four the around the outside of the names of the four cities of the two of the day and then Air Ireland in the middle but they had it listed as this runic thing so it's very clearly they're not talking to occultists they're not talking to people who know the Celtic themed occultism at the time and um they're not generally you know yes we're going to talk about the Golden Dawn a little because it's become academically fashionable to make the occasional nod in that direction but dusting off the Castle of heroes materials no no no no no we don't want that um somebody might have the have the great good sense to dust it off and actually put it in a process and then where would we be um whether you are on the conservative Roman Catholic end of Irish politics or whether you are on the um the Liberal um internationalist rationalist materialist end of Irish politics do you really want a bunch of wild Irish bards and poets and wizards surging up out of you know out of out of some some castle in a lake maybe some farcical aquatic ceremonies involved in fact um haha it is set setting setting all of your nice rational plans into a complete confusion I personally think I personally think it would be a very good idea yeah I think it'd be a great idea um the world needs a little more care I mean generally speaking we live in a world full of um sane rational people sanely and rationally pursuing idiotic policies is that policies that can only lead to destruction and suffering so um you know maybe there's a point to getting a lot of a lot of wild and half mad um Irish mystics um you know doing world class poetry invoking ancient Irish gods it's better than the current situation no question there and it would it would so I think it is it makes people uncomfortable because if you have put so much respect and hero worship in some ways rightfully so then that means that it becomes very difficult to uh just explain away an entire section of that person's life unless you forget it existed all together yeah you can pretend that it didn't exist and that um that lasted that that lasted for a while really Virginia Moore um who wrote a book called The Unicorn Gates of search for reality um blew the um blew that door open back in what was it the 1960s I don't remember when when the unicorn came out but until that time it was astonishing to watch people just desperately trying to cover up every just ignore and turn their backs on every bit of Yates's occult involvements um W H Auden was and and people in his school were very heavily involved in that but you know it's if you ever seen a cat trying to cover up a mess on a linoleum floor it looked rather like that but then that became that that became impossible and you know more and of course Kathleen Reynolds who did extraordinary service in making it impossible to ignore that side of his work and now of course it's become largely because other dissertation topics are becoming scarce um it's become fashionable to to to you know except to include the Golden Dawn and include a wink and a nod and even even someone as brilliant as Yates could have these bizarre follies and uh you know you know how it goes and but they they're trying to domesticate it they're trying to keep it I I recall an extended discussion of a book length discussion of a vision which treated the whole thing as George trying to come up with some kind of some kind of entertaining line of of stuff to keep Yates interested in her wow how how amazingly insulting to her as well well then there's that backwards way of there's there's that now the thing is it's entirely possible that that that was that that was a thread in it but of course it was part of it but to consider the entire thing that is in the light of a tawdry soap opera but that's what you have to do if you don't want to deal with the fact that human beings do in fact um we are in a you know in to use a term a phrase that I think Gates would appreciate we are amphibians we live in two worlds at once we live in the ordinary mundane prosaic world that we've constructed in our imagination to pretend is real and then we also live in a much wider world a world where you know strange voices um you know pass on philosophies of of history and predictions by the way that so far have been remarkably accurate there's there's a thread I I mentioned before we started recording that uh when I was reading some of these writings from from Yates and and thinking more about his connection to the occult um which of course yes I I had been largely ignorant of because it's not talked about I think enough enough even in the wider occult community so far is that it immediately brings to mind um stories about Tolkien's connection to his understanding of sort of creativity and links to what I call the other world um and his on fairy stories and things and then we can get into young from there but um I just find it interesting they're not of course they don't overlap precisely in timing but they're close they're close with Tolkien it was the idea of trying to come up with a very you know purely like British mythology or trying to reach back and create that and for Yeats it feel it you know he was obviously going back into the that the Irish cause and the Irish stories and and mytho poetic kind of strands that he was pulling on but they're both kind of interestingly going in very similar directions what how do you see them connected or being different in their understanding of that I am fairly sure that Tolkien had some episodes in his youthful life that he did not talk about later yes he was far too clear on theosophical terminology I don't think he ever became a theosophist but I think he read some things and I think he went out he he may have met talked to some people this kind of thing um I don't know clearly it was not something that especially in later life um you know as a very devout very traditional Catholic he did not want to think about um I'm sure he confessed all of that period of his life as as the blackest of dreadful sins to his confessor and did a great deal of penance for it but it shows I think of Gandalf facing the Balrog in Moria I am a servant of the secret fire wielder of the flame of Anor you cannot pass what is the secret fire any theosophist can tell you okay you look at his his story of numenor okay the idea that Numenor Atlantis Atalante in uh in in um Cinderella no quenia of course uh Atalante in quenia that it went under as a result as a because the um the people basically sold out to the sorceress powers of evil and took up the practice of evil magic that's not in Plato it's not in um Ignatius Donnelly it's not in any of the Atlantic of the Atlantic literature except Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and it's all over Tolkien it's all over Tolkien he he took the Blavatsky version of of Atlantis Hookland and sinker made it into Numenor and built a you know some some really beautiful beautiful fiction about it um and there's more there's much more I think it's very clear specifically that he had a a considerable exposure to um Wellavaski and Theosophy sometime is in his youth and that that became later um defanged and Christianized became part an important part of his legendarium and that yeah it's something he did not talk about later um that generally speaking the inklings were had had more connections than I think anybody wants to talk about we all know about about Charles Williams and it's very fun to listen to watch his Anglican William's Anglican friends friends try to pretend that he was not um hierophant of the of um Arthur Reade's version of the Golden Dawn for two terms a serious you I mean you don't get that to that level for you know just for dabbling he was a serious practitioner he knew his way around occultism um CS Lewis uh another person who tended to be very um sparing with the truth in his in his biographical stuff everybody I know who practices magic who has read that marvelous scene in That Hideous Strength where um Ransome and Merlin call down the planetary um the the planetary um Oya says has said so it's it's literally the best the best and most accurate description of a planetary evacuation in print in the English language I will have to fix that that's oh generally the the the the Yates oh Yates there we go um Lewis's planetary trilogy the first one is a pleasant fairy tale the second one gets deeper the third one is great and very clear the third one is the one that's packed with references to material that some of it some of it very likely came by way of Williams some of it shows knowledge of stuff that um Dion Fortune was doing at the same time again Lewis was I mean there's a reason why all Lewis's friends referred to his quasi autobiography surprised by joy as suppressed by Jack yeah well Jack was you know if you were born if you were born and named Clive Staples Lewis you'd call yourself Jack too that's what he did but um but yeah everyone's saying hold up this is this is this is a work of fiction described disguised as a memoir um so there may have been a much more direct connection because our theosophy was also instrumental in Yeats's um the development of Yeats's philosophy and Tolkien also draw very heavily drew very heavily on Coleridge and on a range of German idealist philosophers who were themselves influenced by traditions closely akin to the uh Cambridge Platonists so you have that also as a source of connection there so I don't think it's a mistake at all to see them as doing doing different things it's simply that um Tolkien was doing it within the mature Tolkien was doing this within the framework of a very deeply thought through Catholic Christian worldview where Yates in his mature years was doing doing his work in terms of a very carefully thought through very distinctly unchristian worldview yes and in that sense though it's kind of a very similar imaginal realm that they are both drawing from just they're drawing they're drawing from the imaginal world yeah with different framing around it and potentially different ways of accessing it mm hmm although have you ever read um one of one of the the novel one of the many novels that Tolkien never finished The Lost Road that I have not read I have read a lot of Tolkien's works but that I have not yeah the The Lost Road is beautiful stuff it's it's his it's his new novel and it has a lot of stuff about what he's talking about reincarnation he's talking about past life memories and things like this it's spooky yeah yeah yeah I think that so we have like essentially a number of different writers at that that same time and all of these different romantic poets and you know talking is technically later but still within the same but but he was primarily influenced by that early that earlier current yes and each of them were sort of pulling on these threads of connection to these other worlds for poetic expression or for you know in in Yeats's opinion the also what could eventually lead to a revival and you know Irish independence there's a lot of political threads and and other threads that can come through with that outside of just the pure creative act but with that there was there's also the idea that that Yates had of the importance of the the the mask and the anti self for an artist in their creative process can you perhaps talk a little bit about what those concepts are and how that that LED into his creativity that that's perhaps the most intriguing of Yeats'ideas his idea is that you can only create great art by trying to reach toward something that is your absolute opposite um yes himself he that you know if self knowledge is a basic guide to is a basic necessity for occult practice he achieved a fair amount of it um he knew that he was basically a fretful nervous dweeb and he was I mean let's let's be honest here um he was a great poet but as a person he was you know he was very nervous and wired and geeky and what he needed to be as a poet was the absolute opposite of that this you know this this marble figure who you know you could point a gun at him and he wouldn't even blink that's as he as he says in um one of the essays in book in fact you know trying to achieve that that absolute clarity which was of all things the most difficult for him to achieve and when he would embrace that then the art flowed then he got beyond beyond the precious twee ness of of his early art and produced these astounding poetic works of his mature years his view was that this is actually true of everybody that you cannot create certainly in the fields where where he was familiar with whether it's drama whether it's poetry whether it's literature whether it's painting I'm not sure what he would have said about music but I suspect there's some of that there too you've got to not merely go beyond yourself but embrace that which is furthest from yourself to be able to un to open up your own creative creative vision and the term he used for that that anti self that that image of the furthest possible thing from you is the mask and so the will which is the the ordinary personality and the mask become the two primary or two of the four primary factors in the vision of a vision and how they as they you know move exact stay exactly opposite the whole time through the cycle of the 28 phases that sets out 28 different personality types yes absolutely we haven't even really touched on what those 28 personality perhaps give us a slight introduction to that because otherwise um it we've we've now mentioned it several times so okay Yates like every occultist in his time Yates took reincarnations and a reflective life and each incarnation fills falls into one of these 28 phases which are stages in the process by which the soul moves from complete innocence and emptiness to embrace its its own opposite to become what it is capable of being and then to take that and unfold it and gradually let go of it let it stream out of the world until you've achieved that emptiness again so you be so you begin in the first quarter of the the first seven phases are phases of um basically just being in the world getting used to being a social being a um a natural being a living being um you then have to go through the crisis of letting go of the collective to to begin to pursue an individual vision and having done that you come closer and closer to the second quarter to actually embracing that vision and then having embraced it you then in the third quarter have to understand it and express it the third quarters where you get some poets and and creative people in the second quarter most of them in the third quarter and then you need to let go of it you need to stop identifying with it and let it flow out and deal with the world not as you dream of it being but as it is and that takes you through the fourth quarter back to you know back to the start to the starting point it's not a linear kind of thing you you often see these days a lot of people treat reincarnation as a straight line you know you start here and you young souls and old souls and older souls and eventually you reach godhood or something like that um Yates did have the idea that there was a way off the wheel but you have to go through it a number of times first and there's that very much a matter of what you what you achieve in one phase is what you have to let go of in the next phase what you have to overcome um and so each the he he used the symbolic device of the 28 phases of the moon he said repeatedly and I'm going to say this now although everyone's gonna ignore this has nothing to do with where the moon is in your natal chart there's been a whole literature on a vision which tries to take it as us a branch of Natal astrology and if you do that you get gibberish I've seen this over and over again but people will try even though again Yates said don't do this your phase is one thing your horoscope is another and the two interact Yates was among other things Yates and George both were expert astrologers and the the notes to a vision are routinely illustrated with little sketch horoscopes showing certain planetary positions that somehow express this or the other point um I'm I'm looking forward to getting very deeply into that later as I work further into um a current project which is working out a commentary on the um on the material so the the commentary that would be fascinating and I'll be looking forward the I think that the the issue with that that letting go is also uh illustrative in thinking about well uh simply speaking as as a musician and both of us as occultists that being able to let go of the the vision being able to have enough force of will to be able to bring something through this idea of leaning into something which is other in and of itself can kind of be a protective mechanism to stop the overflow of the the egotism that can otherwise take over but then when you do have that kind of like access to things that work and things that are very fascinating and you know they are they are quite sexy and and lovely to be a part of and and feel the if you don't have that ability to let it go or if you don't have an understanding that you're going to have to let it go then you can get to some very serious levels of egotism that has very bad effects and I know that there is a there is a story that involves Yates with uh Curley and I would love to be hahaha I appreciate this especially because William Butler Yates was nobody's example of buff robust manhood okay I would have thought of either yes um Yates kicked Alistair Crowley down a flight of stairs during the during the um civil war in the Golden Dawn Yates was on one side Mathers was on the other Mathers did not have a lot of supporters in England at this time one of the few he had was Alice or Crowley and in fact Crowley was one of the reasons why the the blow up finally the he wasn't the cause but he was the spark that set it off everybody in London looked at Alice or Crowley and said you do not get the um the Adeptus minor degree you are not suited for it you will become a raging egomaniac if you get that um and so he so Crowley went to Mater's in um Paris and sweet talked him in Mater's gave him the Adeptus minor whereupon Crowley immediately became a raging egomaniac um seriously the the Golden Dawn rituals need to be handled carefully um and especially the the powerful solar symbolism I mean if you ever met a really out of control Leo that's what you get when you have that solar influence and it's been the curse of the Golden Dawn ever since because a lot of people got the Adeptus minor without having the necessary done the necessary spiritual work without achieving the necessary self knowledge and humility and they became raging jerks and it's very hard for an organization to hold together if many you know a large number of its leading members are outrageous jerks that's the history of the Golden Dawn tradition from 18 you know 1887 to the present um one of those little things Mather's sent Crowley to Blyth Road where the Golden Dawn had its offices at that time to take possession of the premises away from the and well Yates was waiting for him and there was an altercation and um Yates kicked Crowley down a flight of stairs and Crowley crept away and um made made up for it by badmouthing Gates in and most of the other members of the Golden Dawn in his novel Moonchild you know that's simply the that it was a it's a charming little I mean it was probably a pretty grubby event to go through at the time but it's certainly it has a lot of people laughing when your Crowley's doing the wickedest man in the world routine and he could get his clock cleaned by weedy little Willie Yates but interesting cause I I do think of that though from the perspective of um I am I will tell you right now and anyone who listens to the show I don't mind admitting it I am not a a Crowley scholar by any means I would say that of of our of our illustrious forebears he is one of the figures I I do not know as much about as I should but it does seem to me that there are a number of aspects and elements to this story of what happened to him that seemed to be warnings about the dangers of when this type of power is not handled responsibly and perhaps you know when there are not some of those things that um Yates was speaking about from that perspective on the anti mask and and those those phases is not taken seriously because it it can lead to some dark territory which I think happens also in the arts we we see that all the time with people absolutely they're given and we can we can use just psychological terminology for it and other social and cultural forms but it's it's also beyond that yeah um Yates talk in in a vision Yates talks about people being in phase and out of phase and in particular you're in phase if you recognize that the mask is not you and but you pursue it in a creative fashion if you identify with the mask you are out of phase and you are probably going to have a miserable life and cause a lot of misery to other people too Crowley I think Crowley is a great example he had this vast vision of himself as almost everything that he was not as a mystic as a saint as a sage you know not as a you know dumpy little brewers son with with an interest in occultism and if he had been able to to maintain that balance and see the saint and the sage and the heroic figure silhouetted against the sky as something that he could aspire to and not achieve and something he could express in his own in own poetry his own writing I think he might have been able to achieve much more as it was you know he made a smoking crater of his life and ended up in a small town nursing home with an estate worth 14 shillings and a name that he had made a laughing stock on three continents it took Grady Mcmurtry a far better magician than than Crowley ever was to resurrect his um his legacy and make him some somebody that would appeal at least to hippies in the 60s and you turn the Oto into a significant presence here after yeah um yeah so well then so with that with that being said when you think about the the works that you have put forward in this book of Yeats is what do you see obviously outside of just better understanding our history and understanding another side to someone who's such a great artist and you know contributor to our modern culture what do you think that its um its benefits or its lessons are going to be for occult practitioners who go to it and and read it okay first of all um nothing in this book is a manual of practice we have enough of those honestly at this point if you were to start practicing magic at the age of six and do it full time until you died at 102 you would not be able to work your way through more than a small part of the practical techniques that are currently available to anybody who's interested in magic go down to your you know go down to any any well stocked bookstore and you've got literally the secrets of the ages causing the shelves to groan beneath their weight we've got the practice this is the philosophy this is talking about how you understand magic as a branch of the creative arts how you understand magic as an ingredient in a way of life and in the case of a vision and I I want to get to some specific points about that because the version of the vision in this book is not the one you'll usually find a way of understanding occultism as as it fits into the cycle of lives and the rise and fall of civilizations and the basic structure of the cosmos that we encounter on on on on an everyday basis but also in our dreams and in the inner world Yates has enormous amount to say about how to make sense of the world as a mage as a student of occultism and how to how to make use of those perspectives in in understand both as a way of understanding as a way of living you know in his case a much more successful life than grow labor manager I know that's shooting fish in a barrel but still no um well then we do we do need to talk about the particularly as you mentioned this is what you have included in that book is a a version that is based on the earlier mm hmm it is specifically it's a yeah it was originally published privately for subscribers only in 1925 with a dedication to Moina Mathers under her Golden Dawn title um copies got to some interesting places I recently did a did an article which will be out I think later this year on Carl Jung's um Occult Library which was very substantial one of the things he had in it was a copy of Yeats's 1925 edition of a vision yeah but there's a lot of material in the 1925 version that was edited out before the 1937 version a lot of material that's very specifically occult in nature and there's an important reason for that um one of the things very people very few people realize is the extent to which the coming of the Great Depression was a catastrophe for the occult community at that time before then you had a you had a whole class of people who lived on their investments and could your respectable people didn't have to work for a living and especially you had a whole class of women who were be who were pretty much excluded from the professions but who uh who had enough to who had were comfortably set with their investments they'd inherited and who could provide plenty of funding and volunteer labor and all these other things to occult bodies the the Theosophical Society many other occult organizations of the time ran on that basis that was their support and then the Great Crash happened and most of those investments became worthless and that's why in the transition between the 1920s and the 1930s a huge number of occult organizations either folded completely or simply lost most of their membership theosophy turned for example from a huge international network with a massive cultural presence to a little fringe group which is basically what still is today and so when Yates went to revise a vision he revised it alright he completely rewrote it to make it a much more literary work and as a literary work the 1937 edition is much better as literary work it's it's it's more crisply written it has these these lovely elegant um you know essays leading into it it has the hilarious I Yates never wrote comedy and except for this one outfit and it is a pity when he cut loose in you know stories of Michael Roberts and his friends it's just this amazing slapstick deadpan comedy of a kind it's even you don't have to know anything about what's going on to realize this is hilarious and if Yates had caught on to that early in his career and started filling you know um filling the the small magazines with funny stories a he would have become a multi millionaire and C and b I think um a lot of stuff shirts would have had a fair amount of air let out of their uh excessive inflation but anyway he has this hilarious that hilarious section and then we're on into a very cleaned up version of a vision and that was published for the general for the general public the older version has a lot of things that were dropped out it's not as well written it's not as well organized it doesn't have the slapstick comedy um but occultists who study it will catch on to a lot of possibilities of course this isn't you know a pre 1960s occult text so it does not give up what it has to say to a single reading or even a double reading it requires repeated readings and a great deal of meditation and contemplation but it has an enormous amount to teach especially if you're interested in in the relationship between magic and history between magic and personality between magic and the workings of magical groups it's cool stuff so with the civilization component he does talk about and and break different civilizations into various forms and could you maybe tell us a little bit about that where we are on that spectrum where we are on that spectrum basically a civilization follows the same arc as as a human soul going through its incarnation and um he he has our civilization beginning its arc well there's a two fold pattern because there's this sort of broad over arc that takes 2,000 years but the arc that he's mostly interested is about 1,000 years it is in fact the same one that Oswald Spengler text talks about in the decline of the west where you have western civilization emerging around vaguely around the year 1000 you have the birth of the birth of something that's distinct from the classical world that's distinct from the the Muslim world which gave which you know provided its sudamorphosis to so much of the west and it arises and it goes through the same 28 phases and he he takes it step by step talking about the arts talking about culture talking about how this expresses itself and he himself was writing right around the beginning of the 23rd phase so we're in the fourth quarter we have finished expressing the genius the the the dream the vision of the the guided the western world and now it's a matter of coming back to reality but this is not an easy process and so if you you if you go through the stages you find that um sometime in the latter part of the of the 20th century sometime I I put it around 1980 you have the arrival of the of the 26th phase which he called the Hunchback the phase in which um unless it's in phase which is very difficult for any society to do it's going to pursue the unnatural it's going to pursue the um the anomie it's going to commit crimes just because it can to prove that it hasn't lost it completely and I think we can all see that in the in our cult in our culture during that time we are now in the process of transiting from the Hunchback to the Saint for the 26th and 27th phase and so we're seeing all of a sudden a a flood of people going back to the churches we're seeing a revival of traditional religion um it's going to turn into a great deal of hypocrisy and a great deal of you know the what the kind of rigid dogmatism we've all Learned to call fundamentalism because again it's very hard for a civilization to stay in phase but a lot of people will manage to pull themselves in phase and achieve that contact with the with the supernatural the phase after that is the fool where basically any capacity for organization breaks down and you have the simple if if you're lucky you have the kind of um the the kind of folly that is that that leads to um the developmentally disabled back in ancient times being called the children of god because they just happen to do the right they're protected by Providence they just sort of wander and everyone takes care of them if you don't you know when you're not lucky you have a kind of blind malignancy that a sort of dim animal cunning motivating general nastiness and I'm sure we can we can all see the first traces of that in our current society then you get to the first phase which is the new moon which is just a blank and out of that void comes something new the first stirrings of something new so we so if he ate his right and so far if you look at each phase after his time Bing Bing Bing it's fairly easy to trace the the cultural um events of the time that he wasn't around to um to witness but that he predicted accurately and so we're heading to that point where everything just kind of goes dark and silent for a while and then something new starts up again so yeah so essentially there are these these greater phases of civilizations that are also then being mirrored within the the ways in which personalities and people through reincarnation are also kind of going through these phases then they are not necessarily linked but they have similarities or connection points well it's it's more that people um will depending on what phase you are you will be more or less in harmony with your times I see yes okay so there will be there people who are in who are themselves in the fourth quarter of the cycle will more or less fit fairly well at this time and people who are in the second phase are gonna be completely out of it or the second quarter I should say because they're they're in the opposite thing they're reaching toward a vision where our society is letting go of the last the last track the last traces of theirs so they're going to be constantly baffled and and buffeted by a society that's completely out of out of whack and then the first and the first and third quarters are just off at right angles to the whole thing and and you know they have to make their own way yes and then there's also the he also set up a dichotomy between I don't know if dichotomy is exactly the right word but a difference between primary and antithetical and when when those kind of uh switch back and forth show us mm hmm mm hmm yeah the the primary the the primary consciousness focuses on external reality antithetical consciousness focuses on the internal vision the creative dream okay and so every society starts out in the primary it starts out having to deal with material reality and then it begins to create a vision of the world that is unique to it that is that is internal to it and it gradually builds that and you see that you know emerging in the Renaissance for example you see the western the western imaginary the western vision really taking flight at that point and then you reach the point then it builds and builds through the third quarter you reach the Victorian era and guess what that has to break down and it breaks down usually in societies being what they are in a fairly clumsy and difficult way and we have the you know the various Victorian the abuses of the arts and and then the turning away from the the old artistic vision the the mess of modern art and things like that and which you know those of us who are in other quarters may find it deplorable but it's a necessary symptom of the time and then the gradually the the the guttering out of the creative impulse of the of the collective creative impulse the the sinking back on simple material reality the disintegration of intellect the point where the collective conversation no longer makes any sense at all it's just a matter of mumbling in the void you could turn on your television if you have any doubt of that where we are and and then that that all falls to silence and confusion and you have you have the period from which you know because what at that Victorian point was where we fell back into we slid back into the primary and there you see the rise of experimental science as dominant force again the focus on nature rather on what's outside rather than what's inside this sounds rather similar to a form of astrology essentially that we're talking about all these different cycles and the ways in which the different uh ellipticals and and phases of various things are are coming in and out of either good aspects or not so good aspects um how this is a rather vague question but how would you relate like the ideas of mundane astrology which I am staring at your book on the astrology and what was clearly coming through to Yates in what he describes in a vision okay the classic mundane astrology is much more fine grained and it's exactly the same situation as between natal astrology and the theory of personality in Yates's vision you have your phase and then you have your horoscope and Yates differentiates between the two of them they follow similar laws but they're not the same thing um I am reminded in a way of some of the things that um Dion Fortune wrote in The Cosmic Doctrine about there being an astrology a sort of a vaster astrology of cycles that are far beyond what we can understand and that um that determine whole swaths of the evolutionary process and then you have the the order the the astrology that's within the solar system that simply determines um you know your the details of your this given incarnation in the same way Yates is dealing in his historical cycles with um you know with these great arcs of civilization whereas mundane astrology classic mundane astrology by and large is dealing with okay what's going to happen to the government for the next three six or 12 months and so it's there's a difference there there is a fundamental similarity not surprising again Yates and George were both expert astrologers they were really first rate so was young by the way one of the things I found I mentioned the the the searching through Young's occult library um he had the kind of library that professional astrologers had at that time it was not just you know everyone says dabble we love to talk about dabbling no he was he had an enormous amount of astrological knowledge and by all accounts um including accounts by people who worked with him at the time he used it constantly in his in his um clinical work I suspect one of the reasons that union most unions don't get the kind of results he does he did is that they don't study the horoscopes of their patients that that that makes a lot of sense although we will just not speak of the Red Book the Red Book doesn't exist what haha well why do you think they kept the red Book locked away for so long can't have that getting out good heavens no no no no it's interesting because with this idea of the the the spiraling cones and this and interpenetrating like sort of cycles I'm reminded of the the fact that I think earlier on before some of this time period Yates was also experimenting with music and sort of chanting his poetry and that idea of I'm not sure if this um is known like what his thoughts were or if that kind of plays in somehow to these ideas of ideas of like music of the spheres or if there's any kind of coalescence between that idea of the sacredness of poetry and music interlinking with this idea of the the phases and these these cycles clearly fascinated with with using music somehow as a form of at least poetic chanting you've read his essay chanting to the sultry yes yeah and um that that's that's fascinating I don't recall reading anything that shows about the discuss the esoteric dimension but the person who was playing the this chromatic this this very chromatic sultry was I think divided in quarter steps um while he was chanting with was Ann Horniman who was an adept in the Golden Dawn so it was a you know it if there was something occult going on the right people were involved but it would make sense considering they were all doing they were all involved in the same they were all doing all that stuff yeah exactly and they were all involved in the theater the number of Golden Donnies who were involved in the London theater scene or the Dublin theater scene it's you know it's it was it was your typical counter culture crowd of the day okay a lot of theater types a lot of you know um say you poets poets good heavens yeah and yeah um but I I don't know I don't have the I don't have the background in music theory at this point or in music generally to to really be able to follow that one up but it's definitely something that some again dissertation topic so hopefully somebody somebody with an academic dreams is listening to us um but yeah there's there was a lot of explore there has been a lot of exploration of that of course all all along um in a very different context actually research for one of my novels um I looked into the origins of opera and found out the extent to which that was shaped by Renaissance ideas of the confluence of speech and music you know yes that that that ended up involved in a story about a shoggoth was just one of those things you know well so going back to the idea of civilizations and and where we fall right now when it comes to the patterns just so that because we we mentioned that um the the two different forms when it comes to that where are we falling right now because we are as you mentioned the end of the The Hunchback was that the end of the Hunchback the beginning of the Saint and so when it comes to the the different types of like primary versus antithetical where do we fall on that right now we're very primary we're moving primary and moving moving further into the primary where you can see the the dreams and visions and creative influence the last traces of the creative impetus of western civilization trickling away around us the repetition of old forms increasingly stripped of meaning the increasing crudeness of our art forms the increasing um emptiness of our art forms fading out into um well we'll we'll see what some of what remains put into the service of religion I think we'll probably see the last the the last dim echoes of really creative religious music in the next little while over the next 20 years or so and then that will finish guttering out and the last of it what will remain is a going through the motions or a repetition of old forms very much I mean think of the way classical music has changed from the time of Beethoven to the time of today where in Beethoven's time um it was a common place for for composers of whom there were of course quite a few to simply sell tickets to have them sit down and extemporaneously plays things Beethoven used to make a lot of money that way that's how he paid his bar tab um and can you imagine a modern composer getting anyone to show to one of those things to such a thing um partly you know if I may if I may express some of my my prejudice is here we have not yet got to the we have not yet grasped the point that these that it doesn't matter what kind of abstract scheme you come up with the structure of your music if it's not following tonality or something similar some something similar to that it's not gonna make sense to anybody else and they're not gonna want to listen to it that's just the way it is um you know sorry you know sorry Hindemith haha hate to break it to you but that's just the way things are we are in we are in a complex situation right now as the creative impulse trickles away but we can still make use of forms established in the past I think of like Chinese civilization where people or Egyptian civilization where people took the artistic creations of millennia back and it became art became a matter not of creation but of performance you know when you pick up your violin and you play something by Paganini okay you're not you're you're engaged in an act of creation or recreation um but it's not the same thing that Paganini himself was engaged in okay and that's that going from the era of creation to the era of performance is something that happens in any mature civilization and it's the way that anything survives from the creative era so it's a it's an incredibly important thing to do to take those old forms to keep them alive through the period of the new moon and so they can become a structure they can become a source of of guidance instruction and inspiration eventually a long time from now and something for the future to rebel against because every creative movement must rebel against what came before it so you've got to give them something let's give them some something worth rebelling against I I couldn't agree more and I I think of like the idea my my husband and I sometimes talk about being the library of Alexandria that it's not it's not a physical place but that if if each person kind of thinks of holding on to some of the things that they think are worth holding on to and then passing that on then you are doing that little mini work of a little library of Alexandria for the future cause you never know which exact copy could be the one that survives and not to be super dramatic but it is it's like each one being a little light you know what I mean as a place it's a grandiose place and the the problem with the grandiose place is sooner or later somebody shows up with a torch yeah it is a lot easier and so if it's scattered all over I mean that that was that was the great that's the great secret of monasteries um whether in the west or in India or in China and Japan as they go through Dark Ages monasteries are are the places that anchor the survival of culture because they're scattered they're typically in area places that nobody else wants they're out of the way and so you have a plate you you know you have some little mountain monastery somewhere that keeps a little stock of manuscripts that they copy or in China and Japan of course during their last set of Dark Ages they all they had woodblock printing which made preservation manuscripts much easier and you know so you have these things you have some traditions the reason we have the Tale of Genji the greatest work of classical Japanese literature is because a couple of Buddhist monasteries hung on to copies of it and so in the once the once the the Sengoku the dark the dark the Japanese Dark Ages started to lift um the some monks some monks said oh by the way we have this really interesting novel and people were going wow and you know that to these days to this day high school students in Japan get to work through thousand year old Japanese picking their way through the tales again it's worth it's worth reading in the same way you know we had many many things preserved in European monasteries we had many things preserved in Byzantine monasteries and so on having that sort of scattered presence is essential and yeah individuals can do that absolutely so outside of you know that that work which is extremely important I mean there's probably a lot of people who are listening who are practitioners of various forms of magic and divination and what do you think are some of the um if we were to take inspiration as you said this this these are really like the the philosophical and sort of world view thoughts and channelings from Yates what types of practices or what do you think that would be good ways for people to think about applying this then like what what would you like people to take out of this and then add more to their practices or have it inflected what I'd like them to do is to take these take these these instructions these visions these these ideas about what magic is and what it can be and simply explore because Yates Yates is not again he's not presenting practices he's not even presenting a specific philosophy he's presenting a set of of viewpoints in the case of a vision there are 28 different viewpoints and they all conflict with each other there's a real tendency among among occultists these days and it's not their fault it's because you know our education system is as poor as it is and because our our our our our sort of grasp of of even basic the basics of philosophy has trickled away as western civilization does as we move through that fourth quarter um getting that grounding in okay how do we make the how do we make the world make sense how do we make our practices make sense how do we make our lives make sense Gates is grappling with that he's offering ways to do it he's offering ways to think about the relationship of the individual to the unseen and he's not providing a doctrine he's not providing much less a dogma he's not presenting a set of rules he's trying to make you think and so he's also of course a brilliant writer and he's fun to read although you know it it is it is not you know very early 20th century prose and so it is it is less mindless than most of what passes for prose these days now come on you know I'm right and so um that being the case it's a great way to for practitioners of magic and divination to to stretch themselves a little to think how does this fit how does what I'm doing fit into a wider world to recognize that they're part of a wider world they're not just you know doing this whole and corner existence on the on on the fringes of a collapsing empire even though that is in fact what's going on but there is a wider world there is a wider reality in which they are also participating all the time and that they can you know this is the way that one brilliant occult practitioner and diviner of a great astrologer dab handed tarot all the usual stuff everything you'd expect from a Golden Dawn Adeptus major this is how this is how he wrestled with that and the other thing that I think I would like them to take from that is again to dynamite that fake barrier between you know the all steeled high magic and the low magic you know let's throw that out let's please haul that out with the garbage okay folklore folk tradition I'm not just meaning folklore of conveniently distant romantic peoples okay um some years ago I used to live in a little town in the in the Appalachians I belonged to um the Masonic Lodge there my wife and I belonged to a um to the Eastern Star and we'd sit in the Eastern Star after the is in down in the coffee in the coffee room after the Eastern Star meeting and listen to the little ladies talk about how you make doll babies to cast spells on people okay and these are good Christian women you understand this you know this again this is this is Appalachian um I knew three guys who made Moonshine it was good Moonshine but um there's a lot of folk magic in I mean the the claim that magic somehow went away which is retailed by certain people is it is such a crock of crap that if you composted it you could probably grow a world class garden um it's simply not true magic is all around us people have been practicing it all along um Eastern Star ladies up in you know little Appalachian brick you know red brick mill towns are busy you know if they want if they want to get someone out of their life they're dressing a doll baby doll baby was the term they used for a puppet in close and baptizing it in the name of the person mailing it in a box to General Delivery in Hell Michigan and so all of this stuff is part of a unity there is there is this whole rich tradition of American folk magic and of of course many other kinds of folk magic there are there are ways of looking at the world that were common to Irish farmers in in rural Sligo and to um Japanese farmers in rural Kyushu and to um you know um mediums in upstairs garrets in Soho and to everyone else and maybe we should listen to that maybe we should take that as you know get down off of our off of our supposed our fantasies of superiority and embrace the fact that there is a tradition that a a way of looking at the world that reaches far beyond the the modern cerebral flatulence that so often fill that fills so many of our minds absolutely and also even just from the the the writings that are that are in his collection it makes it very clear you know how much respect and and how much on the ground he was doing in in terms of that and that's fascinating in this day and age to understand that someone who is such a great and such a great occult practitioner also had you know an enormous fascination with people from all over and took that seriously as well as of course we all should be in all time periods but it's then beautiful to to read it in his lovely prose and to know it is is a beautiful thing to hear that very much so and I think and that's that's really the place where he he came into a good relationship with his mask you see he found his mask you he was very much in the third quarter um he identified himself as Phase 17 and I think he was right and so which is third quarter and so that first quarter this sort of earthy peasant world was his mask was his anti self the thing he could not be but could admire and try to express and it was in that relationship not trying to pretend to be something that he could never be not I you know the the I shall rise and go now stuff which again beautifully written but there's a certain quality fake quality to it and he got past that into the the stunning reality of of of his of his best poetry later on um by recognizing that this this was his mask this was the his anti self this this peasant life the that he had been taught to despise as people in the in the British upper classes are taught or even middle classes are taught to despise these lowly peasants as you know many people in our American privileged classes are taught to despise the poor in the working class you know maybe we need to do a little more to pay a little more attention to how we are out of phase and to see the extent to which that's our mask that's the thing you know I I think if if I mean inject something here I've known a lot of people in in the Neopagan community for example who have this this notion of themselves as these oppressed peasants and these are people who are making 100,000 a year or they're or actually many of them are actually living comfortably on disability payments that they may or may not need um but they're you know they're urban many of them are also college educated they're about as far from the peasantry as they could possibly be but they think of themselves as the people of the land rather than the people of the Starbucks and I think what we have here is a lot of people in the third phase who are out of phase and are trying to pretend to be something they're not and I think if they were to instead set that aside and try to come to an understanding of the people who actually inhabit that phase then they would come into phase and then their own creative capacities in in life as well as in the arts would be unlocked but we'll see that was um absolutely beautiful and so important so so thank you for that I as as we come to a close I'm gonna ask you a question uh which I know will have like so many answers what are you working on next hahaha well actually it it has it there are three answers at this point because there there's one project that I have just as in yesterday sent into the publisher the title is Renaissance Mind Training oh cool in the year 15 the average school child um had access to a set of mental training skills that have been completely discarded since that time that enabled them to think their way out of a paper bag of feet which many of us cannot manage these days um we are talking about the art of memory but we're talking about a whole series of other things it occurred to me that especially now that we have you know huge corporate interests trying to talk us into handing over our thinking to a bunch of electronic parrots I'm quote artificial intelligence um that maybe we ought to for a change use our own brains and the the mental skills that made the Renaissance what it was it strikes me that would be a good place to start so Renaissance mind training it's in the hand of the publisher as of yesterday and we'll see how they the next project actually on the request of the publisher um some years ago I wrote a book called um a World Full of gods which is a study yeah it's a study of um my favorites I'm just yeah well good um it's a study of poly why polytheism makes sense um it there was a there for the longest time every book on the philosophy of religion talked about um monotheism and atheism as the only two possible options which struck me as stupid and also biased and so I I decided to try to make sense of polytheism on its own ground so that was my book a World Full of gods um it's it's very popular among modern polytheists in particular maybe a lot of fans in the north pagan scene which is great cause they all have great beer um it's true and so what and so yeah yeah yeah good beer good meat meat I tend to avoid because it gives me hangovers beer is another matter yeah there we go but so the publisher wants a book on polytheist practice for those who don't have a background in it some people come to polytheism by way of organized traditions they join they they get involved with with Asatru or they get involved with one of the other living traditions that has a clear understanding of practice but there are also a lot of people who simply have a sense of of god of a plurality of gods and want to relate to them but they don't have a tradition or they feel in some sense called by this or that deity about whom they may know very little and in some cases especially for example in the case of the Celtic traditions almost nothing survives um we've done our best to make stuff up in the Druid arrival but it's you know a lot not a lot of it deals with this with specifically polytheistic religion so I'm taking the the template for working with the gods that was devised in late Roman times by by um the Neoplatonists and which could be used which was set up to use with literally any deity at all irrespective of pantheon on which they apparent and apparently the gods were perfectly happy with it so the Neoplatonists did rather well and so I am taking that and modernizing it on the basis of my own experiences and that of other modern polytheists and saying okay this is not the only game in town there are many ways you can worship the gods but if you don't have anything else to go by here's something you might want to look at here are some you know here are some approaches to prayer here is how you establish an altar here is how you do um spiritually empowered images of the gods the Neoplatonists were good at that um here is how you do this here is how you do that and here is how you take your own inspirations your own what what they what is so clumsily called unverified personal noses as though noses can be anything but personal and um and you know and and weave this together into a life in relationship with deities that's you know that's how I that's how I've lived for many years now and it seems to work and I am I the last I'm not in any way presenting this as the only option quite the contrary if you've got you know if you've got some other if you know if you have if there's a kemetic temple down the road and you you you really want to get there and worship ISIS and Osiris go ye henceforth and do that thing but if there you are you know sitting in um suburban New Jersey and you have this you have this sense that Cernunnos wants a word with you what do you do well I have some suggestions that sounds fantastic I'm a I'm Hellenic gal myself so there you go so you've got you've got a fair amount of traditions but then the Neoplatonist stuff ought to be very well in work and then finally of course I the next volume in the Ariel Morel Beckett occult detective series is underway um the let's see four of them are out the fifth one's been at the publisher for some time now um that is the sign of the Phoenix and the current one the greater key which deals with the art of memory is and with the legacy of Giordano Bruno and a number of other things that one's mostly done I mean I those are such fun I I enjoy Ariel's company that's that is fantastic well I'm very excited for all of those projects uh and thank you I will be excited to have more excuses for you to come on the show and for us thank you very much I always have a great time on this show well I appreciate that um and thank you so much for being here and for for everything that you've shared and I'll make sure that all of that and more is in the show notes so thank you and I I thank you I appreciate being on one of the things I keep returning to after conversations like this one is the sense that of course the imaginal realm that we were discussing in it is not a literary device only I'm sure that most of you listening have your own approaches to and opinions on what that imaginal realm is and how we connect to it but whatever words we use for it it is clear that artists like Yeats and young and so many many many others each tap into that incredible wellspring in their own ways and that truly so many of the great works of humanity are just bubblings up thoughts coming through and ideas coming through from those other realms we each have our own connection to it whether it is in the works that we create or perform or works that we enjoy or the divination and dream work or experiences that we have that are inspired in our lives it is the deeply human experience of those things that goes beyond words and is why we all struggle to try to describe them I'm sure that there are of course a multitude of other beings who are in those imaginal realms and that the natural world around us is also slipping in and out of those creative states in their own ways that we can't conceive of it's all part of the great memory that is unfolding around us the main reasons why I appreciate Reyes emphasis on this as a philosophy as a way of thinking that is beyond just practices because of course we have to put these things into practice in our daily lives we need to practice our divination we need to practice our art forms and then we also need to frame it and view it and experience it as part of that larger whole that is always unfolding with the unseen and again thank you so much to everyone who writes in for your support of this show by sharing it your support of the book and if there are any things that you'd want to drop me a line about you can of course find the contact information on the website coffee and divination.com and I hope I'll see some of you in Pennsylvania and in Brooklyn and of course Temple Fest later in the year and online for many other events that will be coming forth very soon and for now enjoy your journeys with divination and I'll see you next time