Yeats's System

A Vision (1925; revised 1937) outlines a system that was supposedly dictated by supernatural commentators speaking through Mrs.Yeats. [See the comments on automatic writing in your text.] It turns its back on the mainstream twentieth-century orthodoxies of Christianity, Marxism, and psychoanalysis.

Yeats envisioned life as patterned after The Great Wheel (a wheel with twenty-eight spokes representing the twenty-eight phases of the lunar month) instead of the more common astrological wheel of twelve houses.

Click here to view a graphic of Yeats's Lunar Phases.

Every soul (and every civilization) passes through all twenty-eight phases of the wheel. Each phase is labeled and illustrated. Phase 19, the "Assertive Man," is illustrated by Byron. Phase 17, "Daimonic Man," includes Dante, Shelley, Landor, and Yeats himself. However, for Phase I and its exact opposite, Phase 15, which represent absolutely pure types, Yeats saw no human counterparts. One historical revolution of the wheel takes two thousand years, and each successive revolution mounts spirally toward the Great Year (26,000 years) which will break out of the wheel altogether.

Yeats also saw that each individual was composed of warring elements, and that this mingling of opposites held true for each country, and each era. He represented this conjunction of opposites as two interpenetrating cones ("gyres"):

A cross section of these ceaselessly turning cones will reveal the mingled aspects of a specific individual, and, no two cross sections will ever prove identical. Thus, each person can be seen to possess some characteristics that are directly opposite to his dominant nature. A person whose nature intersects the diagram midway would suffer a paralysis of action or feeling because he would be pulled equally in two opposite directions.

In the Great Wheel, each of Yeats's twenty-eight basic personality types is so arranged that it faces its direct opposite, the personality most different from it. This opposite is its Mask. For every personality there is a Mask, but the objective, primary phase personalities should ignore their Masks or else they will be frustrated and destroyed. The subjective or artistic personalities all must choose a Mask to wear, but they are faced with two to choose from, a True Mask and a False, and it is necessary that they choose correctly.

(The above is taken from Martin S. Day's History of Enqlish Literature: 1837 to the Present, Garden City: Doubleday, 1964, 245-46. The graphics are mine.)

The following provides a quick look at Yeats's Faculty Psychology:

The Four Faculties are the result of the four memories of the Daimon (daemon) or the Ultimate Self of the Man:

• The Will (The Is) or the natural ego of man is shaped out of the Daimon's memory of all the events of his present life, whether consciously remembered or not.
• The Mask (The Ought), the object of desire or idea of the good, is shaped out of the Daimon's memory of the momenta of exaltation in his past lives.
• The Creative Mind (Thought, the Knower) is shaped out of the Daimon's memory of ideas--or universals--displayed by actual men in past lives or their spirits between lives.
• The Body of Fate (Object of Thought; the Known) is the series of events forced upon him from without and is shaped out of the Daimon's memory of the events of his past incarnations.

The Four Principles are the powers that guide the Four Faculties and deal with life from death to birth:

• Husk
• Passionate Beauty
• Spirit
• Celestial Body

Clearly I don't expect you to understand all of this in great detail. However, in looking at the concept of the gyre and at the basic oppositions in his Faculty Psychology, you should recognize Yeats's awareness of the dual nature of existence that we saw in the Romantics, with their concern for "the reconciliation of opposites."

^© Scott Foll 2000. All rights reserved.