William Butler Yeats
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was a poet and leader of the Irish Literary Revival. He was heavily involved in the Dublin Theosophical Lodge, and was also interested in hermeticism, spiritualism, and Rosicrucianism.
The oriental turn to his poetry and that of Æ (George William Russell) was credited to their acquaintance with Mohini M. Chatterji.[1] In 1923, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Personal life
Early years and education
Marriage and family
Later years
The oriental turn to his poetry and that of Æ (George William Russell) was credited to their acquaintance with Mohini M. Chatterji.[2]
Literary career
Abbey Theatre
Poetic style
Nobel Prize
Theosophical Society involvement
Dublin Theosophical Lodge & London Esoteric Section
In late 1884 WBY's aunt Isabella Pollexfen Varley, married to an artist in London..., sent WBY a copy of A. P. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism.... After obtaining it, WBY lent the book to his friend Charles Johnston...[who] had been considering a career in the church; instead he went to London to interview the founders of the movement, and on his return introduced Theosophy to Dublin. Johnston was an established friend of WBY since the days at Howth from 1881 to 1882.... Their paths would intersect through life, with Johnston turning up...at Madame Blavatsky's in London in the 1880s....; it was probably Johnston, together with Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism, who encouraged WBY in the new fad of Theosophy.
...this Theosophist involvement, and others like it, would be WBY's university. He had begun a long career of forming clubs, of organizing speculative conversations, of interrogating a widely assorted range of spiritual disciplines and secret knowledge. The organization..., which called itself the Dublin Hermetic Society, dates from 16 June 1885. Always Theosophically bent, the Hermetic Society became in April 1886 the Dublin Theosophical Society - a limitation which disappointed WBY, though he was impressed by the envoy sent by the Theosophist leader Madame Blavatsky.
WBY was deeply affected by his first experience of an Eastern holy man..., Mohini Chatterjee.... Rather than expounding Sinnett's ideas (which owed more to Western Occultism), [Chatterji] broadcast the more existentialist principles of Samkara.... Thus in Dublin, during April 1886, [Chatterji] preached the necessity to realize one's individual soul by contemplation and the illusory nature of the material world. To WBY,...Theosophy could not have been presented more attractively.[3]
[WBY had moved to join the rest of his family in London by April 1887.] As early as the summer of 1887 WBY had found his way to the Theosophist Madame Blavatsky, recently arrived in England; the introduction was effected by Charles Johnston....[4] For the rest of the autumn [in 1888], he...[was] periodically paying visits to the growing Blavatsky entourage in Holland Park. In December he joined her recently established Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society.[5]
[He had an] inclination towards magical experimentation and the verification of natural phenomenon. For this reason, he strongly backed the formation of the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society, devoted to such rituals; he joined it in December 1888, and renewed his pledges on 20 December 1889, along with the celebrated Annie Besant among others. [Severance][6]
Ignoring for the most part the complex cosmology of the Society itself, Yeats took from Theosophy the doctrines which can be made readily comprehensible in Hough's succinct summary:[7]
The idea of an age-old secret doctrine, passed on by oral tradition from generation to generation. He found a God seen only as the boundless, Absolute, impassible, unknowable, indescribable. He found a world consisting of emanations from this Absolute, and souls who were sparks or separated fragments of the same substance. Their object was to return to the One from which they came, but to accomplish this they have to make a long pilgrimage through many incarnations, live through many lives both in this world and beyond. [8]
Other Esoteric Interests
Meeting Mohini Chatterjee, working with Madame Blavatsky, joining and then running the Order of the Golden Dawn, becoming an adept in Stella Matutina - all contributed to Yeats's practical experience with the supranormal. Supplementing these practical experiences were the Theoretical works Yeats studied, including works by Jacob Boehme, Emmanuel Swedenborg, and Paracelsus, as well as Celtic bardic material and Vedanta. Yeats's own personal attempt at writing an esoteric text comes to us as A Vision, a work that critics have called hos personal mythology. As his letters attest, however, Yeats privately called the material in A Vision his "public philosophy," and admitted that he had a different private philosophy that was not contained in A Vision.[9]
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
In his autobiography, Yeats says that he was initiated into "The Hermetic Students" (an organization that had "a different name among its members") in "May or June 1887" in a "Charlotte Street Studio (Autobiography, 124). R. A. Gilbert dates the birth of the Golden Dawn as February 1888, "when its creator (Dr. William Wynn Westcott) and his cronies (Dr. William Robert Woodman and Samuel Liddell Mathers) signed their pledges of undying allegience to themselves." In the Golden Dawn membership list, Yeats is listed as 0 = 0, Neophyte, in March of 1890.[10]
Writings
The Union Index of Theosophical Periodicals lists 54 articles by and about Yeats, including many in The Lamp, a Canadian journal. For a complete listing of his works, see Wikipedia. Here are some of his most significant works:
Other resources
The Union Index of Theosophical Periodicals lists 49 articles by or about Yeats.
- Harris, Philip S. "Yeats, William Butler" Theosophical Encyclopedia (Quezon City, Philippines: Theosophical Publishing House, 2006), 682. Available at Theosopedia.
- Theosophy and the Theosophical Society at YeatsVision.com
- D.N.D. [Daniel Nicol Dunlop], "Interview with W. B. Yeats," The Irish Theosophist (2:2, November 1893), 147-9. Yeats discusses his interaction with Madame Blavatsky in the earlier days of the Theosophical movement in England. From Theosophy Canada. Also available at the Blavatsky Study Center.
- Dr. Suman Singh, "Mohini Mohan Chatterji's Influence on W.B. Yeats," Shodh Sanchayan: An Internationally Indexed Refereed Research Journal & A complete Periodical dedicated to Humanities & Social Science Research, 3:2 (July 2012).
Notes
- ↑ ”Chatterji, Mohini Mohun,” The Theosophical Year Book, 1938 (Adyar, Madras, India: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1938), 172.
- ↑ ”Chatterji, Mohini Mohun,” The Theosophical Year Book, 1938 (Adyar, Madras, India: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1938), 172.
- ↑ R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, I: The Apprentice Mage 1865-1914. (Oxford University Press, 1997), 45-8.
- ↑ Ibid., 62.
- ↑ Ibid., 78.
- ↑ Ibid., 101-3.
- ↑ Terence Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats: A Critical Biography. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), Chapter 1.
- ↑ Graham Hough, The Mystery Religion of W.B. Yeats. (London: Harvester, 1984), 39.
- ↑ Susan Johnston Graf, W.B. Yeats - Twentieth-Century Magus: An In-Depth Study of Yeats's Esoteric Practices and Beliefs, Including Excerpts from His Magical Diaries. (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 2000), xv.
- ↑ Ibid., 7-8.