Ille argues that art should express spiritual truths, not worldly observations. Rhetoricians and sentimentalists, according to him, cannot be artists, because the artist is always an outsider, a holy hermit living, as Yeats says in Per Arnica, ‘on the threshold of the sacred house’
Susan Johnston Graf, W B Yeats Twentieth Century Magus: An In-Depth Study of Yeat’s Esoteric Practices and Beliefs, Including Excerpts from His Magical Diaries [Amazon, Bookshop, Abebooks, Local Library]
In the tower, the magician works rituals that prepare his soul, making it receptive to daimonic inspiration.
Susan Johnston Graf, W B Yeats Twentieth Century Magus: An In-Depth Study of Yeat’s Esoteric Practices and Beliefs, Including Excerpts from His Magical Diaries [Amazon, Bookshop, Abebooks, Local Library]
These fools possess a wisdom so corrosive that it strips them of their ability to behave appropriately or to be members of the status quo. Yeats’s fools are always outsiders, observing circumstances and belief systems with such a degree of objectivity that they become totally subjective and self-absorbed.
Susan Johnston Graf, W B Yeats Twentieth Century Magus: An In-Depth Study of Yeat’s Esoteric Practices and Beliefs, Including Excerpts from His Magical Diaries [Amazon, Bookshop, Abebooks, Local Library]
Saint, hero, and poet are all inspired; the difference is that saint and hero work in their “… own flesh and blood and not in paper or parchment…” (PASL, 333). Their very lives are works of art, because they have permanently found the anti-self, and so, live in an inspired ecstasy. The poet lives in the tension between inspiration and the workaday world. According to this theory, the ecstatic state of mind, immersion in the anti-self, allows the daimon to inspire the artist.
Susan Johnston Graf, W B Yeats Twentieth Century Magus: An In-Depth Study of Yeat’s Esoteric Practices and Beliefs, Including Excerpts from His Magical Diaries [Bookshop, Amazon]
“The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose to name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is reality”
Susan Johnston Graf, W.B. Yeats Twentieth Century Magus: An In-Depth Study of Yeat’s Esoteric Practices and Beliefs, Including Excerpts from His Magical Diaries [Bookshop, Amazon]
“Yeats explains what he meant by ‘passion is reality’: ‘… for the awakening, for the vision, for the revelation of reality, tradition offers us a different word-ecstasy’ … Immersion in the anti-self brought about a ‘revelation of reality,’ an ecstatic state that enabled the artist to create works of genius. … Only when he became the anti-self could he become a totally subjective individual, overcome the illusion of duality, and find a ‘revelation of reality.'”
the Daimon comes not as like to like but seeking its own opposite, for man and Daimon feed the hunger in one another’s hearts. Because the ghost is simple, the man heterogeneous and confused, they are but knit together when the man has found a mask whose lineaments permit the expression of all the man most lacks, and it may be dreads, and of that only.
Susan Johnston Graf, W.B. Yeats Twentieth Century Magus: An In-Depth Study of Yeat’s Esoteric Practices and Beliefs, Including Excerpts from His Magical Diaries [Bookshop, Amazon]
The passionate ecstasy that engendered his poetry was excited by the stark, pagan purity of his sensuality, which found its talismanic representation in the tower struck by lightning.
Susan Johnston Graf, W B Yeats Twentieth Century Magus
By the time he wrote “Long-legged Fly,” he had decided that civilization’s state was hopeless. It was time for revolution. He called for “the topless towers” to be burned (VP, 617). The towers, dead at the top, lacked the guidance of enlightened, purified souls, souls from the upper two realms of the Cabbalistic cosmos. “Topless towers” were inhabited only by souls driven through the instinct and passion of the lower two realms.
Susan Johnston Graf, W B Yeats Twentieth Century Magus: An In-Depth Study of Yeat’s Esoteric Practices and Beliefs, Including Excerpts from His Magical Diaries
As for the rest we wait till the world changes and its reflection changes in our mirror and an hieratical society returns, power descending from the few to the many, from the subtle to the gross, not because some man’s policy has decreed it but because what is so overwhelming cannot be restrained. A new beginning, a new turn of the wheel.
Susan Johnston Graf, W B Yeats — Twentieth Century Magus
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”
Susan Johnston Graf, W.B. Yeats Twentieth Century Magus: An In-Depth Study of Yeats’ Esoteric Practices and Beliefs, Including Excerpts from His Magical Diaries
