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Yeats' Stolen Theory of Masks: The Golden Dawn and Tarot Ritual
by JUNE LEAVITT
In order to canonize William Butler Yeats as the exemplary intellectual poet of Irish
nationalism, mainstream critics play down Yeats's total engagement with magic and mystical symbols of the Tarot. This canonization of Yeats requires an excellent pair of blinders for Yeats filled his diaries and autobiographies with anecdotes about exactly what happened when he used magical symbols and mystical symbols of the Tarot. Moreover, the fact that Yeats was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (and when it broke up a member of a splinter mystical society) for over thirty years, and that Tarot cards were essential to Golden Dawn ritual, is not usually taken into consideration when sources are sought for Yeats's literary theory known as the theory of masks. Nor is it generally understood that the Golden Dawn theory of masks was not only put to use by Yeats in his poetry,

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Yeats' Stolen Theory of Masks: The Golden Dawn and Tarot Ritual

stories and diaries. Through the Golden Dawn theory of masks, Yeats constructed an image, an opaque self- construct which blocks his biographers from understanding his true personality. Yeats was fond of writing about himself; he wrote several autobiographies and memoirs. In his Autobiographies, Yeats tells how by the use of symbols he gave to a friend, this friend would pass into a trance and a celestial being named Megarithma would appear to give oracles to Yeats (Autobiographies 371). Some time later, Yeats himself decided to invoke the magical power of a symbol himself:

I decided to repeat the names associated with the moon in the cabbalistic tree of life, the divine name, the name of the angelic order, the name of the planetary sphere(Autobiographies 372)

"Then, after invocations night after night, for eight or nine nights consecutively, suddenly the symbol bestowed its power on me! I saw a galloping centaur, and a moment later a naked woman of incredible beauty, standing upon a pedestal and shooting a star. (Autobiographies 372-373). In his autobiography called Autobiographies, Yeats brags that soon after becoming a member of the Golden Dawn and mastering its symbolic system, he could make the visible world completely vanish and another world summoned by the symbol would take its place (The Autobiography 162-163). Before Yeats became a life long member of the Golden Dawn, he was in the esoteric section of Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical lodge. After encouraging fellow members to burn a flower to ashes, and to put the ashes in a bell glass in moonlight in order to allow the phantom of

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Yeats' Stolen Theory of Masks: The Golden Dawn and Tarot Ritual

the flower to rise, and to put indigo under their pillows and to record the images that the color vibrations caused, he was evicted from the lodge for trying too hard to be a magician. (Memoirs 23) But then, he couldn't have cared less for he had met cabalist Macgregor Matthews in the British Museum reading room. Mathers, one of the founders of the new secret society of Christian cabalists, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, asked Yeats to join (Memoirs 26). Sometime between 1888 and 1890, Yeats was initiated into the Golden Dawn, and was to remain a member, not for just a few years as critics write, but for most of his life in a splinter group which continued after the original society had broken up. It was in the Golden Dawn that he mastered the techniques of using symbols, including the Tarot, to attain supernatural powers. After three years of using Tarot symbols to ascend paths in the Tree of Life, Yeats lay down in a tomb in a dingy London basement, a basement decorated with mystic signs, which Golden Dawn members called the Isis-Urania temple, and there he died a symbolic birth (Ellmann 99). When he got up he was reborn and received a new name, Demon Est Deu Inversus, the devil is an inverted god. Whatever the ramifications of his mystical name (I believe the name alludes to the Tarot symbol of The Hanged Man who is made to see the world inverted so that he can break the confines of normal consciousness; Madame Blavatsky was appalled. She thought it was a dangerous insult to devil-hating Christianity) the rituals in the Golden Dawn gave Yeats an idealized opportunity to erase the plain and human aspects of his personality through an elaborate mystical system of path working which used the Tarot symbols. The need to project a superior self began, according to Yeats, in County Sligo Ireland, a landscape dominated by a powerful grandfather who Yeats confused with God (The

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Yeats' Stolen Theory of Masks: The Golden Dawn and Tarot Ritual

Autobiography of W.B. Yeats 9). Armed with a horsewhip by day and a hatchet by night, William Pollexfen was known for his violent temper and his physical prowess. His grandson was his opposite. Weak and timid, the boy Willy was known as a poor fighter who lived in fear of other boys and dreamed of being like his grandfather who thought so little of danger he jumped overboard in the Bay of Biscay after an old hat" (The Autobiography of W.B. Yeats 34). But wandering County Sligo alone, which the provincial Irish believe they share with fairies, gnomes and elves, ostensibly going to catch butterflies, Yeats began to imagine that he was a superman. One day he saw himself dying a hero's death with the Fenians after battling the British Empire for Irish independence. Another day he saw himself as Manfred on his glacier, and now Prince Athanase with his solitary lamp[] (The Autobiography of W.B. Yeats 58). During these extended periods of solitude in Sligo, Yeats also played at being a sage, a magician or poet. In his mind, Willy Yeats became the enlightened one who would guide his fellow Irishmen towards something. Alternately, the butterfly net became the magicians wand; one tap the boy could transform the physical world into anything he pleased. The Golden Dawn satisfied Yeats's need for a system of worship which might further his goals to become a super person, an enlightened one, a magician. By the time, Yeats wrote his early stories The Stories of Red Hanrahan in 1897, he had been working for ten years with symbols and magic. He was now able, according to his testimony, to excite a cat by transmitting the image of a mouse to its nose (The Autobiography of W.B Yeats 162). He taught friends and acquaintances how to see the future in a crystal ball according to the methods learnt in the Golden Dawn. A young doctor, who was living with Yeats, became so entranced when Yeats gazed into the crystal that the doctor visualized a High Priestess leading him through a white room past an

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Yeats' Stolen Theory of Masks: The Golden Dawn and Tarot Ritual

empty throne to an empty tomb. The doctor understood this to mean that a reigning sovereign would die (Memoirs 70). A few years later when Queen Victoria died, the doctor and his friends believed that through Yeatss wizardry, a prophetic vision had been conveyed. Yeats boasts that his reputation of being magician had indeed spread far and wide. Even the rural people of County Sligo used to gossip about how he could be carried for five miles in the inking of an eye (Memoirs 76). Soon after mastering Golden Dawn techniques, Yeats writes that he could exert psychic influence over other peoples minds as well. Holding one Tarot card behind his back, and meditating on it, he asked his friend what image he thought Yeats was hiding behind his back. The friend replied, I see a most august immense being glowing with a ruddy opalescent color, sitting on a throne.

Yes, Yeats transmitted the image of the Tarot card The Emperor who wears red robes and sits on a throne! Another time, Yeats brags about using a Tarot symbol to send a friend to the Garden of Eden (The Autobiography of W.B Yeats 222-224).It would seem that this time he was using can you guess? Yes, the Tarot card The Lovers: for a naked man and woman stand before the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of life in the Garden of Eden.

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Yeats' Stolen Theory of Masks: The Golden Dawn and Tarot Ritual

After just a few years in the Golden Dawn, Yeats declared that he was able to heal his Uncle George who became feverish and delirious following a smallpox vaccination. Sitting by his uncles bedside, Yeats imagined a Tarot symbol associated with water. Though Yeats does not tell us in his autobiography what Tarot symbol he actually imagined, we know, as well as he knew that the Cup suit of the Minor Arcana is associated with water. His Uncle George then mumbled, "The red dancing figures have gone away, and instead a river is running through the room!" (The Autobiography of W.B Yeats 230). Uncle George promptly fell peacefully asleep, and when he woke he was a firm believer in his nephews powers. On another occasion, Yeats imagined yet another Tarot symbol and then watched the signs on his uncle's face. Suddenly his uncle blurted out, "You are making me see the marriage of Heaven and Hell!" Yeats most likely had the Tarot card The Devil in mind; beneath the figure of the devil a man and woman stand naked, bound to one another. Yeatss faculty of imagination was so potent that even the servant of his Uncle George that very same night dreamt that a bishop had run away with a High-up lady (The Autobiography 223). Yeats wrote in his autobiography that the bishop represented Heaven, and the lady, Hell. In other words, even his servant absorbed the imagery of the Tarot card The Devil because Yeats visualized it in his mind so powerfully.

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Yeats' Stolen Theory of Masks: The Golden Dawn and Tarot Ritual

When Yeats first fell in love with Maud Gonne, a love which was to last most of his life but never to bring him peace, one of the first things he did to her was to imagine a Tarot symbol. Can you guess which Tarot symbol? Yeats used the Tarot card Death in order to see if he and Maud were spiritually compatible. Yeats allegedly asked the spirit of the symbol not to alarm Maud but to take the form of a dogs skull. Immediately Maud cried out, I see a figure holding out its hand with a skull in it (Memoirs 124). Gonne and Yeats understood this to mean they were indeed spiritually compatible. Shortly thereafter, he brought Gonne to the Golden Dawn Temple where she was also initiated as a neophyte. From then on their courtship entailed using Golden Dawn Tarot symbols to see each others etheric doubles, to bring up their past incarnations, and to create visions together.

If Yeats's romantic behavior was shaped by the Golden Dawn it should come as no surprise that his famous theory of masks, which developed into his renowned theory of self and anti-self, was also shaped by the Golden Dawn. In the evocation ceremonies, Golden Dawn neophytes stood in a circle around a member

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Yeats' Stolen Theory of Masks: The Golden Dawn and Tarot Ritual

dressed as The Magician. The Magician, wearing a scarlet robe and holding a talisman, was instructed by higher adepts in the Golden Dawn to mentally imagine his or herself as a higher spirit.

Now let the Magician imagine himself as clothed outwardly [sic] with the semblance of the form of the Spirit to be evoked, and in this let him be careful not to identify himself [sic]with the spirit, which would be dangerous, but only to formulate a species of mask, worn for the time being (Regardie 381).

This masking, called by the Golden Dawn, astral masking (Regardie 381) was a way of assuming a higher personality through the faculty of imagination. The outward form of a spirit could be imagined or envisioned and then the inner form of the higher spirit would enter the neophytes. Even when Yeats became drawn to politics and the emerging Irish nationalist movement, this theory of masks influenced his behavior. He confides in his journal, Last night there was a debate on the political question...In pursuit of the mask, I resolved to say only fanciful and personal things, and to escape out of mere combat" (Memoirs 139). At another time he writes, Women should find in the mask enough joy to forget the doll without regret. There is always a living force behind the mask (Memoirs 192). When he fell madly in love with Maud Gonne, he inscribed in his journal, In wise love, each divines the high secret self of the other. Love also creates the mask (Memoirs 145). In another entry, he remarks, I think all happiness depends on having the energy to assume the mask of some other self...like that of a child where one loses the infinite pain and hides from the

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Yeats' Stolen Theory of Masks: The Golden Dawn and Tarot Ritual

terrors of judgment (Memoirs 191). Before discussing Yeatss surprising reference to the infinite pain which he says the masks are meant to hide, it is important to point out that the Golden Dawn theory of masks entailed an ethic. The lower self in each human being was conceived of being constituted of emotions which retarded spiritual development and growth. In another Golden Dawn ritual, this ethic is articulated:

Be thou therefore prompt and active as the Sylphs, but avoid frivolity and caprice. Be energetic and strong as the Salamanders, but avoid irritability and ferocity. Be flexible and attentive to images...but avoid idleness and changeability; be laborious and patient like the Gnomes, but avoid grossness and avarice. So shalt thou gradually develop the powers of thy soul, and fit thyself to command the Spirits of the Elements (Regardie 160.)

Here the moral and ethical implications of masks are clear: By imagining oneself as a Sylph or spirit of the air, or a Salamander which was believed to be able to endure fire, or a Gnome which was thought to live underground and guard the earths treasures, one could attain swiftness, stamina, patience and all other qualities needed in order to evolve into a higher level of being who would be able to command the spirits of the elements. This higher being was opposed to the lower spirit in each human being constituted of emotions which retarded development and growth. The astral masking used in Golden Dawn ritual can now facilitate an understanding of Yeats's symbols of magician and fool, symbols which run through his diaries, short stories and

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Yeats' Stolen Theory of Masks: The Golden Dawn and Tarot Ritual

poetry. The astral masking used in the Golden Dawn can also facilitate an understanding of how and why Yeats blocked biographers from understanding his true personality. In my book Esoteric Symbols: The Tarot in Yeats, Eliot and Kafka, I showed at length how the Golden Dawn theory if masks operates in his early short stories and in his later poem, "Blood and the Moon." Stated briefly, The Stories of Red Hanrahan is set up as a spiritual journey, a spiritual journey full of Tarot symbols which come to life, and all this is made possible by the character of an old man who is playing with cards. A school teacher, named Red Hanrahan happens to see this old man and suddenly the spiritual dimension opens up before him. Dogs begin to bark. Rabbits appear out of nowhere and begin to run and the dogs chase them. Hanrahan goes after the dogs and the terrain becomes supernatural. In other words the old man is not only a character in a story. He is The Magician. In this way, by surreptitiously using Tarot symbols as they were used in the Golden Dawn, Yeats hoped to take literature out of the prosaic world into the higher worlds. Putting this together with Yeats's personal documentation, we begin to perceive that his Magician is the astral mask for Yeats. By donning the mask of the magician, who was also wise, Yeats could become more than just one other prose writer, dramatist and poet. He could write fiction which was a real vehicle to enlighten multitudes. He could escape from lowly human emotions to become that extraordinary spiritual teacher for whom Blavatsky and her disciples were awaiting, that teacher whom Ireland was about to produce. Yet, Yeatss main character, Red Hanrahan, does not become enlightened. The text becomes a locus of failure. In fact, when Red Hanrahan returns to the barn after the abortive attempt at his spiritualization, the magician has disappeared altogether. Hanrahan will not become a neophyte. He will become a second rate poet instead.

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Yeats' Stolen Theory of Masks: The Golden Dawn and Tarot Ritual

The astral mask of Magician, the condensed symbol of who Yeats wants to be, gives way to the more powerful image of how Yeats really sees himself. He is Red Hanrahan, and Red Hanrahan is the Tarot Fool. In other words, the mask of Magician hides Yeats's lower inferior self which contains qualities that prevent spiritual growth. This lower self for Yeats is The Fool. As this Tarot symbol is often present in Yeatss poems and mythologies-- the Fool by the Roadside, Crazy Jane, and Tom the Lunatic, it is a symbol central to Yeatss psychic life" (Raine 124). Yeats himself offers insight into the meaning of the Tarot card The Fool. In his journal of 1909, he explains how he threw the Tarot in order to know whether he should pursue a relationship with one of the Gore-Booth sisters who were known as the most beautiful females in Sligo County. When The Fool came up," he writes, "I knew nothing at all would happen, I turned my mind away (Memoirs 78-79). The Fool in the Tarot, associated with nothingness and the number zero, lacks the determining, ruling, and directive aspect of consciousness which is characterized by The Magician. Though Yeats did as much erasing as he did writing in his journals ( he erases dates, names of people, all signs of everyday reality, most signs of personal weakness, most signs of despair and confusion) there are several entries in Yeatss journal which escaped his censorship. These entries infer that the pain, which the masks are meant to cover, was caused by a feeling of emptiness and weakness: For years I have had some kind of fright, a sense of spiritual loss (Memoirs 171). It always comes from impatience, from a kind of spiritual fright at someone who is here and now more powerful" (Memoirs 138).He even wonders if he has a congenital nervous weakness inherited from his mother. Yeats remarks in another entry, I had a curious breakdown of some sort. He thinks it may come from fear of losing his inspiration. This was to be one of

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Yeats' Stolen Theory of Masks: The Golden Dawn and Tarot Ritual

many breakdowns he would have. By 1917, Yeats will frequently refer to the mask as the anti-self or antithetical self, opposed to the self constituted of inferior qualities. In other words, Yeatss early conception of the mask, shaped by the Golden Dawn, and expressed in the personae of The Magician and The Fool, developed into a more sophisticated and intellectually elaborate theory of opposite selves. While the philosophy of the self and the anti-self, also called Yeats's theory of masks, has provided fodder for literary critics, biographers of Yeats complain about the biased documentation in which Yeats skillfully crafted his own image (Aldritt xiii). However, it is in his stolen theory of self and anti-self, that we will ultimately be able to write a more personal portrait of Yeats. Through the Golden Dawn ritual of astral masking, we can begin to comprehend Yeatss statement that masks are a way of hiding from infinite pain. Ideally, according to Yeats, the self and anti-self should knit together, but this only happens when the man finds a mask whose lineaments permit the expression of all the man most lacks "(Mythologies 335). On the other hand, Yeats states that the sharper the opposition of self and anti-self, the more violent and definite the antipathy (Mythologies 336). Apparently, Yeatss anti-self of Magician and self of The Fool had a violent relationship. By 1917, Yeats wrote that when he puts his head on the pillow at night he saw someone fencing him and on the foil was the image of Yeatss face (Mythologies 337). But it was not only at night the two engaged in a duel. Yeats admitted that the duel was perpetual, and it took place in the deep of his mind. Yeats seems to have taken the Golden Dawn astral masking to the wrong place.

Now let the Magician imagine himself as clothed outwardly [sic] with the

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Yeats' Stolen Theory of Masks: The Golden Dawn and Tarot Ritual

semblance of the form of the Spirit to be evoked, and in this let him be careful not to identify himself [sic]with the spirit, which would be dangerous, but only to formulate a species of mask, worn for the time being (Regardie 381).

Yeats's totally identified with his mask, and he did not wear this mask for the time being, he wore it perpetually. The agony this caused him and which he tried to excise from his personal documentation can be understood if we reconstitute Yeats's life as magician in the Golden Dawn. A systematic sublimation of passions is required, a masking, an assumption of anti-self, so that higher faculties of the soul can be activated. And then and only a man or woman can control the elemental world. But the price Yeats paid for adopting the Golden Dawn theory until it became the impetus for almost everything he did and wrote was very high. Yeats lamented at the end of his life, "Is not ones art made out of the struggle of ones soul? Is not beauty a victory over oneself (Memoirs 157)?

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Yeats' Stolen Theory of Masks: The Golden Dawn and Tarot Ritual

Notes
Alldritt, Keith. W.B. Yeats: The Man and the Milieu. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1997. Ellmann, Richard. Yeats: The Man and the Masks. London: Faber, 1961. Raine, Kathleen. Yeats, the Tarot and the Golden Dawn. Sewanee Review 77 (1969), 112-148. Regardie, Israel. The Golden Dawn: Four Volumes in One. St. Paul, MN. Llewellyn Publications, 2000 Yeats, W.B. The Autobiography of W.B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1938. ---..Autobiographies. London: Macmillan, 1961. ---. Essays and Introductions. New York: Macmillan, 1961. ---.Memoirs: Autobiography-First Draft Journal. ed. Denis Donoghue. London: Macmillan 1972. ---. Mythologies. London: Macmillan, 1962.

2007 June Leavitt. All Rights Reserved. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal.

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JUNE LEAVITT
June Leavitt is an internationally renowned diarist and teacher who has published many books, and articles which have appeared in major American newspapers and magazines. In her book Storm of Terror: a Hebron Mother's Diary, Ivan Dee, 2002, Ms. Leavitt chronicles her spiritual struggles awakenings in the midst of a wave of terrorism. The affirmation of life which comes from pain and the awareness that happiness can be found side by side with sorrow is part of her message. A distinguished mystic and esoteric scholar, June Leavitt's new book, Esoteric Symbols: the Tarot in Yeats, Eliot and Kafka, University Press of America, April 2007 brings the reader on a journey where the occult Tarot and literature meet. A native of Long Island, Leavitt received her bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin, and her master's degree in literature from Ben Gurion University in Israel. Currently working on her doctorate, she is the creator of a college course on spirituality in literature which she has taught at the Overseas Students program at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. In addition to her scholarly work and writing, June is dedicated to transmitting spirituality information and awareness about spiritual consciousness. Ms. Leavitt teaches Yoga, meditation and techniques for inducing consciousness and a happy state of mind.

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Also by JUNE LEAVITT

Esoteric Symbols: The Tarot in Yeats, Eliot, and Kafka Storm of Terror: A Hebron Mothers Diary Vivre Hbron Im Labyrinth des Terror Flight to Seven Swan Bay

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