Understanding Yeatss concept of history, the gyres and the phases of the moon I hope this helps!

There are 28 phases of the moon (four week or roughly monthly cycles) Yeats believed that each phase of the moon represented a different characteristic (see the poem The Phases of the Moon) and that all life on Earth is directly affected by the moon and the sun. In Eastern philosophy there is a similar idea expressed in the symbol of the Yin and Yang. Yeats believed that history runs in cycles, or gyres, of time. He thought there were 12 gyres in each millennium and that every two millennia an annunciation, or mystical birth (Helen of Troy (daughter of Leda and hatched rather than born); Jesus Christ later) takes place that propels a new phase of history. Yeats considers phases of history to be either primary (objective, unified and symbolised by the sun (era of Christianity, for ex.)) or antithetical (subjective, personal, symbolised by the moon (eras of Classical World)). Yeats applied his theory of the phases of the moon to longer cycles of history, and describes the rise and fall of civilizations in terms of the sequence of the phases of the moon. (For example, a movement towards a moral and spiritual stage in civilizations development would be attributed to a particular phase). He considered Byzantium to have reached the height of its greatness at around the year 1050, and describes it as having reached phase 15 (full moon). Essentially, he uses the phases of the moon as a metaphorical way of describing how societies develop, and then fall apart, and then re-emerge as a new incarnation (just as a new moon does, in a sense). He confuses us by then applying his theories in a literal way (for example he worked out that Julius Caesar the Roman Consul was killed on phase 15 of the moon, which he thought fitted with the historical importance of the event) but this is not really important for us when we are concentrating on his poetry. Yeats also applies his theory of the phases of the moon to individual people Maud Gonne, for example, he considered to be at phase 14, a phase he associates with strength of opinion and assertiveness, with a person at the height of his or her powers. Again, this is a metaphorical description describing the stage Yeats felt she was at on her spiritual journey through all of her lives.

From WB Yeats and A Vision www.yeatsvision.com

The Christian annunciation inaugurates a primary dispensation looking beyond itself towards a transcendent power, which is dogmatic, levelling, unifying, feminine, humane, peace its means and end; the preceding classical annunciation inaugurates an antitheticaldispensation, which obeys imminent [for immanent?] power, is expressive, hierarchical, multiple, masculine, harsh, surgical (AV B 263). The cyclical nature of Yeatss conception means that there will be another antithetical annunciation in the near future, the second coming not of Christ but of His antithetical opposite, the focus of one of Yeatss most celebrated poems The Second Coming (see the Future).
. . . now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Elsewhere, Yeats portrays the antithetical Messiah as Oedipus, an image from Homers age (AV B 28), who lay down upon the earth and sank down soul and body into the earth. I would have him balance Christ who, crucified standing up, went into the abstract sky soul and body ( AV B 27): What if Christ and Oedipus or, to shift the names, Saint Catherine of Genoa and Michael Angelo, are the two scales of a balance, the two buttends of a seesaw? What if every two thousand and odd years something happens in the world to make one sacred, the other secular; one wise, the other foolish; one fair, the other foul; one divine, the other devilish? What if there is an arithmetic or geometry that can exactly measure the slope of the balance, the dip of the scale, and so date the coming of that something?