"I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are:-
(1) That the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.
(2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
(3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols."- W.B. Yeats, Magic (1901)
Thursday, 21 August 2008
Definitions of Magic: Evocation, Illusion, & Vision
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1 comment:
Thanks for quoting this. It's a shame this essay isn't more widely known in occult circles. (So far as I know, it isn't even available on-line.)
Yeats worked out his theory of "true symbols" in some detail: how symbols arise, the difference between "true symbols" and arbitrary signs, how symbols exert their effects, what happens when two symbols are combined, etc.
Unfortunately, the theory is scattered in half-a-dozen essays and his Autobiographies. It's worth searching out, though, because Yeats based his conclusions not just on what he learned from S.L. Mathers, but on actual empirical experiments (mostly performed with his uncle, George Pollexfen), which he records.
While the details are often sketchy, anyone who cares to can try to replicate Yeats's experiments today.
Later Yeats turned to Spiritualism, resulting in the baroque metaphysics of A Vision--a dead-end for most readers. Yet years before, as one of the member of the Golden Dawn most interested in it remaining a "magical order", he had a decidedly practical and "hands-on" approach. People forget that the once belonged to the (London) Society for Psychical Research. He put their empircal methodology to use not in proving the existence of magic--he was already convinced on that score--but in figuring out how magic worked, what were the "laws of magic". It's a shame that he did not have more background in scientific methodology, or he might have developed this theory further.
It's easy to read the beautiful essay "Magic", as a specimen of creative literature. But in fact it describes actual incidents, such as the Enochian summoning performed by Mr. & Mrs. Mathers. Behind the graceful words is a keen observer and relentless investigator.
Yeats decided early on that the only way he could talk about his occult pursuits in published works was to cloak the discussion in a thick patitna of artful language. His prose is elusive, never strident or assertive. This essay and the other scattered paragraphs is as close as he ever got to revealing the foundations of his magical practice (before he turned to spiritualism).
This is the key to understanding how Yeats could remain a member of the Golden Dawn even when he believed that the "Fraulein Sprengle" letters were a forgery, and doubted the existence of the "Secret Chiefs". He had his own source of information: his experiments. He tested the things that Mathers taught, and kept only what worked.
Once he had the practical part, he turned to finding a theory. For most readers, the essay "Magic" again contains the most satisfactory account. Progress via the empirical approach was slow and difficult, however. Perhaps this is why he abandond it for spiritualism and his wife's trance writing. But the system that produced (i.e., that of A Vision) had little connnection with any practice.
For example: as far as published sources go, it appears that Yeats continued to summon and banish in the G.D. manner, using "the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram",
with it's confusing assignments of elements to points. But his own theory of "gyres", as discussed in A Vision, would have suggested a spiral pattern, with clockwise motion for summoning, and counter-clockwise for banishing. Indeed, this has been proposed independently by one modern occut writer, Donald Tyson (in The New Magus, retitled New Millennium Magic, where it seems to be the result of speculation, not experimentation). But there is no evidence that Yeats ever used gyre motion for anything other than "metaphors for poetry".
--M.
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