William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats, W B Yeats, Demon est Deus Inversus (The Devil is the opposite of God)
Ireland / England
Events
Comments
Symbolist poet; Ceremonial Magick; Rosicrucian; from his 1920 poem, “The Second Coming”. Blocked the British-Israel Association of London from excavating Tara, a holy Celtic site, searching for the Lost Ark of the Covenant in 1899; Creator of quasi - Masonic Rites;
Connections
Teachers
Jack Butler Yeats (brother); alchemist Frederick Holland; William Robert Woodman; William Wynn Westcott; Éliphas Lévi; Papus;“Anna Sprengel” AKA Soror S.d.A; Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie; Count Apponyi; Frederick Hockley; Moina Mathers; Percy Bysshe Shelley; Edmund Spenser; William Blake; Mary Wollstonecraft (Shelly); Emanuel Swedenborg; Mohini Chatterjee; “Leo Africanus”, spirit guide; Ernest Fenollosa; Eugen Sandow, physical culture star of his time; Dr. Serge Voronoff, the Monkey Balls Man; Ibn Sina (Avicenna); Morienus; Alfarbi; Raymond Lull; Nicolas Flamel; , his wife Parnella; William Blake; Salomon Trismosin
Students
Georgie Hyde-Lees Yeats, wife; R.F. Foster; uncle George Pollexfen; Florence Farr; J. M. Synge aka John Millington Synge ; Sean O'Casey; Padraic Colum; Douglas Hyde; Annie Elizabeth Fredericka Horniman; Ezra Pound; Chinua Achebe; Mairtín O Direain; Mike Scot of The Waterboys band; Seamus Heaney, poet; P. L. Travers aka Pamela Lyndon Travers, OBE aka Mary Poppins; introduced James Joyce to Ezra Pound, gifting that Irish genius to the world, where otherwise he never would have been published; Peter Haining; William T. Gorski; Graham Hough; Patrick J. Keane;
Friends
Ernest Rhys; Edwin Ellis ; Olivia Shakespear; Edward Martyn; Lady Gregory; George Moore; Eva Gore Booth; Percy Metcalfe; Maud Gonne, actress; her daughter Iseult Gonne; with his secretary Ezra Pound, admired Benito Mussolini the Italian Fascist; Irish General Eoin O'Duffy; Margot Ruddock; Ethel Mannin; H.L. Mencken; Charles Johnston
Enemies
W. H. Auden; Aleister Crowley; Major John MacBride; Jesuit Father Peter Finlay;
Organizations
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Isis-Urania temple,; Rhymers' Club; the “Tragic Generation” of artists; “The Ghost Club”, 1911; Dublin Hermetic Society, 1885; Theosophical Society ; “Irish Literary Revival” movement; Irish Literary Theatre ; the “Order of the Alchemical Rose”;
Author
the Celtic Twilight; In The Seven Woods; “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson”, 1885; “John Sherman” 1891; “Dhoya”, 1891; “The Isle of Statues”; The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889); Poems (1895); The Secret Rose (1897); The Wind Among the Reeds (1899); play Cathleen Ni Houlihan ; play At the Hawk's Well; “Easter, 1916”; 'The Fisherman'; A Vision (1925) describes his and Georgie's automatic writing and trance experiments; The Secret Rose And Rosa Alchemica; Is the Order of R.R. & A.C. to Remain a Magical Order? On the Golden Dawn;
Search the Hermetic Library
References
External References
- https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/friend-or-foe-how-wb-yeats-damaged-the-legacy-of-arthur-griffith-1.4462195 “Yeats came to articulate an ostensibly gendered theory that Ireland had long pursued fixed ideas until 'at last a generation is like an hysterical woman who will make unmeasured accusations and believe impossible things'. One wonders to what extent this was a projection of his earlier confused and obsessive fixation on Maud Gonne, who rejected him in favour of the militant republican John MacBride.”
- https://www.patheos.com/blogs/marginalia/2023/03/charley/ Story of Charles Johnston and William Butler Yeats childhood friendship and later co-founding Dublin Hermetic Society, and more. — “Soon after his enrollment, Charley met another new student, a 'lanky youth, with shaggy black hair,' named William Butler Yeats. The two boys would become fast friends. 'Some instinct drew us together,' Yeats would later say. 'Willie Yeats and I gravitated together,' Charley would confirm. They bonded over a shared interest in science, and enjoyed experimenting 'in physics, chemistry, and electricity, with some homemade contrivances,' to varying degrees of success. '[Yeats] was a rabid Darwinian,' Charley would say, 'and, like all new proselytes, longed for a convert; and I, as his school chum, was the natural prey.' Charley was more sympathetic of spiritual matters.”
- https://www.vqronline.org/essay/ae-and-wb — “That Madame Blavatsky was working towards Theosophy; the Theosophical Society was founded in 1875; it had reached Dublin within ten years—Yeats gave the opening address to the Dublin Hermetic Society.”
- https://jpellegrino.com/teaching/yeats.html (A timeline of life events)