This appendix compiles lengthy sections of text where the last document approved by WBY differs significantly from the text as printed in 1937. In the absence of the setting copy, and of all galleys and proofs, these texts gesture to WBY’s processes of revision between his preparation of the setting typescript and the publication of A Vision. See Editors’ Introduction, xxxix–l.
Excised Section of “Rapallo” (Packet, 7–9)
In A Packet for Ezra Pound (Dublin: The Cuala Press, 1929), “Rapallo” includes a sixth section, struck through on the setting copy for A Vision and so excised from the 1937 printing.
VI
Four weeks ago I read poetry again after four years philosophical study; at first it was faint like an old faded letter, and then an excitement that I had not felt for years. I read contemporary poets in various pamphlets of verse, in a couple of anthologies, finding a great deal I had forgotten or had never known, and then came Ezra Pound’s ‘Personæ’. One is a harder judge of a friend’s work than of a stranger’s because one knows his powers so well that his faults seem perversity, or we do not know his powers and think he should go our way and not his, and then all in a moment we see his work as a whole and judge as with the eyes of a stranger. In this book just published in America are all his poems except those Twenty-seven Cantos which keep me procrastinating, and though I had read it all in the little books I had never understood until now that the translations from Chinese, from Latin, from Provencal, are as much a part of his original work, as much chosen as to theme, as much characterised as to style, as the vituperation, the railing, which I had hated but which now seem a necessary balance. He is not trying to create forms because he believes, like so many of his contemporaries, that old forms are dead, so much as a new style, a new man. Again and again he breaks the metrical form which the work seemed to require, or which, where he is translating, it once had, or interjects some anachronism, as when he makes Propertius talk of an old Wordsworthian, that he may pull it back not into himself but into this hard, shining, fastidious modern man, who has no existence, who can never have existence, except to the readers of his poetry. I remember the devil’s imps & their nightly drop of blood from the witch’s head, some German story of the devil’s name that sounded Greek and noble but no man could remember it, and I try to remember a passage from Plotinus ‘On the Titular Genius.’ Yes, a Titular Genius, that from which a man obtains his special quality and honour, but having, unlike his character, universality, detachability; a being therefore to be introduced to our sons and daughters!1 Synge once said to me ‘All our modern poetry is the poetry of the lyrical boy’,2 but here, in spite of all faults and flaws,—sometimes that exasperation is but nerves—is the grown man, in ‘Cathay’ his passion and self-possession, in ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ his self-abandonment that recovers itself in mockery, everywhere his masterful curiosity.3
‘Go, my songs, seek your praise from the young
and from the intolerant,
Move among the lovers of perfection alone.
Seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean light’ . . .4
March and October, 1928 (7–9).
Book II Typescript (NLI 36,272/6/1b, leaves 2–5)
As rendered in the carbon of the setting TS, the ending of Section I of Book II (138–39) differs substantially from the printed text, even in being separated into two sections.
At death consciousness passes from Husk to Spirit Husk and Passionate Body are said to “disappear”, which corresponds to Creative Mind and Body of Fate ceasing to be “enforced” at their phase 22, and from that on to birth Spirit turns from Passionate Body and clings to Celestial Body, as Creative Mind in the primary phases turns from Mask and clings to Body of Fate.
II
The Husk is more than kind or race, and Passionate Body is more than what is sensible or perceivable. Through the Husk is expressed the needs of a particular daimon: it draws to itself and turns into pleasure and pain those objects of sense that symbolise those daimons that are its natural associates. Through the Body of Fate we touch the Creative Minds of all other beings; through the Passionate Body their Husks, for every daimon is a centre that has all other daimons for circumference. The Spirit knows by an act of pure consciousness; what the Spirit knows becomes a part of itself and is accepted as intellectual necessity, and for this reason my instructors have called the Celestial Body “fate” although I have preferred to keep the word for the Faculties where it describes the sum of fact. The Husk is not only the natural senses but what Blake called the enlarged and numerous senses, it knows the ultimate reality through its Passionate Body as multitude, but the Spirit knows it in the Celestial Body as one, and I must not attempt to solve the impossible. “In aeternitatis opposita coincidunt”.5 It must not be thought that spirit is reality and sense illusionary, both are illusionary because abstracted from that reality symbolised as the sphere.
The Spirit cannot find those others in their unity unless unless [sic] it first seeks them in the objects of sense separate from it and from one another (the Passionate Body exists “to save the Celestial Body from solitude”) and only because it so seeks as it were in hunger and thirst can it receive the Celestial Body in marriage. In the symbolism of my instructors the Celestial Body is a captive, sometimes in a lonely tower, and is said to age as the Passionate Body grows young.
The Spirit begets the next life, the stream of images and events, and then from birth “disappears” but continues to act through the Huskk spearating [sic] from one another those forms which now constitute the Passionate Body but were once through past unions with the Celestial Body a part of itself; but the Celestial Body, now evil because separate, pursues the forms and encloses them in time and space.6 The Passionate Body, which somewhat resembles Aristotle’s matter, cannot be known to sense or Husk except through Spirit which alone can make one Principle known to another, nor can it be known to intellect until the Faculties which are a derivation from Husk find names and attributes. Some srtists [sic] seek to undo the work of the Faculties and to reach through associations of excitement pure Passionate Body—perhaps some philosophers have attempted an equal impossibility—the discovery of pure Celestial Body.
Book II Typescript (NLI 36,272/6/1b, leaves 14–18)
From the paragraph that in the printed text begins “If we consider East . . .” on 145, and continuing to “The foregoing figure shows the position . . .” on 147, the TS carbon differs significantly from the printed text, and so is reproduced here.
The pole of the Principles, if we place it in that of the year, is at right angles to that of the Faculties. My instructors fixed this upon my mind by saying that the man of the Principles stood upright whereas the man of the Faculties lay horizontal like a sleeping man. That the small Wheels and Vortexes that run from birth to birth may be part of the symbolism of the Wheel of the 28 incarnations without confusing it in the minds [sic] eye, my instructors have preferred to give to the Principles of these small Wheels a cone that cannot be confused with that of the Faculties. The dominant thought is to show Husk starting on its journey from the centre of the Wheel as if from the incarnate daimon, and Spirit from the circumference as though it received its impulse from beyond the daimon. These cones are drawn across the centre of the Wheel from Faculty to Faculty, two with bases joined between Creative Mind and Body of Fate, and two with apexes joined between Will and Mask. Within these figures move the Principles, Spirit and Celestial Body in the figure shaped like an ace of diamonds, Husk and Passionate Body in that shaped like an hour glass. The first figure I shall for convenience think of as divided according to the signs of the Zodiac, though it can be divided as readily according to the points of the compass, the East or sunrise taking the place of the Vernal Equinox, and the second figure I shall divide into the 28 lunar phases. In the cones of the Spirit and the Celestial Body there is only one gyre, that of Spirit, Celestial Body being represented by the whole diamond. The union of Spirit and Celestial Body has a long approach and is complete when the gyre reaches its widest expansion. There is only one gyre because whereas Husk faces an object alien to itself, S pirit’s [sic] object is of like nature to itself. The gyre of the Husk starts at the centre (its phase 1) reaches its phase 8 at the circumference where the Mask is and returns to its centre for phase 15, passes from its centre to its phase 22 (at the circumference) where the Will is and finishes at the centre. One records these movements, phases for Husk, zodiacal signs for Spirit,7 upon the edges of the figures, Husk and Passionate Body moving from right to left and the single gyre of Spirit from left to right. Husk and Passionate Body remain always opposite, Passionate Body at phase 15 when Husk is at phase 1 and so on. When the gyres of Husk and Passionate Body are at the centre of their figure Spirit is at the widest expansion of the Diamond.
The converging and diverging lines of this figure should be first considered. When Spirit is at either end of the diamond it is upon the pole, upon the antithetical or lunar centre of its movement; and when at the widest expansion is where that movement is primary or solar. When Husk is at the greatest contraction of the hourglass it is upon the pole, upon the antithetical or lunar centre of its movement, which is also the centre of the Wheel of 28 incarnations. Though for convenience we make the diamond narrow like the diamond on a playing card, its widest expansion must be considered to touch the circumference of the Wheel where it meets the gyre of the 13th cone. When Spirit is at Cancer, its symbolical summer, Spirit and Celestial Body in union predominate though Husk and Passionate Body are at their centre. When Husk is at phase 15 Husk and Passionate Body in union predominate. Taken in relation to the Wheel of the diamond and the hourglass are two pulsations, one moving outward, one moving inward. Owing to the fact that the diamond touches the circumference of the Wheel with its narrow ends this is the least satisfactory of the diagrams pictorially. The figure shows the position of the diamond and hourglass when Will on the Wheel is passing phase 17, the arrows show Husk and Spirit as they are placed just after the beginning of the phase.
The following diagram shows such cones when Will on the Wheel of the 28 phases is at phase 15.
Book II Typescript (NLI 36,272/6/1b, leaves 30–32)
The TS carbon includes an additional section, appearing between the current sections XVI and XVII (157).
XVII
As the Will moves through the 28 phases, the three other Faculties awaken their phases in regular order, but there is a seemingly disorderly movement which my instructors have named the “Lightning Flash”. The flash starts at Will and moves with seeming irregularity from phase to phase until it ends at the phase that gives its character to the next incarnation. We can mark this flash upon the Wheel when we consider the Wheel as all instantaneously present, but when we consider the W heel [sic] in time the flas[h] becomes but an image in the eye. The phases it has touched are more important than the others and are called “Initiatory Moments” and differentiate certain points among others touched by the gyres at one or other side of its cone, whereas the ends of the cones are called “Critical Moments”. The “Initiatory Moments” change the symbol, a new love or the transformation of an old love, a new historical purpose, whereas the “Critical Moments” liberate from all symbol. The “Lightning Flash” is what makes two men at the same phase and as near to the same moment and the same place as may be, two men who are twins let us say, differ from one another. It is a conscious act as distinguished from the circular course of nature; its origin never explained, unexplainable, lies in the past and the future and yet lies fully in the present, and though the “flash” may seem to occupy many years it is but an instant of the last initiation.
When its Initiatory and Critical Moments are moments of activity or change in sexual life my instructors can without difficulty—I have tested this—date them in the “Ephemeris” by their association with certain planets. These irregularly placed moments determine the phasal character of the sexual lure and explain why a woman, of, let us say, phase 25 does not always follow a woman of an earlier phase. She is as it were uprooted, planted elsewhere in the temporal or natural order. Sometimes my instructors have constructed a s igil [sic] like those in old books of magic, and only when re-drawn ypon [sic] the Wheel, only when one has noticed where its first point, its last point, and its angles fall, does one discover in this zig-zag sigil or “Flash” a series of initiatory moments, the essential character of an action or a man. Certain mystics have indeed drawn similar lines between the petals of a symbolic Rose, where every petal has its separate meaning, marking the beginning and end with a minute circle.
Book III Typescript (NLI 36,272/6/2a, leaves 5–8)
The TS carbon contains a lengthy section of text that in the printed version is replaced by the first five sentences of section V (162). This text is heavily corrected in ink in WBY’s hand, and text rendered in italics was added in manuscript.
V
Should one say, Like Swedenborg, that the spirits enter into our dreams and thoughts, into our unconscious life whether we wake or sleep, or that their daimons (Principles) are present to our daimons (our Principles) and that it is our daimon that compels us to dream and think. The second seems most compatible with the system I am expounding. All ghosts controls, communicators, materialisations, poltergeists, apparitions, instructors, are personnifications [sic], dramatisations of what would otherwise remain unknown, but these dramatisations conveyed from one man to another as daimon becomes aware of daimon, or if you prefer by “suggestion”, “thought transference” take their forms from general experience, forms that can be studied as we study dreams in the old dream books or in those of the psycho-analysts. The true spirits, the discarnate daimons, the objective principles, are served by these subjective fabrications, relieved of certain burdens, but are of another nature, for all that speaks, reasons, dramatises, wills, belongs to the Faculties and the Faculties are cast off at death. Whenever I speak of spirits having form or voice it must be understood that such dramatisations are implied.
I have explained the symbolism of the state between birth and death in book II, section 1. At death (phase 15 on the Wheel of the Faculties) Husk and Passionate Body “disappear”[,] Spirit and Celestial Body “appear”; at birth (phase 8 1 on the Wheel of the Faculties) Husk and Passionate Body “appear”, Spirit and Celestial Body “disappear”. These words take the place of ‘enforced’ and ‘unenforced’ which are appropriate to the acquired or voluntary Faculties.
Discarnate life corresponds to the months from mid-March to mid-September, and the sisx states described in the book are the “Vision of the Blood Kindred” (March), the “Return” or “Dreaming Back” (April), the “Shiftings” “First Purification” (May), tThe “Beatitude” “Marriage” (June), the “Second Purification” (July), the “Preparation” “Foreknowledge” (August). The six states are states of learning that climax in tThe “Beatitude” “Marriage” whereas the primary phases in the Wheel of the Faculties are states of obedience that climax in phase 1.
VI
The In “the Vision of the Blood Kindred” I do not fully understand, but it is too picturesque to ignore. , Tthe blood kindred appear to the dying man, the more recent the more vividly, from amongst them come those visions of husband or wife seen by the dying. The Husk as an expression of Passionate Body [text added in ink and then struck through], now separated from the acquired Faculties (the particular man as a part of nature) is about to “disappear” and can only do so by completing itself in a moment of perception comparable to the act of synthesis that accompanies the breaking of the Will at phase 22. It This Vision is followed by the “Meditation”8 corresponding to the acceptance, fate or “emotion of Sanctity” at these[?] phases; where the Spirit discovers its relation to the Celestial Body. During this “Meditation” the Husk [. . .]
Book III Typescript (NLI 36,272/6/2a, leaves 14–26)
Beginning on 167 (“Teaching Spirits are Spirits of the Thirteenth Cone . . .”), and continuing to the end of Book III, the text of the TS carbon differs radically from that of the printed text. Text rendered in italics was added in manuscript.
The Spirit oscillates between the Dreaming Back and the Celestial Body, and these two states are compared to sleeping and The dreaming back may be supplemented by what is called the phantasmagoria. The spirit has itself no creative power, but the spirits of the thirteenth cone may create an illusionary life which exhausts emotion. Houses appear to satisfy hope or habit, the child seems to grow to maturity, or with the help of some medium a christmas tree is created.I The spirit oscillates between the Dreaming Back or Phantasmagoria and the celestial body. The first two states are compared to sleep and are represented upon the gyre by a stoppage of movement. The celestial body is made apparent by the spirits of the 13th cone during what my instructors have called the teaching. They may make the man aware not merely of the events of his past life in the order of their occurrence but of the events of their earlier lives especially those which occurred where celestial body, husk and passionate body fall upon the wheel of a cycle. The act of teaching is by its very nature a recession through time, a disappearance of the present moment.
Book III. Chap. 8
The passage from event to event with the periodical falling back into Passionate Body when some event seems to complete itself shows to the Spirit the course and effect of all the passionate events of life. This showing is not the work of Spirit itself because Spirit separated from the Faculties cannot choose, can but attend or withold attention, nor that even without the collaboration of some living man. It has been purified of pleasure and pain and must now be purified of good and evil, and in this the Celestial Body is present as it were in person and not through its messengers. Events are no longer seen and explained but are lived, and the Spirit is now saidto [sic] live a true life. The past life seen as cause and effect is almost identical with the timeless Celestial Body, almost apprehended as a single simultaneous act. It is not completely identical with the Celestial Body nor with Spirit because it has been judged in relation to the code accepted during life. But nowthe [sic] Code itself must be judged and transcended; as Spirit and Celestial Body approach each other events losetheir [sic] separate identity, reveal themselves as an abstraction from Divine Wisdom or Reality.
The change from the Return to the First Purification is analogous to that after phase II. The unity that had hitherto been sought in external events and some accepted code is revealed through the One, but the One is not now within the human personality but in Celestial Body, present to the Spirit as its Other. In the Dreaming Back associated with this state concrete acts that studied by the Spirit in relation to the code accepted during life have disturbed the conscience are relieved in the order of their intensity. Their pain, when they are painful, is moral suffering and cannot be cast off until the code itself is merged in reality. Cornelius Agrippa speaks of those who among the dead imagine themselves “surrounded by flames and persecuted by demons” and confers upon them the name “Hobgoblin”. There is a girl in a Japanese play whose ghost tells a Priest of a slight sin, if indeed it was sin, which seems great because of her exaggerated conscience. She is surrounded by flames, and though the Priest explains that if she but ceased to believe in those flames they would cease to exist, believe she must, and the play ends with an elaborate dance, the dance of her agony. Here too, it seems plain, the Spirit may eke out its knowledge with that of the living, or be helped as that Priest might have helped, be released from Purgatory as we say; that it has still its part among those whose beliefs it shared, or shared in some measure while living.
The Third State called the Marriage, Celestial Body is completely absorbed in Spirit (as Mask is in Will at phase 15) or in a timeless moment of pure consciousness or unconsciousness that must not be called the present because the present divides past and future and implies their existence. This moment has been compared to two mirrors which are empty because face to face. My instructors have described it as follows, “the Celestial Body is the Divine Cloak lent to all, it falls away at the consummation and Christ is revealed”, words which seem to echo Bardesan’s “Hymn of the Soul” where a King’s son asleep in Egypt (physical life) is sent a cloak which is also an image of his body. II He sets out to his father’s kingdom wrapped in the cloak. This state must not be confused with the Beatitude a state analagous [sic] to Unity of Being which may occur either in the first or second Purification according to the nature of the soul. Antithetical man has a Primary daimon, or Primary Principles, and will enter the Beatitude if at all during the Second Purification. Primary man has an antithetical daimon and will enter the Beatitude in the First Purification. It is a state symbolical of ultimate reality, or of the final solution of the antinomies. All is not lost in Spirit but the Spirit finds itself in all.
IX.
Before and after the Marriage occurs an experience called the Shiftingswhich [sic] corresponds to the Interchange of the Tinctures in the Wheel of the Faculties. The Solar and Lunar Principles exchange their contents. What was motive may become environment and vice-versa. This may last until the mid-point between birth and death when the Shiftings recur once more. A life may however have to be re-lived before the exchange is either complete or unnecessary. I will quote the actual words of the automatic script which were made perhaps harsh and paradoxical to startle me into attention. I am compelled to remember that my instructors once defined the Antithetical Tincture as evil, the Primary as good.
During the Purifications when the Spirit no longer knows the particular events of its past or future lives every experience is universalised, made absolute, keyed to the utmost intensity. The Spirit lives either “the best possible life in the worst possible surroundings” or the contrary of this. The Beatitude and the Shiftings can be described as contrary states for in the first the Spirit returns to the Whole in the second to its opposite. Yet there is no suffering “for in a state of equilibrium there is neither emotion nor sensation”, and seeing thatfor [sic] all “in the limits of the good and evil of the previous life—————————the soul is brought to a comprehension of good and evil, neither its utmost good not [sic] its utmost evil can force sensation or emotion”. One remenbers [sic] the most beautiful of the Enneads that upon “The Impassivity of the Disembodied”.
X
My instructors speak of those in the states before the Beatitude as the dead and confine the word spirit (as distinct from Spirit) to those in the Beatitude or later states. The dead, if they approach the living during the Meditation, appear as they were a little before death, if during the Return as they appeared during the moment of life just lived through in the Dreaming Back, if during the First Purification in whatever form they most impressed themselves upon the living. If a spirit appear during the Beatitude it wears a form symbolical of the Divine Intellect. In the state I am about to describe the spirit appears as the shape-changer of tradition.
“ ‘Twas said that she all shapes could wear;
And often times before him stood
Amid the trees of some thick wood,
In semblance of a lady fair;
And taught him signs, and showed him sights
In Craven’s dens, or Cumbrian heights”.
XI
The dead meet one another under the constraint of necessity. In the Dreaming Back each is alone in his dream though many may compose a single event; during the Return they are not alone but meet only as some past event permits. During the Phantasmagoria they may meet at the permission of the 13th Cone; during the First Purification as that of the Celestial Body. During the Second Purification spirits are drawn like to like. “We have no freedom” said an inhabitant of this state “but to purify our intention”, meaning, as I found afterward, to purify it of “complication” or of all that is not compatible with its ideal aim or ruling love of its group. It is a state not of thought but of contemplation. These aims unseal the soul’s ultimate rest whereas the First Purification unsealed its source by turning necessity into thought. It is in the presence of those forms copied in the Fine Arts, the forms and acts of those liberated Daimons that await the cycles’ end and their final absorption in God. But Spirits must draw upon the Faculties of the living whose daimonic or unconscious words or actions they control that they may turn their vision into knowledge. Those who taught me this system claim to have done so not for my sake but for the sake of their own “purification”. III We say Spirit has no present moment but only after the Marriage is a spirit truly Spirit. When truly Spirit it is identical with the life it perceives or knows. The forms and voices that seem to display it and in so doing to possess a present moment are created by the daimons of the living. For that reason my instructors have said “we never give thoughts, we create such a situation as compels you to listen to your daimon . . . . . . we are objectivity”. Under the directions of the 13th cone they display, that they may achieve their own purification, the ruling love or hate of their group.
The “Foreknowledge” is a vision of the next incarnation in its concrete detailin [sic] its alliances and groups, if the spirit is not in phase it may seek to act upon the living so as to influence its own future life but it cannot affect that life unless at the bidding of the 13th cone. It may be full of a partizan [sic] intensity unknown to living men because it foresees the remote consequence of some perhaps trivial act and this emotion and the action it inspires constitutes the frustration dreaded by mediums. This frustration this partizan [sic] intensity have however no consequencef or [sic] the spirit, for the discarnate spirit cannot create, except that it may delay its birth which cannot take place until all it has foreseen is admitted to be just. In the sleep of the womb it recognises its future life as its own choice.
XIII
All the involuntary acts and facts of life are the effect of the whirring and interlocking of the gyres, but gyres may be broken or twisted by greater gyres. Sometimes individuals are primary and antithetical to one another and joined by a bond so powerful that they form a common gyre or series of gyres. This gyre or these gyres no greater gyre may be able to break till exhaustion comes. Doubtless we all to some extent meet again and again the same people and certainly in some cases form a kind of family of two or three or more persons who come together life after life until all passionate relations are exhausted, the child of one life the husband, wife, brother or sister of the next. Sometimes however a single relationship will repeat itself, turning its revolving wheel again and again, especially, my instructors say, where there has been strong sexual passion. All such passions they say, with an unexpected austerity, contain “cruelty and deceit”, and this antithetical cruelty and deceit must be expiated in primary suffering and submission, or the old tragedy will be repeated. They are expiated between birth and death life because they are actions, but their victim must expiate between death and birth the ignorance that made them possible. The victim must life in a state analagous [sic] to the Interchange of the Tinctures or to The Shiftings, the act of cruelty, not as victim but as tyrant; whereas the tyrant must by a necessity of his or her nature become the victim. But if one is dead and the other living they find each other in thought and symbol, the one that has been passive and is now active may from within control the other once tyrant now victim. If the act is associated with the Return or the Purification the one that controls from within, re-living as a form of, knowledge what once was tyranny,gives [sic] not pain but ecstasy. The one whose expiation is an act needs for the act some surrogateIV or symbol of the other and offers to some other man or woman submission or service, but because the unconscious mind knows that this act isfated [sic] no new gyre is started. The expiation because offered to the living for the dead is called “expiation for the dead” but is in reality expiation for the daimon, for passionate love is from the Daimon which seeks by union with some other daimon to reconstruct above the antinomies its own true nature. The souls of victim and tyrant are bound together and unless there is a redemption, through the intercommunication of the living and the dead, that bond may continue life after life, and this is just for there had been no need of expiation had they seen in one another each other and not something else. The expiation is completed and the oscillation brought to an end for each at the same moment. There are other bonds besides those between tyrant and victim but of these I know nothing. We get happiness, my instructors say, from those we have served, ecstacy [sic] from those we have wronged.
XIV
When describing phase 22 Book I Part II I spoke of the alternation between Sage and Victim “Here takes place an interchange between portions of the mind which corresponds—————to the interchange between the old and new Primary, the old and new Antithetical at phase I and 15. The mind that has shown a predominately emotional character, called that of the victim, through the antithetical phases, now shows a predominately intellectual character, called that of the Sage . . . . . . . . . . whereas the mind that has been predominately that of the Sage puts on Victimage etc.”. This symbolism becomes intelligible when we so superimpose the cones of the Principles upon those of the Faculties that they lie at right angles to one another. The interchange of Sage and Victim is the interchange upon the upon the [sic] Wheel of the Faculties at what corresponds to the mid-point between death and birth, birth and death. It seems strange that Sage and Victim should suggest Tyrant and Victim, but the Sage and Tyrant echo the Antithetical Tincture. The Sage is described as dependent for his strength upon a tradition or logical process independent of himself, a wing of the antinomy asserted against the whole; and both victims expiate ignorance. The Victim that is the opposite of the Sage is the One present in all things and he suffers because he shares the sufferings of all. I think of Ramakrishna and certain followers of his who if they saw a man or beast beaten in the street displayed the stripes upon their own bodies, and of Saint Lydwine of Schiedam who took the diseases of others upon herself.
XV
In Book II Section XV I described how the cone of the twelve cycles is cut by a cone to which we give the name of the 13th cone. The double cone so constituted is a cone of the Faculties and at its phase 22 and phase 8 comes an Interchange that has no technical name. It is that whereby a supernatural guide is brought into existence. The 13th cone contains the Ghostly Self, the self that does not incarnate, and there is a Victimage for the Ghostly Self corresponding to that which though it be for the incarnate daimon is called Victimage for the dead. The soul in Victimage for the Dead takes upon itself suffering because it has through some excess or particularity of living wounded that body which represents the body of the whole. Victimage for the Ghostly Self follows a refusal to live, whether from fear of injuring oneself or others or necessitated by conviction. Because the Ghostly Self hungers for nature and seeks it thro,ugh [sic] man and starves if the man refuse to live the man when the Interchange takes place becomes the Victim and is starved for the supernatural that is now the Sage—Eli! Eli! Lama Sabacthani.
In this double cone the human cycles run from phase 15 to phase I, and at phase 22 which corresponds with cycle 6 and 7 there is a state analogous to the Beatitude Marriage Beatitude.
Sometimes expiation for the Ghostly Self and Expiation for the dead coincide.
Book IV Typescript (NLI 36,272/26, leaves 10–12)
The latest surviving typescript of the latter parts of Book IV contains two short but interesting sections that were cut before the printed text. In that typescript, they appear between the material that would become sections XI and XIII in the printed text, possibly in lieu of the current section XII (188–89). Text rendered in italics was added in manuscript.
7
Upon the other hand we may regard the whole period of two thousand years as a dark fortnight, a movement through the Phases from Phase I5 to Phase I. When an historical Phase is Phase I5, the bierth of Christ, there is what is called when we speak of the individual life a Critical Moment. The primary west as I have explained in the completed symbol begets the primary east upon the antithetical east—Libra upon Aries in the solar symbolism—or seals it with its character, and the child so begotten is Christ or Christendom. When our historical era approaches Phase I, or the beginning of a new era the antithetical east will beget upon the primary west and the child or era so born will be antithetical. The primary child or era is predominately western, but because begotten upon the east, eastern in body, and if I am right in thinking that my Instructors imply not only the symbolical but the geographical east, Asiatic. Only when that body begins to wither can the western church predominate visibly.
Some years ago I repeated in Westminster Abbey a trick of the mind I had first practised in a baroque Italian church. All I compared those preposterous crowded marble figures to Asiatic figures with half a dozen seemed at my bidding to thrust out three or four arms apiece. I said to myself “I am somewhere in Thibet and in the Temple of some old decadent Asiatic faith”, and now all that marble seemed so full of exciting history that I would not for the world have an inch of it away. I understood for the first time, though it sounds simple enough, that Christianity in its present form was an eastern religion that had spread through Europe as the Mahomettan conquest spread into Sicily and Spain, that when the neo-Thomist bids us cling to what is western he is turning away from all that has made his Christianity a religion, turning to its inmost character indeed, but to something that is not religion, to something that declares itself at the moment when faith sees its the tomb shows at the turn of the road. The next era should have a harsh secular western body but gradually as that body dies reveal its Asiatic soul. It may even be as my Instructors have said that we shall seek through hate and science what we once sought through faith and love[.]
Book IV Typescript (NLI 36,272/30, leaf 28)
A folder of rejected odd pages of what would become Book IV contains two very brief sections that might initially have been intended to follow what is in the printed Macmillan text the final section (192). We here transcribe the text from the typescript. Text rendered in italics was added in manuscript.
XIX
The circuit of the four principles occupies four thousand years and a few years over, the life of Christ corresponding to the mid-point between birth and death, 1050 A.D. to death, the approaching influx to the mid-point between death and birth, a date some 1500 years later to birth and the place of Aries marked in [of?] the [Sign?] on the wheel of the four thousand years. Aries in the diagram of the Great Wheel.
XX
I have left unexpounded certain automatic scripts about the relations of man and woman as this book is sufficiently complicated, though I have touched upon their symbols. The more historically important of the phases marked upon the upper and lower sides of the figure correspond to loves or episodes in love that fix some new symbol or lure and constitute initiatory moments and the final influx to that liberation from all lures and symbols, that presence of a love which does not pass away being fated and accepted that my instructors have named a critical moment.
Book V Typescript (NLI 36,272/6/2c)
Preserved with the TS carbon are two draft stages, dated September 1932, of what would become “The End of the Cycle” (see 219–20). The first text, typed on different paper from the rest of the setting-copy carbon, comprises 9 leaves, and it is heavily marked with corrections. The second text, also 9 leaves and on the same paper as the rest of the carbon of the setting-copy typescript, is unmarked and incorporates the changes from the first version. We reproduce here the second text, with annotations representing the most substantial changes from the first text.
DOVE AND SWAN.
(Directions to printer)
After the words “possibility of science[”] in “Dove or Swan”—“A Vision” page 210—put a row of dots and then the words “finished at Capri. February 1925.”
Omit all from “possibility of science” to the end of page 215 and insert instead what follows, under the heading “1931 to the end of the cycle”.
The most honoured historians describe great public events as the result of inevitable social or economic forces but never announce those events beforehand; no government sends for them as did that of the commonwealth for Lilly the astrologer;9 yet science is prophecy, the laboratory corroborates the text book, the stars the calendar. Karl Marx said that the opponents of Hegel, “that great mind” as he calls him, would see the dialectic at work and has foretold its work, but Karl Marx thought his words could shape that work.
Day after day I have sat in my chair turning a symbol over in my mind, exploring all its details, defining and again defining its elements, testing my convictions and those of others by its unity, attempting to substitute particulars for an abstraction like that of an algebra. I have felt the convictions of a life-time melt though at an age when the mind should be rigid, and others take their place, and these in turn give way to others. How far can I expect socialistic or communistic prophecies? I remember debates in the little coach-house at Hammersmith or at Morris’ supper table afterwards. I remember the Apocalyptic dreams of the Japanese saint and labour leader Kagawa whose books were lent me by a Galway Clergyman; and a communist described by Captain White in his memoirs ploughing on the Cotswold Hills nothing on his great hairy body but sandals and a pair of drawers, nothing in his head but Hegel’s Logic.10 Then I draw myself up into the symbol and it seems as if I should know all if I could but banish such memories and questions and find everything in the symbol.
II
No, that is impossible, I must think of some other age like and yet unlike what the symbol seems to foretell. Perhaps certain pages of Schneider’s analysis of Roman civilisationV give me what I need though my instructors spoke of Greek civilisation alone in their examination of the pre-Christian age. The Roman wheel was differently timed. It began and finished its revolution some centuries later and could be ignored. “Dove or Swan” has a more important omission for which I am responsible. I knew nothing of the Principles when I wrote it. Perhaps my imagination in my own despite will some day force meto [sic] discover their effect upon the 12th and 14th centuries and upon the epoch that has just closed. For the present all I need say is that for a generation or so to come a state analagous to The Beatitude is possible in the daemonic life, but such a state can not act directly on more than a few trained or gifted minds. Schneider does not help me to separate the Roman 23rd phase from the general turbulence of the civil wars (phase 22), he sees however in Augustus Caesar and his poet Virgil the characters I attribute to an antithetical twentyfourth [sic] phase: tradition remained, Augustus ruled in its name, but the public welfare seemed the sole test of tradition and action alike, and every god a public god; personality returned within narrow limits in Ovid, Catullus, Propertius, only private [joys] and sorrows mattered and at last artificial and therefore violent personality (phase 26) created the counter Augustus in Nero. When order accompanied the philosophical identification of the individual and the One: Epicetus [sic] became emperor in Marcus Aurelius (phase 27).
III
Instead of the turbulence of some great person our phase 23 is a movement of unconscious forces and revolutionary ideas which affect the general mass. The European movement from 1680 yo [sic] 1927, an age of industrialism, individualism, capitalism,—Kagawa—insists that capitalism is the only possible cement between developed individuals—latterly democracy seems about to reverse itself. Something has happened which has affected literature and art and still more their criticism. I know young men, not all under the influence of Marxian Russia, who in criticising literature repudiate individual chracterisation and commend, let us say, the second act of Casey’s “Silver Tassie” because man there is described in the mass.11 Others with finer susceptibilities create sacred books, “Ulysses” or “The Waste Land”, where character and detail however clearly seen summon thought to an undefined immensity.12 I remember Pirandello whose dramatis personae find their own characters so plastic that they flow into any mould.13 “You are happy”, says somebody to some woman whose mind has gone, “because nobody can do anything to you now”. She will never again be compelled to torture herself into some strange shape. I remember Wyndham Lewis, who seems to have found a stone where he can stand and watch stream by, those artists, idlers, rich men, low and high-born parasites, who create out of some carefully selected vice, crime or eccentricity, an artificial character. But these artificial characters protect themselves not against suggestibility which implies a suggesting mind but against imitativeness. They resist absorption in the mass of men, in public ideals, in a material external unity as the Hunchback will resist absorption in a spiritual unity; yet it is from their half accomplished absorption that they get their plasticity. The moment (phase 24) has all but come for the Comedia [sic] del arte, for a drama where all characters express the public conscience as it is shaped by history or necessity, or by some resistance to that conscience that soon must seem stupid or in bad taste. Personality, still possible in private, or as it were in a monk’s cell, will lose all public significance. I can imagine much talk of physical health, a preoccupation with the most salubrious scenes and habits, but neither Georgics nor Eclogues, nor sculptured images of mahogany-dark athletes. As we are not in Rome or Greece where politics, always an expression of power, delayed and shaped the decadence, but in primary Europe, economics may create our values. Men see the future in Russia as a hundred and odd years ago they saw it in France, but the Russian revolution will be absorbed like the French revolution in the growing complexity of Europe. The historical conflict does not work itself out, as Marx believed, through a single preoccupation of the conscious mind, but is conterminous with the mind, conscious and unconscious. The Europe of Personality (phases 17, 18, 19) found its expression in Shakespeare, the Europe of Will (phases 19, 20, 21), as I think in Balzac; the moral Europe (phases 23, 24, 25) yet to come may form some man of genius as inferior to Balzac as Balzac is to Shakespeare. That moment too will create its appropriate reaction; many men will turn from what has destroyed their spontaneity and sincerity but find no sanctuary in themselves or in the external world, nor will their study of the next discover analogies of their need. The great nations of the past were in themselves antithetical or belonged to a world that was predominately antithetical. There will be no Ovid, no Catullus, no Marcus Aurelius, but I can imagine a public licence beyond anything we have known, followed by some sudden outbreak of psychic phenomena which, whether it sustain or undermine traditional religion, will cause as much excitement as did witchcraft in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But all that is speculation; we cannot know the future in its particulars. What I hold certain is that the soul which has seemed since 1680 (end of phase 18 the counter of phase 26) a part of something else and little better than a process will recover its autonomy and after violent rebellion substitute in certain chosen minds, for man’s slavery to an external unity submission to a unity that is itself.
IV
Every ancient civilisation in its last phase (harvest and decadence) has ceased to be intelligible to the mass of men and the mass of men have accepted in its place the horseman and the shepherd. How that change will come or under what disguise, eludes my imagination though I seek for it in my own mind. Our civilisation, from its birth in the 10th to the Exchange of the Tinctures in the 15th century faced a vivid, concrete, exciting life (Will and Body of Fate in the natural phases) with a desire growing clearer in the depth of the mind for an abstract external order (Creatice [sic] Mind and Mask in the intellectual and moral phases), but since the Exchange they have faced an abstract and external order with a desire in the depth of the mind (a secret committed to painters, poets and musicians alone), for all that is vivid, concrete and exciting. But this desire can no more bring the shepherd and the horseman than could the pastoral poetry of Rome and Alexandrian Greece bring the migrating hordes; the final change is not from desire but from fate acting through submission and exhaustion.
V.
The unity we move towards will not be that deduced by Graeco-Roman civilisation from Christ’s “I and My Father are One”, Historical Christianity turning in its greater wheel has awakened like the Civilisation, an opposition in the depth of the mind. After the predominance of a single ideal figure, or of a single interpretation, must come multiform influx, the One present in every form, but conscious alone in all that is perfect after its kind; and that is why I foretell the horseman, the ruler, not the shepherd who breaks up and settles.
September 1932.
I. The past incarnations corresponding to his Four Faculties seem to accompany a living man. Once when a child was born in the house I smelt roses everywhere, though none were visible, nor were they in my head alone for the doctor and the child’s mother smelt them. Years afterwards I read in a book called “Nursery Life Three Hundred Years Ago” of a custom that lasted into the Seventeenth Century of washing new-born children in a bath “made wholesome . . . . . . . with red roses”, of rolling them in salt and roses, and of sprinkling them, when the parents could afford it, with [sic] oil of roses. If I assume that the Thirteenth Cone can sendthe [sic] forms from any incarnation which correspond to the place of Faculty or Principle, whether in the present or an earlier cycle, I have an explanation of that emergence during vision of an old Cretan myth described in my autobiography.
II. A living man sees the Celestial Body through the Mask. I awoke one night when a young man to find my body rigid and to hear a voice that came from my lips and yet did not seem my voice saying “We make an image of him who sleeps that is not him who sleeps and we call it Emmanuel”.
III. They insist however that only the actual words spoken or written in a super-normal way assist them. My interpretation of those words does not concern them.
IV. A Bombay friend of mine once saw an Indian peasant standing by the road with many flowers beside her. She gave a flower to each passer-by with the words “I give this to my Lord”. Her Lord was the god Krishna, but the passionate offer to no God but to their [own] dead a similar worship.
V. “The History of World Civilization” Vol. II.