Book IV: The Great Year of the Ancients

1 The textual case of Book IV differs from that of the other revised sections of A Vision. The TS carbon (NLI 36,272/6/2b) includes only nine of the eighteen sections of the book; the other leaves appear to have been lost. There are three other TSs, representing different stages of revision (in working order: NLI 36,272/26, NLI 36,272/28, and NLI 36,272/29). A file contains four miscellaneous revised leaves (MS 36,272/30), perhaps parts of the other TSs at one time. NLI 36,272/26 contains early versions of all sections of the Macmillan text except X, XII, and XVIII, and it has two sections that would be excised entirely from the final version (see Appendix II, 291–93). None of the other TSs goes beyond the middle of section XI of the published text, although NLI 36,272/30 includes TS for rejected sections XIX and XX (see Appendix II, 292–93). Except that it is incomplete, NLI 36,272/6/2b represents a stage far closer to the published text than do any of the other rewritten parts of A Vision.

The astrological Great Year is tied to the phenomenon of the precession of the equinoxes. This is caused by the nutation of the Earth, a “wobble” of the Earth’s axis, often compared to a spinning top that is running down. A single cycle of this “wobble” is now known to take about 25,800 years. As the axis of the Earth describes a circle (as the North Pole gyrates and points to different stars at different periods), the points where the plane of the equator of the Earth intersects with that of the apparent motion of the sun (the ecliptic) shift backwards. These two points represent the two equinoxes, and their position is used to fix the position of the “tropical” zodiac (from the Greek tropoi, turning points), in contrast with the “sidereal” zodiac used in India (from the Latin sidera, stars). At the time when Western astrology and astronomy were being codified in Alexandria, the point of intersection that corresponded to the spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere was at the start of the constellation of Aries and so came to be called “the first point of Aries” (it retains this name in astronomy and astrology). This point is also the very end (30°) of Pisces, and as time has gone on, the equinox has shifted through the constellation of Pisces, such that the “first point of Aries” has shifted through the constellation of Pisces toward Aquarius. The time taken for the equinoctial point to pass through one twelfth of the circle, corresponding to a sign of the zodiac or a regularized constellation, is some 2,160 years. This is the period adopted by the Yeatses’ instructors in their divisions of the historical gyres.

WBY explains the Great Year in the introduction to The Resurrection:

Ptolemy thought the precession of the equinoxes moved at the rate of a degree every hundred years, and that somewhere about the time of Christ and Caesar the equinoctial sun had returned to its original place in the constellations, completing and recommencing the thirty-six thousand years, or three hundred and sixty incarnations of a hundred years apiece, of Plato’s Man of Ur. Hitherto almost every philosopher had some different measure for the Greatest Year, but this Platonic Year, as it was called, soon displaced all the others; it was a Christian heresy in the twelfth century, and in the East, multiplied by twelve as if it were but a month of a still greater year, it became the Manvantra of 432,000 years, until animated by the Indian jungle it generated new noughts and multiplied itself into Kalpas. (Plays 724)

The Great Year has been discussed by any number of commentators in antiquity and into the early modern period (for example, by Marsilio Ficino [1433–99], whose work was translated by GY). The most influential discussion is that by Plato in the Timaeus (thus, the concept has often been termed Annus Platonicus). Pierre Duhem’s Le système du monde is the most comprehensive modern treatment. For a comprehensive list of sources, see Godefroid de Callataÿ, Annus Platonicus: A Study of World Cycles in Greek, Latin and Arabic Sources (Louvain-la-Neuve: Université Catholique de Louvain, 1996), Bibliography 1, 269–76. See also 149.

2 The Fourth Eclogue of Publius Vergilius Maro (70–19 BCE) was often called the “Messianic Eclogue” because of Christian interpretations of its enigmatic prophetic verses about a child who would usher in a new golden age. The Yeatses owned two translations of the Eclogues, one of which is Samuel Palmer’s translation with accompanying etchings (YL 2202, 2203). Cf. AVA 125. WBY’s sources included an article by Kirby Flower Smith, “Ages of the World (Greek and Roman),” Hastings 1:200. The twelve-volume Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, edited by James Hastings, was one of WBY’s main sources for information about the Great Year in antiquity; he purchased it using some of the funds from the Nobel Prize. Other sources include an article by W. Warde Fowler about whether this infant referred to a real child or a representative of a coming generation (“Observations on the Fourth Eclogue of Virgil,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 14 [1903], 17–35); and Virgil and His Meaning to the World of To-Day by J. W. Mackail (London, Calcutta, and Sydney: George G. Harrap, [n.d.]), as mentioned in Diary 1930 (Ex 336). See also the list of sources WBY used for the Great Year noted in the back flyleaf of his edition of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Somnium Scipionis . . . , trans. by L.O. [Levavi Oculos, the Golden Dawn motto of Percy Bullock], Vol. 5 of Collectanea Hermetica, ed. W. Wynn Westcott (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1894) (YL 387). Liebregts gives a corrected transcription of this list (255).

The god Attis, whose cult was originally associated with Phrygia and Greece, was linked to the Great Mother (Cybele), self-castration, death, and resurrection. In Chap. 34 of The Golden Bough, “The Myth and Ritual of Attis,” Sir James Frazer (1854–1941) notes that Attis

was to Phrygia what Adonis was to Syria. Like Adonis, he appears to have been a god of vegetation, and his death and resurrection were annually mourned and rejoiced over at a festival in spring. The legends and rites of the two gods were so much alike that the ancients themselves sometimes identified them.

(Part 4, Adonis Attis Osiris [2nd ed.; London: Macmillan, 1907; YL 700], 229–30)

Cf. references to Attis in “Vacillation” (Poems 254) and The Resurrection (1927 version, VPl 924). WBY marked passages in his copy of the “Hymn to the Mother of the Gods” by Julian the Apostate having to do with Attis, including the explanation for the festival of Attis taking place at the vernal equinox (Julian the Emperor, The Works of the Emperor Julian, trans. Wilmer Cave Wright [3 vols.; Loeb, 1913; YL 1049], 1:471, 473, 479, 489). On the “old lunar year” beginning in March, see n10 below.

3 WBY here substitutes the Roman general and politician Gaius Marius (c. 157–86 BCE) for his great rival Lucius Cornelius Sulla (138–68 BCE) in the complicated military and political upheavals of first-century Rome, but otherwise closely follows his source, Plutarch’s Life of Sulla (to which WBY refers in a note written into the verso of the title page of his copy of Somnium Scipionis). In Chap. 7, Plutarch relates the omens foretelling the disasters in the civil wars following Sulla’s march on Rome (88 BCE):

And when Sulla had set out for his camp on unfinished business, he himself kept at home and contrived that most fatal sedition, which wrought Rome more harm than all her wars together had done, as indeed the heavenly powers foreshowed to them. For fire broke forth of its own accord from the staves which supported the ensigns, and was with difficulty extinguished; and three ravens brought their young forth into the street and devoured them, and then carried the remains back again into their nest; and after mice had gnawed consecrated gold in a temple, the keepers caught one of them, a female, in a trap, and in the very trap she brought forth five young ones and ate up three of them. But most important of all, out of a cloudless and clear air there rang out the voice of a trumpet, prolonging a shrill and dismal note, so that all were amazed and terrified at its loudness. The Tuscan wise men declared that the prodigy foretokened a change of conditions and the advent of a new age. For according to them there are eight ages in all, differing from one another in the lives and customs of men, and to each of these God has appointed a definite number of times and seasons, which is completed by the circuit of a great year. And whenever this circuit has run out, and another begins, some wonderful sign is sent from earth or heaven, so that it is at once clear to those who have studied such subjects and are versed in them, that men of other habits and modes of life have come into the world, who are either more or less of concern to the gods than their predecessors were. All things, they say, undergo great changes, as one again succeeds another, and especially the art of divination; at one period it rises in esteem and is successful in its predictions, because manifest and genuine signs are sent forth from the Deity; and again, in another age, it is in small repute, being off-hand, for the most part, and seeking to grasp the future by means of faint and blind senses. Such, at any rate, was the tale told by the wisest of the Tuscans, who were thought to know much more about it than the rest.

(Plutarch, Lives 4: Alcibiades and Coriolanus, Lysander and Sulla, trans. Bernadotte Perrin [Loeb, 1916], 345–49)

Cf. Petrie, The Revolutions of Civilisation, 9–10, which quotes part of this extract. The passage occurs on 4:61–62 of North’s translation of the Lives (YL 1597). Lady Gregory owned a copy of the 1770 translation by John and William Langhorne (we are indebted to James Pethica for information about the library at Coole). The Etruscan civilization, which flourished in central Italy from the eighth to the fifth century BCE, was gradually defeated by Rome by the third century BCE. WBY refers to the “trumpets heard by Etruscan seers” in On the Boiler (LE 236).

4 From Virgil, Eclogue 4.5–14, probably translated by GY: in her copy of A Vision (1938; YL 2435), “IVth Ecologue” [sic] is written beside the line. The Cumaean Sibyl was the prophetess at the Apollonian oracle at Cumae. Her oracles, the Sibylline Books, were kept in Rome by the quindecimviri sacris faciundis, a college of fifteen men who guarded, consulted, and interpreted them in times of crisis. Astraea, the celestial virgin, abandoned the earth during the Iron Age in favor of the heavens where she became the constellation Virgo. A personification of justice, her return would signal a new golden age. Cf. “Two Songs from a Play” (Poems 216–17, Plays 481–82), The Resurrection (Plays 487), and CL 3:123. The “reign of Saturn” refers to the return of the golden ages associated with one of the oldest gods of Roman religion. Virgil’s patron Gaius Asinius Pollio (75 BCE–4 CE) was a Roman soldier, politician, and man of letters.

5 An earlier version of this section is far shorter:

Why do Caesar and Christ always stand face to face in our imagination? Did not Dante put Judas and Brutus into the mouth of Satan? According to Cicero the official interpreter of oracles had thought of announcing to the Senate House that certain verses of the Sybil proclaimed Caesar that ideal king who would bring the Golden Age, a thought that enraged Cicero the more because “Neither Gods nor men would suffer a king in Rome”.^x Cicero Caesar was killed at the full moon in March—the Ides of March—through coincidence some old custom of sacrifice or the derision of his enemies, or—but what do we know of anything? Christ died at a full moon in March, the first full moon after the vernal equinox and upon that day or upon the Sunday nearest we celebrate Easter.

Yeats’s note referring back the “x” reads: “I take this from Cudworth’s ‘Intellectual System of the World’ for I have no edition of Cicero’s letters near my hand” (NLI 36,272/26, leaves 1–2, text in italics added in manuscript). See n7 below about WBY’s revision of this passage in consultation with Cicero’s letters.

6 In Dante’s Inferno, in the ninth circle of Hell, the poet sees and describes Satan, who chews eternally on three traitors partly stuffed into the jaws of his three mouths: Judas Iscariot, who betrays his master Jesus in the gospels; and Marcus Junius Brutus (c. 85–42 BCE) and Gaius Cassius Longinus (d. 42 BCE), leading assassins of Julius Caesar (Inferno 34.55–69).

7 Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE) was a Roman philosopher, orator, statesman, and writer whose prose style has been of broad influence in Western culture. He wrote a letter to his close friend Titus Pomponius Atticus on July 20 or 21, 45 BCE, alluding in passing to the procession in which Caesar’s image was carried amongst those of the gods in the Ludi Victoriae Caesaris as well as the rumor about Cotta (Letters to Atticus 13.44). Lucius Aurelius Cotta (who was a member of the quindecimviri) was said to have intended to propose the title of King for Julius Caesar, since it was written that the Parthian Empire could be defeated only by a king. The fuller story is told in Cicero’s De Divinatione 1.54 (De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione, with trans. by William Armistead Falconer [Loeb, 1923], 494–97). Plutarch also mentions the incidents in his Life of Caesar (Lives 7: Demosthenes and Cicero, Alexander and Caesar, trans. Bernadotte Perrin [Loeb, 1919], 580–83. Many pages in the Life of Caesar are uncut in the Yeatses’ copy of Plutarch’s Lives (5:267–349; YL 1597).

This passage was revised while WBY was at Coole staying with the gravely ill Lady Gregory in the autumn of 1931. Putting what he thought were final touches on A Vision, he tried and failed to find citations in Cicero’s letters for the story of the prophecies connecting Caesar with a divinely ordained kingship. He enlisted GY for help, as well as Louis Claude Purser (1854–1932), co-editor of Cicero’s voluminous correspondence. Purser pointed to an allusion to the letter in a further source: The True Intellectual System of the Universe, the magnum opus of the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth. On October 20, WBY wrote GY asking her to look up a passage for him in one of the two copies in their library (YL 453, 454).

I enclose a letter of Pursers. Could you look in Cudworths “Intellectual Systems of the World”. You will find it under “sibyl” or “sibyllene Oracle” in the Index. Cicero speaks of Ceasar in connection with the great year & uses the words that “neither gods nor men would tolerate a king in Rome”. Ceasar had thought of having himself repres[ent]ed as the king fortold by the oracle. We have two copies of Cudworth but the one with an index is in three volumes, an eighteenth century or early nineteenth century edition. If the reference is precise do not trouble Purser but if it is, as I expect, merely to a letter to “Atticus” you might ask his help. There are 3 vols of letters to “Atticus”. I don’t want the passage I want merely the reference. I am writing to Purser. (LWBY/GY 258)

GY’s search in the index to the nineteenth-century edition led to the passage in which Cudworth describes Cicero’s account (though referring to the fuller description in Cicero’s De Divinatione and not the letters). Cudworth quotes and translates Cicero extensively, adding a footnote identifying L. Cotta Quindecimvir as the interpreter who, in Cicero’s words, “was lately thought to have been about to declare in the senate-house, that if we would be safe, we should acknowledge him for a king who really was so.” Cicero’s question “If there be any such thing contained in the Sibylline books, then we demand, concerning what man is it spoken, and of what time?” is quoted, as well as Cicero’s opinion that “whoever framed those Sibylline verses, he craftily contrived, that whatsoever should come to pass, might seem to have been predicted in them, by taking away all distinction of persons and times.” Cudworth reports Cicero writing, “Let us also deal with the Quindecimviri and Interpreters of the Sibylline books, that they would rather produce any thing out of them, than a king” (1.465–66, translating Cicero, De Divinatione 1.54).

“The religious party of the Sibyl” is misleading. WBY may have found the phrase in the Loeb edition of the Epistolae ad Familiares (Cicero, The Letters to His Friends, with translation by W. Glynn Williams [3 vols.; Loeb, 1927]). As translated by Williams, Cicero writes to Publius Lentulus Spinther in August 56 that Ptolemy (XII) might be reinstated as king of Egypt “as the Senate originally decided, and that he will be reinstated ‘without a host,’ as was the intention (according to the religious party) of the Sibyl” (1:31). Cicero’s translated phrase, “quemadmodum homines religiosi Sibyllae placere dixerunt,” addresses what the “homines religiosi,” possibly the quindecimviri, reported the Sibylline Books to have said about how Ptolemy’s restoration was to take place.

8 According to a number of ancient sources, the body of Julius Caesar was partially cremated by a mob of plebians after the reading of his testament and a highly emotional oration by Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony). Members of the crowd snatched brands from the fire to burn down the houses of his assassins. As Suetonius relates,

The bier on the rostra was carried down into the Forum by magistrates and ex-magistrates; and while some were urging that it be burned in the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, and others in the Hall of Pompey, on a sudden two beings with swords by their sides and brandishing a pair of darts set fire to it with blazing torches, and at once the throng of bystanders heaped upon it dry branches, the judgment seats with the benches, and whatever else could serve as an offering. Then the musicians and actors tore off their robes, which they had taken from the equipment of his triumphs and put on for the occasion, rent them to bits and threw them into the flames, and the veterans of the legions the arms with which they had adorned themselves for the funeral; many of the women too, offered up the jewels which they wore and the amulets and robes of their children.

(Book 1: The Deified Julius, The Lives of the Caesars, trans. J. C. Wolfe [Loeb, 1913], 115)

Later, a man calling himself Amatius erected an altar on the spot where the body had been burnt. He was killed without trial by Antonius, and the altar (as well as a column dedicated to Caesar) was demolished by Dolabella. According to Walter C. A. Ker,

At the beginning of April an impostor, calling himself a descendant of the great Marius, and therefore of kin to Caesar, but who was, in fact, a horse-doctor called Herophilus or Amatius, appeared in Rome. . . . He now mingled with the crowds that still lingered round the scene of the cremation as a holy spot, fanned the excitement of the mob, and built an altar. . . . At this altar he persuaded the people to pour libations and make sacrifice to Caesar as to a god.

(Cicero, Philippics, trans. Walter C. A. Ker [Loeb, 1926], 10–11)

The detail about his profession comes from Facta et Dicta Memorabilia by Valerius Maximus; one MS of this work reports him to be a horse doctor [(a)equarius medicus] and another an eye doctor [ocularis medicus] (Valerius Maxiumus, Memorable Doings and Sayings, trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey [Loeb, 2000], 390–91). No sources call Herophilus/Amatius a “cow-doctor,” and we have been unable to trace where WBY may have found information about the profession of this minor figure. The events are also described (without this detail) in Charles Merivale, History of the Romans Under the Empire (8 vols.; London: Longman, Green, 1865), 2:86–96.

9 Publius Cornelius Dolabella (70–43 BCE) was a Roman general and politician. He had a short-lived marriage to Cicero’s daughter Tullia, who died in childbed soon after their divorce. After Caesar’s assassination, Cicero wrote him a letter praising him for destroying the altar and pillar erected to Caesar as god and pater patriae. In that letter, Cicero compares Dolabella to Brutus, writing that “Nihil est enim, mihi crede, virtute formosius, nihil pulchrius, nihil amabilius” (“There is nothing fairer, nothing more beautiful, nothing more lovable than courageous action”), Cicero, The Letters to His Friends, trans. W. Glynn Williams (3 vols.; Loeb, 1928), 9.14, 2:228, 229.

10 The Roman calendar, as described by W. Warde Fowler in Hastings, began “with March, which marks the season when all living things, man included, break into fresh activity, and which bears the name of the deity who represented at once the agricultural and the military activity of the community” [i.e., Mars] (“Roman Religion,” 10.822). Julius Caesar revised the Roman calendar in 46 BCE to a new system that was based more closely on a solar or tropical year than the calendar it replaced. The cult of Attis became prominent in Rome after the rise of the empire. According to the entry in Hastings, Attis played a part in a series of Roman festivals occurring in late March. “On March 15 the college of Cannophori, or reed-bearers, took part in the ceremonies of the day by carrying reeds in procession—a custom explained as a commemoration of the finding of Attis by the Great Mother on the reedy banks of the river Gallus, but more likely a reminiscence of a primitive phallic procession” (Grant Showerman, “Attis,” Hastings 2:217). Fowler describes how “The internal arrangement of each [Roman] month had originally been based on the phases of the moon, and this system was maintained, for convenience of reckoning, long after all relations between these phases and the calendar had been lost. The two chief points in a lunar month are the first appearance of the moon’s crescent (Kalendæ), and the full moon (Idus) (Fowler, “Calendar [Roman],” Hastings 3:134).

11 See James G. Carleton, “Calendar (Christian)”: “The primitive Christians all agreed in celebrating Christ’s death and resurrection at the season when they actually occurred, that is, at the time of the Jewish Passover. They also agreed that the Crucifixion took place on a Friday which coincided with the 14th day of the first Jewish (lunar) month Nisan. . . . As Christians made their Paschal anniversaries coincide in season with the Passover, so, for a long period, they were satisfied to accept the Jewish computation of the time of that festival, which should fall on the first full moon after the vernal equinox” (Hastings 3:88–89).

The dating of Easter is a complicated question involving religious principles, solar as well as lunar calculations, and calendars in several Christian and Jewish cultures over many centuries. It has a complex and often tumultuous history. It is not true that the majority of Christendom ever celebrated its major feast on the first full moon after the vernal equinox, as WBY states. Rather, it is generally set on the Sunday after that date. It is unclear where WBY found that some Christians using the Julian calendar (instituted in 46 BCE) celebrated the feast on March 15, an idea that underscores his parallel between Caesar and Christ. See Carleton’s description of Quartodecimanism, the practice of celebrating Easter on the fourteenth day of Nisan, regardless of the day of the week (op. cit.). Some early Christians seem to have complained that Jewish reckonings varied from community to community, sometimes occurring too soon. The author of De pascha computus (243, falsely attributed to St. Cyprian of Carthage and so often referred to as Pseudo-Cyprian) refers to some of his predecessors giving the range of dates for Easter as the Ides of March to the Ides of April (Patrologia Latina. Patrologiae cursus completus: series Latina, ed. J. P. Migne et al. [Paris, 1841–1902], 4:942–72, discussed in Alden A. Mosshammer, The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008], 125–27). Eusebius quotes Dionysus, bishop of Alexandria (7.20), and Anatolius of Alexandria (7.32), complaining about setting the feast before the equinox through errors in the Jewish calendar (The Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius Pamphilus, trans. Christian Frederick Crusé [9th ed.; New York: Stanford & Swords, 1850], 290, 312–14). Since the vernal equinox is an astronomical point, it is not easy to determine. When Julius Caesar reformed the calendar, the vernal equinox was restored to March 25, its date when Numa had made the calendar official rather than truly lunar, but because of the arrangement of leap years, it started drifting “backwards” with the years. It moved back at a rate of about 1 day every 128 years or so, and after a few centuries it was already on March 21.

Another possible source involves the Celtic calendar, probably first made in Gaul at the turn of the fifth century but used in Ireland and Northern England until the mid-7th century. In the Celtic calendar the vernal equinox was set at March 25, so this gave March 26 as the earliest possible date for Easter. Easter calendars using March 21 as the vernal equinox gave March 22 as the earliest possible date for Easter. Thus, in a situation where multiple calendars were in use, as in Merovingian Gaul, the user of the Celtic calendar could criticize the users of the other calendars of celebrating Easter before the vernal equinox. St. Colm Cille (or Columba, 521–97) championed the Celtic calendar and did in fact make this complaint to Pope Gregory the Great in an epistle dated about 600 (see Caitlin Corning, The Celtic and Roman Traditions: Conflict and Consensus in the Early Medieval Church [Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006], 26ff.).

See WBY’s notebook entry from March 26, 1921: “Yesterday morning I was searching through Frazers ‘Adonis’ to find origin of easter & could not find why it was not always at same date. That evening she [GY] told me how soon after lunch (I had not mentioned my research) she got interested in easter & found in some book, whose name she could not remember, that easter was always at first full moon after easter [sic]. . . . I doubt if George’s book was real (YVP 3:74–75).

12 Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), an influential German classical scholar, historian, politician, and jurist, is the author of the History of Rome (3 vols.; 1854, 1855, and 1856), which covers the beginnings of Rome to the rule of Julius Caesar (a promised extension into the imperial period was never written). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902. Mommsen distinguished his profound admiration for Julius Caesar from approval of Caesarism: “From Caesar’s time, as the sequel will show and Gibbon has shown long ago, the Roman system had only an external coherence and received only a mechanical extension, while internally it became even with him utterly withered and dead” (The History of Rome, trans. William Purdie Dickson [5 vols.; London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1894], 5:326). WBY also mentions Mommsen in the note to The Resurrection (Plays 726).

13 The passage is from Cicero’s Dream of Scipio (Somnium Scipionis), a deliberate echo of the myth of Er in Plato’s Republic in an account of a dream vision by Scipio Aemilianus (Scipio Africanus the Younger), which forms the final section of the sixth book of De re publica (6.24). It is unclear whose translation is used here (perhaps GY’s). The passage is quoted (in French) in Duhem 1:283 and also in Bullock’s translation of Somnium Scipionis (YL 387); WBY marked it in his copy of the latter (12).

14 The TS carbon here inserts the extra phrase, “an eclipse perhaps at some particular place in heaven” (NLI 36,272/6/2b, leaf 4, text in italics added in manuscript).

15 For the Indian Great Year, see WBY’s introduction to The Holy Mountain (LE 153–54) and his note to The Resurrection (Plays 724), where he cites Duhem, 1:67–68, as a source. For “brightening and darkening fortnights,” cf. The Ten Principal Upanishads, translated into English by Shree Purohit Swāmi and W. B. Yeats (London: Faber, 1937), 158. They are also mentioned in Manusmti 1.66. Manusmti or Mānava-Dharmaśāstra, known in English as The Laws or Code of Manu, is an ancient sacred text in Sanskrit, containing an account of creation and orders in society, as well as an ethical code. Manu, the progenitor of humankind, saved humanity from a great flood and discovered the dharma; the Code of Manu is his response to sages who asked him to declare to them the sacred laws of society (see S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy [2 vols.; London: George Allen & Unwin, 1923, 1927]; YL 1663, 1:515–18). WBY’s sources may include Madame Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology (2 vols.; New York: Bouton; London: Quaritch, 1877), 1:30–35. WBY certainly consulted Sepharial [Walter Gorn Old], Hebrew Astrology: The Key to the Study of Prophecy (London: W. Foulsham, 1929), 61; and H. Jacobi’s entry “Ages of the World (Indian)” in Hastings 1:200–202. In 1928 or 1929, WBY made extensive entries from Sepharial and Jacobi about the Indian Great Year in Rapallo Notebook D (NLI 13,581). See also Harbans Rai Bachchan, W. B. Yeats and Occultism (Dehli, Varanasi, and Patna: Motilal Banarsidass, 1966), 149–57.

16 As WBY notes, this section relies on Pierre Duhem, Le système du monde, especially Vol. 1, Chap. 2, Section 10 (on the periodicity of the world according to ancient philosophies, in the context of the Platonic Great Year), 1:69–85; and Chap. 5, sections 6 and 7 (on the Great Year in the works of the Stoics and Neoplatonists), 1:275–95.

17 Anaximander (610–546 BCE) was a Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. Fragments of his work are the oldest surviving examples of Western philosophy; they suppose an order in the cosmos deriving from to apeiron, the boundless. Duhem states, “Anaximandre a . . . professé l’opinion qu’au cours de l’éternité, se succèdent une infinité de mondes dont chacun a une durée limitée,” and “nous voyons ici Anaximandre affirmer un double infini: Une étendue infinie, principe de la coexistence d’une infinité de mondes simultanés; une éternité infinie, principe des générations et des destructions périodiques d’une infinité de mondes successifs” (1:70–71). Cf. the summary of Anaximander’s system in Burnet 47–55.

18 For alternating destruction by water and fire, see Cicero, Somnium Scipionis: “fire and flood, which will inevitably happen at certain fixed periods of time,” YL 387, 12 (De re publica 6.23). Other sources include those WBY noted in his copy of Somnium Scipionis (see n2 above). Quoting from Chap. 18 of De Die Natali (238) by the Roman grammarian and philosopher Censorinus (not 17, as WBY’s note indicates), Duhem writes,

Il y a encore l’Année qu’Aristote appelle très grande plutôt que grande, et qui est formée par les révolutions du Soleil, de la Lune et des cinq étoiles errantes, lorsque tous ces astres sont revenus à la fois au point céleste d’où ils étaient partis ensemble. Cette Année a un Grand Hiver appelé par les Grecs kataklusmo/j (inondation) et par les latins diluvium; elle a aussi un été que les Grecs nomment e}kpu/rwsij ou incendie du Monde. Le Monde, en effet, doit être, tour à tour inondé ou embrasé à chacune de ces époques. (1:73)

In Naturales Quaestiones 3.29 (also noted by WBY in his copy of Somnium Scipionis) Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 1 BCE–65 CE) relates how the Babylonian historian and astronomer Belosus discusses the day of destruction: “All that the earth inherits will, he assures us, be consigned to flame when the planets, which now move in different orbits, all assemble in Cancer, so arranged in one row that a straight line may pass through their spheres. When the same gathering takes place in Capricorn, then we are in danger of the deluge. Midsummer is at present brought round by the former, midwinter by the latter. They are zodiacal signs of great power seeing that they are the determining influences in the two great changes of the year” (Physical Science in the Time of Nero: Being a Translation of the Quaestiones Naturales of Seneca, trans. John Clarke [London: Macmillan, 1910], 151).

The phrases “the fire of heaven” and “lunar water” are translated from Duhem (Chap. 2), who discusses the ideas of alternating destruction and re-creation in Heraclitus and Empedocles, called Love and Discord by the latter, then refers to the Pythagorean philosopher and scientist Philolaus (c. 470 to c. 385 BCE), as reported in Pseudo-Plutarch, De placitis philosophorum. Duhem quotes: “voici comment s’exprime le Pseudo-Plutarque: ‘De quoi se nourrit le Monde—Philolaüs dit que la destruction se produit de deux manières, tantôt parce que le feu du ciel vient à s’écouler, tantòt parce que l’eau lunaire se répand en l’atmosphère aérienne; de ces deux éléments sont formés les aliments gazeux du monde’ ” (1:77). The “fire [returning] to its seed” is from Duhem (Chap. 5): “Il a plu, en effet, aux philosophes stoïciens que l’Univers se transformât en feu, comme en sa semence (spe/rma), puis que, de ce feu, se produisît, de nouveau, une disposition toute semblable à celle qui existait auparavant” (1:277). See also LE 155.

19 For WBY’s interest in Nicholas of Cusa, see 383 n2 and 467 n5. Duhem notes (quoting Empedocles on Love and Discord) that

ainsi [l’homogène et l’hétérogène] sont sans cesse engendrés; ni à l’un ni à l’autre n’est attribuée l’immuable éternité; mais par là que ces alternances n’ont jamais aucune fin, par là même [l’homogène et l’hétérogène] gardent toujours l’immobilité de ce qui est périodique. . . . Par ces vers d’Empédocle, nous entendons, pour la première fois, énoncer une idée que nous retrouverons bien souvent en la Philosophie grecque: Une chose changeante qui se reproduit périodiquement nous présente comme la ressemblance atténuée d’une chose qui demeure éternellement la même (1:75–76)

20 Taken directly from Duhem, quoting Chrysippus the Stoic (1:279). Duhem notes that Empedocles “admettait une période intermédiaire d’immobilité et de repos” (1:76).

21 On the TS carbon, the opening of this sentence reads, “So far the universals had been everything, the individual nothing; beauty and truth had mattered, not Pericles and Socrates had not,” (NLI 36,272/6/2b, leaf 6, text in italics added in manuscript).

22 See Ennead 5.7.1, which treats the “question whether there exists an ideal archetype of individuals. . . . the individual soul has an existence in the Supreme as well as in his world” (Plotinus 4:69). Cf. WBY’s introduction to The Resurrection: “Plotinus substituted the archetypes of individual men in all their possible incarnations for a limited number of Platonic Ideas . . . We may come to think that nothing exists but a stream of souls, that all knowledge is biography, and with Plotinus that every soul is unique; that these souls, these eternal archetypes, combine into greater units as days and nights into months, months into years, and at last into the final unit that differs in nothing from that which they were at the beginning” (Plays 724–25).

23 On the TS carbon, the beginning of this sentence reads “After his pupil Porphyry, the To the next generation it seemed plain that the eEternal rReturn” (NLI 36,272/6/2b, leaf 6, text in italics added in manuscript).

24 The quotation from Proclus’s influential Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus is a direct English version of Duhem’s French translation:

Il semblerait, d’après ce passage, qu’il faille distinguer deux Grandes Années platoniciennes; celle dont il est question au Timée, plus petit commun multiple des huit années de révolution des sphères célestes, serait seulement une partie aliquote de l’autre; celle-ci, plus petit commun multiple des périodes de toutes les rotations, de toutes les révolutions visibles ou invisibles qui s’effectuent au sein des cieux, serait celle dont il est question dans la République, celle dont le nombre parfait mesure le temps du retour de l’Univers à son état initial. (1:292)

25 The list on the back flyleaf of WBY’s copy of Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis (YL 387) refers to “Adam, Republic / ii.p. 264 ff”: that is, the first Appendix to Book 8 in James Adam’s edition of The Republic of Plato (2 vols.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902), 2:264–312. The opening pages of this extensive appendix on “The Number” list, in addition to ancient sources such as Aristotle and Proclus, eleven scholars whose discussions Adam finds “interesting and occasionally suggestive” (264).

26 A. E. Taylor, A Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928; YL 2107), 217–18; in his copy, WBY made several annotations in the sections to do with the Great Year. See 397 n66. For “Plato’s Man of Ur,” see 392–93 n44 and 413–15 n1.

27 This quotation is also directly rendered from Duhem (1:290). The selections in Duhem are from Ernestus Diehl, ed., Procli Diadochi In Platonis Timaeum commentaria (3 vols.; Leipzig: Teubner, 1903), 3:91–94.

28 WBY owned two translations of Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, Translated from The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences by William Wallace (2nd ed.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892, YL 869) and Hegel’s Logic of World and Idea by Henry S. Macran (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929, YL 868). In the former, WBY marked or turned down a number of pages at passages that argue against perceived separations of, for example, philosophy and religion (5), universal and singular (50–52), identity and difference (224–29), substance and infinity (415–16). In the latter, see Hegel’s description of knowledge as a circle, from Logic 1:252: “By virtue of the nature of the method just demonstrated, knowledge presents itself as a circle returning upon itself, whose mediation carries round its conclusion into its beginning, the simple ground. Moreover, this circle is a circle of circles; for each individual link, as animated by the method, is introflection that in returning into the beginning is at the same time the beginning of a new link” (212–13).

29 This quotation follows immediately from the previous selection from Duhem (1:290).

30 According to H. J. Rose, “The Athenian year was supposed to begin with the summer solstice” (“Calendar [Greek],” Hastings 3:107).

31 The article on “Calendar (Persian)” in Hastings, by Louis H. Gray, reports that the first month in the Old Persian calendar was Garmapada (“footstep of heat”), which corresponded to the Hebrew Nisan. “This would make the commencement of the old Persian year harmonize with both the Avesta [later Persian calendar] and the Babylonian systems, as well as with the Hebrew sacred year” (3:128).

32 As WBY states, this passage is from Duhem on the Great Year in the Church fathers (2:451). Duhem quotes Nemesius (fl. 4th cent.), a Christian bishop of Emessa and author of On the Nature of Man, a theological and anthropological text that influenced Byzantine and medieval philosophy significantly. Duhem’s citations are from Nemesius Episcopus Emesenus, De natura hominis, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca 40 (Paris: J. P. Migne, 1863), Chap. 38, 759–62.

33 Slightly misquoted (WBY has misremembered “Mortality’s” for “Immortalities,” “furnace-fire” for “funeral pyre”) from “From the Night of Forebeing: An Ode After Easter” by the Roman Catholic poet Francis Thompson (1859–1907), New Poems (Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1897; YL 2128), 48; The Collected Poetry (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913; YL 2127), 163. GY changed “Immortalities” to “Mortalities” in her copy of AVB (YL 2434). WBY included in OBMV Thompson’s famous poem The Hound of Heaven, a fragment of the long poem Sister Songs, and a pair of sonnets. Thompson is mentioned in WBY’s introduction to that volume (LE 184, 191, 202).

34 This date figures significantly in three plays written during the period when WBY was revising A Vision: The Resurrection (Plays 481–92), The King in the Great Clock Tower (Plays 493–500), and A Full Moon in March (Plays 501–8).

35 Plato (speaking as Timaeus) explains the opposite motions of the circles of same and other in Timaeus 36b–d; according to A. E. Taylor, these circles refer to the apparent paths of “fixed” stars in the equatorial circle and that of the sun in the ecliptic (Taylor, Commentary 148–49). See also Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work (London: Methuen, 1926; YL 2109), 445.

36 Stoicism was a philosophical school from the Hellenistic period, Greek in origin and widely practiced in Rome, which taught detachment from emotions and indifference to all elements of external circumstance. Cicero admired the movement and is an important source of information; no complete work survives by the founder Zeno (344–262 BCE) or his immediate successors Cleanthes (d. 232 BCE) and Chrysippus (d. c. 206 BCE). Although Stoic philosophers were definitely interested in the Great Year, the number 15,000 comes not from any Stoic thinker but Macrobius, who, commenting on this passage, mentions that Cicero began his “world-year” with the hour of the death of Romulus and that the year will be completed 15,000 years later, according to “philosophers” (Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William Harris Stahl [New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1952], 2.11.9–15, 220–22). This value “was to enjoy great success in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance” (Godefroid de Callataÿ, Annus Platonicus 122).

37 See AVA 123–25 and Duhem 1:283. Cicero sets a beginning date for a Great Year “when the Soul of Romulus entered into these sacred abodes” in Somnium Scipionis (De re publica 6.24; Bullock’s translation [YL 387], 12). Mother Shipton, a name linked with apocalyptic prophecies, is the popular name given to Ursula Southeil, the Yorkshire Sibyl, an English prophetess about whom relatively little is actually known, though a variety of pamphlets about her life and prophecies were (and are) widely available. For Cicero’s opposition to official interpretations of the Sibylline Books and Virgil’s attribution of the prophecy in his fourth Eclogue to that Cumaean Sibyl, see 417 n4 and 418–20 n7.

38 On the TS carbon, both instances of “36,000” in this paragraph were originally typed as “360000,” with one of the zeros then struck through (NLI 36,272/6/2b, leaf 11).

39 Duhem’s discussion of Hipparchus and Ptolemy on the precession of the equinoxes (2:180–89) underpins this section. As WBY states, this Great or Platonic Year is outlined by Plato and refers to the return of the constellations and planets to their original positions (Timaeus 39d). Hipparchus (c. 190–c. 127 BCE) was a Greek mathematician and astronomer who developed trigonometry and has historically been credited with discovering the precession of the equinoxes: according to Duhem, he determined that the rate of precession, i.e., the rate at which the stars move relative to the equinoctial points, is at least 1° per century (see also Adams, Republic, 304–5). Claudius Ptolemy (c. 90–c. 168 CE, not third cent.) was an astronomer, mathematician, and geographer from Roman Egypt. His treatise the Almagest (Mathēmatikē Syntaxis), the earliest extant work of Greek astronomy, was preserved in Arabic and became highly influential on later Christian and Islamic astronomy. Ptolemy used (and arguably misused) Hipparchus. He adopted the figure of 1° per century, which results in a complete cycle of 36,000 years, identifying it with the Platonic Great Year. Duhem treats the question of whether Hipparchus derived knowledge of precession from “astrologues de l’Orient” (i.e., Chaldean), 2:180. See also Alfred Jeremias, “Ages of the World (Babylonian),” Hastings 1:185, one of WBY’s trusted sources on the Great Year; and Franz Cumont, Astrology and Religion Among the Greeks and Romans (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912; YL 455), 5, 58.

The precession of the equinoxes actually takes slightly less than 26,000 years, the figure adopted by the Yeatses’ Instructors. WBY was not greatly concerned with precise calculations: “because of our modern discovery that the equinox shifts its ground more rapidly than Ptolemy believed, one must, somebody says, invent a new symbolic scheme. No, a thousand times no; I insist that the equinox does shift a degree in a hundred years; anything else would lead to confusion” (Ex 396, Plays 725). For WBY’s symbolic mathematics, see the note by Neil Mann, “Numbers, Accuracy and Precision,” http://www.yeatsvision.com/Numbers.html. Cf. AVA 122–23 and Bullock, trans., Somnium Scipionis (YL 387), 34 n27. See also 150.

40 Aries, the Ram, the first sign in the zodiac, is a fire sign, ruled by the planet Mars (hence “martial”), and associated with masculine energy; in the tropical zodiac, the sun transits the sign between mid-March and mid-April. Capricorn the Goat, the tenth sign, is associated with winter (the sun is in Capricorn from mid-December to mid-January); it is an earth sign, ruled by Saturn, suggesting introversion and tenacity.

41 On the TS carbon, the final lines of this paragraph read “[. . .] cold and wet even if the Goat were lost. And every individual horoscope must preserve the seal set upon it by the position of the planets at their rising, setting and culminating” (NLI 36,272/6/2b, leaf 11).

42 Ennead 2.3 (“Are the Stars Causes?”) elaborates on the idea that the stars “indicate events to come but without being the cause direct”: Plotinus suggests that “we must at once admit signification” but cannot “ascribe to the stars any efficacy except in what concerns the (material) All and in what is of their own function” (Plotinus 2:159, 168).

43 Robin Ernest William Flower (1881–1946) was an Anglo-Saxonist and scholar of the Irish language; he lived on the Blasket Islands for a time and translated An t-Oileánach by Tomás Ó Criomhthain (The Islandman [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951]). The stories told to Lady Gregory and to Robin Flower are untraced, though Flower was visiting Coole in September 1931, when WBY was also staying there.

Cf. an unexplained reference to a “sky-woman” in The Pot of Broth, cowritten by WBY and Lady Gregory (Plays 117); and a story that contains an inner story about a woman in a cloud, included by Gearóid Ó Crualaoich in his study of the cailleach (supernatural old woman) in Irish tradition. The story was collected in the early 1930s from Peig Sayers on the Great Blasket Island (The Book of the Cailleach: Stories of the Wise-Woman Healer [Cork: Cork University Press, 2003], 150–52 and 256–57, cited from Kenneth H. Jackson [ed.], Scéalta ón mBlascaod [Baile Átha Cliath: An Cumann le Béaloideas Éireann, 1938]).

Time and Western Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927) includes an imaginary dialogue between “I” and “You,” including this exchange:

I. “Mr 4.30 or Mr. Eleven o’clock is a truer name than Smith?”

YOU. “Certainly.” (377)

Lewis here satirizes Bergsonian duration rather than the ideas of the British analytic philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) per se, though Time and Western Man is an extended critique of notions of time in modern philosophy, including Russell’s. On February 12, 1928, WBY wrote to Sturge Moore:

I have read Time and Western Man with gratitude, the last chapters again and again. It has given, what I could not, a coherent voice to my hatred. You are wrong to think Lewis attacks the conclusions of men like Alexander and Russell because he thinks them “uncertain.” He thinks them false. To admit uncertainty into philosophy, necessary uncertainty, would seem to him to wrong the sovereignty of intellect, or worse, to accept the hypocritical humility of the scientific propagandists which is, he declares, their “cloak for dogma.” (LTSM 122)

44 The quotation is from Asclepius 3.35, Hermetica (YL 881) 1:329–31.

45 See AVA 124–25 and note, and 416–17 n3 above. The source mentioned is Plutarch’s Life of Sulla; the immediate source is W. M. Flinders Petrie, The Revolutions of Civilisation (3rd ed.; London and New York: Harper and Brothers, 1922; YL 1359), 9–10. According to Petrie, the Great Year of the Etruscans is 1,100 years, not 11,000. The TS carbon (NLI 36,272/6/2b) ends here. See 413–14 n1 above.

46 The quotation is from Emmeline M. Plunkett, Ancient Calendars and Constellations (London: John Murray, 1903; YL 1596), 17 (this page is turned down in the Yeatses’ copy). Georgius Syncellus (George the Syncellus), a Byzantine cleric and scholar who served under the Patriarch Tarasius and died after 810, wrote Selection of Chronography, a chronicle of history from the beginning of the world through the reign of the Roman emperor Diocletian. The Genica or Genetic books of Hermes (as Genica rather than Genetica in AVA 123 and Plunkett) and the Cyrannid books were theological, historical, and philosophical collections; they contained information about cycles in the computation of time. (Plunkett cites Syncellus, Chronographia, 52 [B. G. Niebuhr, ed., Georgius Syncellus et Nicephorus Cp., Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae [2 vols.; Bonn: Impensis Ed. Weberi, 1829], 1:97).

47 Duhem notes that Ptolemy posits a ninth sphere beyond the fixed stars in his Hypothesis of the Planets (Duhem 2:186). Ptolemy did not calculate the beginning date of the Platonic year.

48 These lines are from The Resurrection (Plays 482), quoted in WBY’s introduction to the play (Plays 723) and also printed as one of “Two Songs from a Play” in The Tower (Poems 216).

49 The material of section X does not appear in NLI 36,272/26, the most complete surviving TS of the latter half of Book IV. See 413–14 n1.

50 See fig. 17 (60).

51 Cf. “The Four Ages of Man,” identifying “struggles with the mind” with the third quarter of the wheel (Poems 294).

52 Frederick Scott Oliver (1864–1934) was an English historian and biographer, author of The Endless Adventure (3 vols.; London: Macmillan, 1931 and 1935). WBY’s Diary 1930 mentions reading this book and its influence (Ex 289). The Endless Adventure focuses on the “great administration” of Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745), after whose fall “there was such an accumulated loss of moral force, of manly independence, of alacrity in national service, that Britain seemed to lie at the mercy of a foreign invader and would-be usurper” (1:3, 16). In the note to The Words Upon the Window-Pane, WBY glosses a speech that expresses these opinions by the character John Corbet, noting that Corbet “may have read similar words in Oliver” (Plays 708). “Gothic” is here used metonymically to stand for northern European; cf. John Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic,” The Stones of Venice, Vol. 2, Chap. 6 (published separately as The Nature of Gothic [Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1892]) and 209.

53 Spinoza, Leibniz, and Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) are linked with Jansenist monks at the Port Royal monastery in Paris, who took Descartes’s notion that animals were machines to extreme and cruel lengths. In an often-quoted remark, a contemporary wrote that solitaries at the monastery, following the theologian Antoine Arnauld (1612–94), “nailed the poor animals up on boards by their four paws to vivisect them to see the circulation of the blood which was a great subject of controversy” (Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Port Royal [Utrecht, 1736], quoted in Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983], 5, quoting Leonora Rosenfield, From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine [New York: Columbia, 1968], 54).

54 Vico’s theory of history, as elaborated in his Scienza Nuova, posits universal stages of historical development, which include a ricorso or return to a more primitive stage (though not exactly “the same point”).

55 See a draft of this diagram in the first Vision notebook, YVP 3:172.

56 Petrie divides the “recurrences of civilisation” into eight periods and suggests that the fluctuations he tracks in the civilizations of Egypt and Europe are contemporary, “that is to say, in the same phase at one time” (81).

57 The material in this section does not appear in NLI 36,272/26, the latest surviving TS of the final sections of Book IV. See 413–14 n1. At this point in that TS are two sections that do not appear in the final text: see Appendix II, 292–93.

58 In 1924, WBY read and began to cite from Origin of Christian Church Art, trans. O. M. Dalton and H. J. Braunholtz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923; YL 2026), by the Austrian art critic and National Socialist Josef Strzygowski (1862–1941). See VPl 80 and Au 525, and cf. AVA 141 and 289 n138. The parallel section in AVA does not link cardinal directions and symbolic civilizations with actual geography. Here, however, “my instructors imply not only the symbolical but the geographical East,” and Strzygowski’s method, “which I may describe as research into essential character” (189), became useful, although WBY does not share Strzygowski’s overt anti-Semitism. Sections of Strzygowski used include Chap. 7, “The Triumph of Representational Art. Hellenism, Semitism, Mazdaism,” discussing geographical influences on levels of naturalistic or conventional representation (155–88), and the section on nonrepresentational European art on 153–54. For WBY’s use of Strzygowski, Spengler, and Frobenius, see Matthew Gibson, “ ‘Timeless and Spaceless’?—Yeats’s Search for Models of Interpretation in Post-Enlightenment Philosophy, Contemporary Anthropology and Art History, and the Effects of These Theories on ‘The Completed Symbol,’ ‘The Soul in Judgment’ and ‘The Great Year of the Ancients,’ ” Mann et al., 123–27.

59 Leo Viktor Frobenius (1873–1938) was a German ethnologist whose cultural theories were supported by fieldwork in Africa and whose work influenced Oswald Spengler. The Yeatses owned a copy of Paideuma: Umrisse einer Kultur- und Seelenlehre (Munich: C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1921; YL 715), which mentions a sense of depth associated with a cavern; the Yeatses’ copy has marginalia by Pound, among others. WBY was introduced to Frobenius by Pound; either Pound or GY may have translated the material in Paideuma. On April 17, 1929, WBY wrote Sturge Moore that Pound was “sunk in Frobenius, Spengler’s German source, and finds him a most interesting person. Frobenius originated the idea that cultures, including arts and sciences, arise out of races, express those races as if they were fruit and leaves in a pre-ordained order, and perish with them; and the two main symbols, that of the Cavern and that of the Boundless. . . . He proves his case all through by African research. I cannot read German and so must get him second-hand” (LTSM 153–54). Frobenius is mentioned in Diary 1930 (Ex 313) and the note to The Words Upon the Window-Pane (Plays 713). WBY did apparently read Frobenius, The Voice of Africa, trans. Rudolf Blind (2 vols.; London: Hutchinson & Co, 1913); it is mentioned in the Rapallo Notebook E (NLI 13,582, leaf 1). Frobenius discusses the importance of sixteen directions to the Yoruban (as well as ancient Etruscan) conception of the world (see 252–64), though it is likely that WBY’s interpretation of this work as well as Paideuma was influenced considerably by Pound.

60 See Frobenius, Voice of Africa, 1:260–61.

61 The phrase is a reference to Bergson’s concept of duration, criticized by Wyndham Lewis in Time and Western Man (op cit., 166–67); cf. n43. Spengler correlates the invention of a clock mechanism, c. 1000 CE, with stirring of the “Faustian” or Western soul, and emphasizes the importance of a fascination with time to Western culture (The Decline of the West, 1:14–15). In the Yeatses’ copy of this text, a pencil mark highlights the passage, “Observe the significant association of time measurement with the edifices of religion” (1:15), and later, “Without exact time-measurement, without a chronology of becoming to correspond with his imperative need of archaeology (the preservation, excavation and collection of things-become), Western man is unthinkable” (1:124; YL 1975; we are grateful to Wayne K. Chapman for access to his photographs of these volumes). Spengler writes that the idea of “window as architecture . . . is peculiar to the Faustian soul and the most significant symbol of its depth-experience. In it can be felt the will to emerge from the interior into the boundless” (1:199).

62 The phrase is from the Brihadāranyaka Upanishad, Book 7, translated as “This knowledge is not born even in a priest” in The Ten Principal Upanishads, put into English by Shri Purohit Swāmi and W. B. Yeats (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), 157. This is one of the older of the main Upanishads. WBY’s sources such as Arthur Berriedale Keith state that the Upanishads are often believed to be opposed to sacrifice, unlike the Brahmanas (priestly commentaries on the Vedas). However, Keith states, sacrifice is “expressly relegated to an inferior place”; and “sacrifice is least reputed in the Bhadārayaka Upanishad where, with a certain insolence, the worship of anything except the self is derided.” The theism and doctrine of predestination of the Upanishads represents “a later stage than [the] pantheism and cosmogonism [of the Brāhmaas]” (The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads [Harvard Oriental Series, vols. 31 and 32; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925; YL 1058], 514, 511). See Keith, Chap. 28, “The Philosophy of the Upaniads” (489–600). See also S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy, especially Chap. 4, “The Philosophy of the Upaniads” (2 vols.; London: George Allen & Unwin, 1923–27; YL 1663), 1:137–267. Radhakrishnan explains that “In the Upaniads we find an advance on the Vedic and the Brāhmanical conceptions of future life, though there is not yet any consistent theory about it. It is the idea of rebirth that is the prominent one in the Upaniads” (249). See also the Ten Principal Upanishads, passim, for details about doctrines such as karma, Self, illusion, and a kingly source mentioned here.

Shankar Gajannan Purohit, who went by the title Shri Purohit Swāmi (1882–1941), was an Indian guru who translated the Bhagavad Gita (The Geeta [London: Faber, 1935]). WBY met him through Sturge Moore in 1931 and worked with him for several years. WBY wrote to Mario Rossi on February 9, 1932, “I am now helping to correct a curious Autobiography which will I think make a stir. A year ago I met in London an Indian ascetic who has been wandering with a begging bowl for nine years & persuaded him to write all the simple objective facts of his life. The book is full of strange psychical experiences. I am to write the Introduction & describe the books origin. There is no other book of its kind” (CL InteLex 5596). WBY contributed introductions to Purohit’s spiritual autobiography An Indian Monk (London: Macmillan, 1932), his translation of The Holy Mountain by his own guru Bhagwān Shri Hamsa (London: Faber, 1934), his translation of the Mandukya Upanishad (The Criterion 14 [1935]: 547–58), The Ten Principal Upanishads, and his translation of Patañjali’s Aphorisms of Yoga (London: Faber, 1938), LE 130–38, 139–55, 156–64, 171–74, 175–80. WBY also included three translated poems in OBMV (223–24). See also LE 210, 291.

63 In GY’s copy of A Vision (1938; YL 2435), there is written in the margin beside this sentence, “X untrue. GY had read Hegel’s Philosophy of history.”

64 See 7, 10, and 313 n24.

65 Gerald Heard (Henry Fitzgerald Heard, 1889–1971) was a British historian, philosopher, writer about science, and educator, who is best known for his book The Five Ages of Man (1963). The Yeatses owned a copy of his book The Ascent of Humanity: An Essay on The Evolution of Civilization from Group Consciousness through Individuality to Super-Consciousness (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929; YL 863); for Adams, Petrie, and Spengler see especially 214–29. WBY mentions Heard in Diary 1930 (Ex 314).

WBY owned copies of three works by the American journalist and historian Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918): his autobiography The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918; YL 17; also YL 18); Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913; YL 19); and The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (New York: Macmillan, 1920; YL 16). The last is a posthumous collection consisting of one letter and two substantial essays, with a biographical essay by Henry’s brother Brooks Adams. In January 1923, WBY wrote to the historian H. P. R. Finberg mentioning this book and the last essay, “The Rule of Phase applied to History” (CL InteLex 4255). On April 9, 1929, WBY commented to Sturge Moore about Spengler that “There are no doubt errors of historical detail but his vast enlargement of Henry Adams’s History as Phase, for that is what his work is, is, if it were nothing more, magnificent as a work of imagination” (LTSM 150).

66 The quotation is from The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (London: Howard Latimer, 1913; YL 445), 243; this book was given to WBY by GY in August 1924. The French socialist philosopher and syndicalist Georges Sorel (1847–1922) was a follower of Karl Marx who was influential on both Communist and Fascist thought; his book Réflexions sur la violence (1908) theorizes the virtue of violence and the importance of myth in the processes of history.

67 Sir John Collings Squire (1884–1958) was a British poet, historian, writer, anthologist, and editor of the New Statesman and the London Mercury, known for his conservative literary and political tastes. WBY included one of his satiric poems in OBMV. His essay “The Reader” in the Spectator (No. 5,357, February 28, 1931, 304–5) is a reminiscence of seeing Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) studying in the British Library, including the detail that “His principal study was sociology, economic theory, and the philosophy of history” (305).

68 “The Tendency of History,” the first essay of the three collected in The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, was sent as a letter in lieu of the annual address by the president of the American Historical Association (125). Adams describes the risks he sees in advancing his dynamic theory of history, determining that “In whatever direction we look we can see no possibility of converting history into a science without bringing it into hostility toward one or more of the most powerful organizations of the era” (131).

69 See 139 and 384 n9.

70 Most Christian philosophers through St. Augustine were in some sense Platonists. WBY may be recalling Nietzsche, for whom Christianity was fundamentally Platonic. In the preface to Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes that “Christianity is Platonism for the ‘people’ ”; Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Cf. Nietzsche’s remarks in “What I Owe to the Ancients” that Plato was “pre-existently Christian” (2); Twilight of the Idols, trans. Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin, 1954). In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche refers to “that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato” (3.24); London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1899; YL 1443, 207. Peter Liebregts notes that WBY may have found the idea in essays about Nietzsche by Havelock Ellis: “Plato fled from reality into the ideal and was a Christian before his time” (Selected Essays [London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1936], 10; Liebregts 288).

71 Cf. Matthew 22:21.

72 The quotation is from the poem “The Second Coming” (1919), published in The Dial and The Nation in 1920 and then in the collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921).

73 The material in this section does not appear in NLI 36,272/26, the latest surviving TS of the last sections of Book IV. See 413–14 n1.

74 A folder of rejected odd pages (NLI 36,272/30) includes a TS (leaf 28) for two additional sections following what is now the end of the text. See Appendix II, 292–93.

Book V: Dove or Swan

1 On March 23, 1935, WBY wrote to Harold Macmillan, “In sending you the script for ‘A Vision’ I forgot one diagram. At the beginning of Book III ‘Dove or Swan’ in the old edition of A Vision which you are partly printing from there is a diagram in black and red called the historical cones. This is to be inserted at the same place in the new edition” (CL InteLex 6214).

2 For the story of Leda, see 336 n44. Written September 18, 1923, the poem was first published in the Dial (June 1924) as “Leda and the Swan”; this title was also used in its journal publication in To-morrow (Dublin, August 1924) and in its book publication in The Tower (London and New York: Macmillan, 1928). The immediate visual model for the poem is a plate in Élie Faure, History of Art, trans. Walter Path (4 vols.; London: John Lane; New York: Harper, 1921–24; YL 664), Vol. 1, Ancient Art, 2, reproducing the Roman copy of a Greek image of Leda and the swan in the British Museum (F. N. Pryce and A. H. Smith, Catalogue of Greek Sculpture in the British Museum [3 vols.; London, British Museum Press, 1892], Item 2199). See Charles Madge, “Leda and the Swan,” Times Literary Supplement, July 20, 1962: 532; Ian Fletcher, “ ‘Leda and the Swan’ as Iconic Poem,” YA 1 (1982): 82–113; and Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 153. For other literary and visual sources, see Giorgio Melchiori, The Whole Mystery of Art: Pattern into Poetry in the Work of W. B. Yeats (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), esp. chaps. 2 and 3 as well as Excursus V, Renaissance Paintings of Leda, 280–82.

3 When Agamemnon returned home after the Trojan War, bringing along Cassandra as a part of his war booty, his wife, Clytemnestra (herself in the interval having become the lover of Aegisthus), killed him in his bath as retribution for his sacrificial slaying of their daughter Iphigenia and his unfaithfulness with Cassandra. This story is told in many Greek sources, including Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, and Pindar. The “broken wall and tower” are those of Troy, the city destroyed by the war brought on by the abduction of Helen (who was “engender[ed]” by the rape of Leda).

4 According to myth, Aphrodite (aphros, “sea-foam”) was born of the sea foam near Paphos, Cyprus, after Cronus cut off the genitals of his father, Uranus, and the elder god’s blood and semen dropped into the sea. Helen’s abduction by Paris is said to have caused the Trojan War.

5 In Greek mythology, Niobe had seven sons and seven daughters; for boasting to Leto about the size of her brood, her children were killed by the children of Leto, Apollo and Artemis. Niobe wept ceaselessly and was transformed by the gods into a weeping stone. On civilization as “a struggle to keep control,” see also “Meru” (Poems 289).

6 In Greek myth, the peacock derived from a hundred-eyed man, Argus Panoptes, “the all-seeing.” Hera set him to guard a cow, the disguised form of the nymph Io, whom Zeus desired and had transformed to protect her from his wife. At Zeus’s bidding, Hermes slew Argus, and Hera put Argus’s many eyes into the peacock’s tail. The idea that the cry of the peacock produces terror comes from the bestiary tradition: see, for example, the Aberdeen Bestiary: “The peacock, as Isidore says, gets its name from the sound of its cry. For when it starts, unexpectedly, to give its cry, it produces sudden fear in its hearers. The peacock is called pavo, therefore, from pavor, fear, since its cry produces fear in those who hear it” (fol. 60v, trans. Colin McLaren; http://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary). See also “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” sec. 3 (“My Table”), lines 31–32 (“it seemed / Juno’s peacock screamed”).

7 See Liebregts 280–89.

8 For the eggs of Leda, see 37 and 336 n43.

9 Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) was a British comparative historian whose multivolume work A Study of History offered a globalizing theory of the rise and fall of civilizations based on an essentially religious outlook; the Yeatses owned the first three volumes, published in 1934 (2nd ed.; London: Oxford University Press, 1935; YL 2157). Toynbee’s survey of Minoan culture stresses the relation between Minoan and later Greek societies, as the “largely monotheistic cult, in which the female form of divinity held the supreme place” of the former and survived as a “ghost of a Minoan universal church which the Hellenic Society succeeded in conjuring up from the tomb” (92–103, quotations from 97, quoting Sir Arthur Evans, and 100).

See Cumont, Astrology and Religion Among the Greeks and Romans (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912; YL 455), for an extended treatment of the “astral ‘mathematics’ ” of Babylonian astrology and its effects on Greek, Roman, and other ancient Middle-Eastern cultures (xvii). The copy of this book in the Yeatses’ library belonged to GY, who purchased it in 1913 (Saddlemyer 60). For relations between the Babylonian zodiac and myths of gods, see also Alfred Jeremias, “Ages of the World (Babylonian),” Hastings 1:183–87. That Babylonian astrology spread to Egypt and thence to other cultures is a commonplace; see, for example, the article by Morris Jastrow, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., s.v. “Astrology,” 795–800. See also Burnet 21–22.

10 For Jewish thinking about long life, see such biblical passages as Exodus 20:12, 1 Kings 3:11–14, or Psalms 91:16. The Greek sentiment is common; for an early source, see Menander’s fragmentary The Double Deceiver and its oft-quoted line, “the man dies young on whom the gods their love bestow” (Menander, The Principal Fragments, trans. Francis G. Allison, Loeb, 1921), 345. WBY frequently connected Irish and Greek traditions, as he did in a draft of this passage: “Not only Achilles but our own Cuchulain also, as competent men have thought, coming from that tribal fermentation” (NLI 36,269/4, leaf 1).

11 The “great Empire” of Minoan culture on Crete (c. 3000–1200 BCE) was presumably broken up by invading Greek tribes (2000–1000 BCE), who assimilated elements of Minoan culture. It is difficult to adjust the Yeatses’ system to history: while the former would place the Ledean annunciation at roughly 2000 BCE (two millennia before Christ), the latter (to the degree that historians believe that a Trojan War was in fact waged) sets the fall of Troy between 1300 and 1200 (1184 BCE was the traditional date). The system stresses the polytheistic, individualistic nature of Greek religion and thought, in contrast to the subsequent Christian revelation but in accord with the one arriving imminently (see WBY’s note to “The Second Coming,” Poems 658–60).

12 WBY refers here to the so-called Dark Age(s) in Greek history, from the end of Mycenean (Bronze Age) civilization in about 1200–1100 BCE and the series of migrations that resettled Greece during this period, including what nineteenth-century historians called the “Dorian invasion” (associated with the legendary “return of the Heracleides”). The period, which is sometimes called the Homeric Age or the Geometric Age, extended roughly to the ninth century BCE and the formation of city-states (poleis).

13 The classical or Phidian period of Greek art (which falls between the Archaic and Hellenistic periods) is named for the Athenian sculptor Phidias (or Pheidias, active c. 465–425 BCE), who probably supervised the carving of the Parthenon frieze and was celebrated especially for his magnificent chryselephantine statues of Athena Parthenos (completed 438 BCE) and Zeus Olympios. Both were c. 12.75 m (40 ft) tall, and the latter was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. See Chap. 5, “Phidias,” in Faure, History of Art, Vol. 1, Ancient Art, 149–85. See also the mention of “Phidias’ famous ivories” in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” line 7 (Poems 210).

14 The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford has in its collection a fifth-century lekythos (a container for oil), with a red-figure image of a Nike suspended in air and plucking a cithara (AN 1888.1401 [V. 312]), which Michael Vickers suggests is the one to which WBY refers (Ancient Greek Pottery [Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, 1999], 43). The museum also houses an extensive collection of black-figure pottery, including a number of “certain pots” with images of horses; this technique was used in Greek pottery painting from about 700 BCE until the early fifth century.

15 For the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, supposedly the first philosopher to move to Athens and establish the city as a center for philosophy, see n31 below. The Athenian tragic playwrights Aeschylus (c. 525–455 BCE) and Sophocles (c. 490s–406 BCE) were also fifth-century and thus “Phidian.”

16 The cycle of 1,050 years (one-half of the larger wheel, as Yeats explains above) is itself divided into twelve sections, for which in this Book he uses the term gyres (a term also used for other iterations of the basic symbol elsewhere in A Vision). As Neil Mann explains,

Since they divide up a period of 1050 years, the twelve gyres of “Dove or Swan” are very roughly periods of a century or less. However they show a wide variation in “speed”, ranging in practice from 195 years (1680–1875) to 30 years (800–830). The starting dates of the respective gyres were given by the Instructors, and Yeats himself finds a few of the dates rather perplexing, since they do not match his own understanding of either history or the System. He did not feel at liberty to change them, however, so that they stand largely as he was given them in a Sleep in December 1920 . . . ; there are three exceptions, all in the most recent dates, which show correction in the original: for the ninth gyre (19–20–21) Yeats crossed out 1680 in the notebook and put in 1740, but reverted to the first date in A Vision, where he also amended 1870 to 1875 and omitted the date for the start of the twelfth gyre (26–27–28), given as 2050.

(http://www.yeatsvision.com/History.html)

On December 9, 1920, “George began diagram” and that night “ ‘Carmichael’ [the Control] gave confirmation of classification of devisions [sic] of historical cone being devided [sic] among phases” (YVP 3:60). GY’s illustration is reproduced in YVP 3:61.

17 Lines 21–24 of “Under the Round Tower” (Poems 138), a poem that is a direct outgrowth of an AS (March 20, 1918) at Glendalough, the site of a ruined monastic center containing one of Ireland’s famous round towers (YVP 1:394–95). This paragraph is slightly changed from the corresponding section in AVA, which makes clearer the alchemical and sexual suggestions of the royal dance:

But one must consider not the movement only from the beginning to the end of the historical cone, but the gyres that touch its sides, the horizontal movement. There is that continual oscillation which I have symbolised elsewhere as a King and Queen, who are Sun and Moon also, and whirl round and round as they mount up through a Round Tower. (AVA 152)

18 The distinction between “Ionic elegance” and “Doric vigour” was a standard conception of art history: see Faure, History of Art, Vol. 1, Ancient Art, 121–38. Ionian art was also associated with the East; the Encyclopaedia Britannica calls the spread of its style to the mainland “orientalizing” and mentions that “Ionian painting is unrestrained in character, characterized by a license not foreign to the nature of the race, and wants the self-control and moderation which belong to Doric art” (11th ed., s.v. “Greek Art,” 476, 477). Liebregts suggests that WBY’s use of the terms is also endebted to Walter Pater and Nietzsche (284–86).

The Persian Wars, in which Greece repulsed attacks by Darius and Xerxes, empowered the Greeks and created the conditions for the classical period in the fifth century. Cf. “The Statues”:

                . . . the men

That with a mallet or a chisel modelled these

Calculations that look but casual flesh, put down

All Asiatic vague immensities,

And not the banks of oars that swam upon

The many-headed foam at Salamis.

Europe put off that foam when Phidias

Gave women dreams and dreams their looking glass.

(lines 9–16, Poems 345)

19 See Republic Books 2 and 3, in which Socrates suggests the necessity in the ideal State of casting out poets who tell immoral tales. (Note that this discussion also suggests banning music in Ionian or Lydian modes, characterized as soft, in opposition to vigorous-sounding Doric or Phrygian harmonies.) The destruction of Ionia resulted from the Ionian revolt against the Persian Empire (499–94 BCE); mainland Greek forces aided the Ionians, thus provoking the Persian Wars between Greece and Persia (c. 498–448 BCE).

20 Cf. Faure, History of Art, Vol. 1, Ancient Art: “The Dorian spirit and the Ionian spirit—the young countryman bursting with vigor and the woman bedecked, caressing, questionable—met and loved. Attic art, which in its adult age was to be the great classic sculpture, austere and living, was to be born of their union” (137–38). Tiziano Vecellio (1488/90–1576) was the greatest Italian painter of the Venetian school, a virtuoso known both for daring in colour and design and for elegance and simplicity in perception and mood. See similar remarks on Phidias and Callimachus in “Certain Noble Plays of Japan” (EE 166).

21 The Greek sculptor Callimachus (fifth century BCE) presumably designed the Corinthian capital based on acanthus leaves growing around a basket on a girl’s tomb. See Adolf Furtwängler, Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture (ed. Eugénie Sellers [Strong], London: Heinemann, 1895): “In any case, the artist [Callimachus] belonged to the same Ionicizing school, which tended to a wide divergence from the Pheidian style . . .” (450–51). Furtwängler describes the “armchair found in front of the Pronaos of the Parthenon” (441), but he neither says that the chair was marble nor refers to the Persian. Note that in “Lapis Lazuli” (lines 29ff., Poems 301), WBY seems to accept the more usual scholarly view that the chair should not be attributed to Callimachus. Pausanias describes the bronze lamp in Description of Greece 1.26.7 (Books 1–2, trans. W. H. S. Jones [London: Heinemann, 1918; YL 1545], 136–37). The lamp also appears in “Lapis Lazuli” (lines 33–34, Poems 301). Also see Furtwängler 437.

22 Furtwängler frequently uses the term “archaistic” in references to Callimachus (438–39). Here WBY seems to refer to Nikias, described by Furtwängler as “the head of the conservative party, and personally a man of strictly orthodox belief and timid piety” (432). Furtwängler also asserts that Nikias preferred building the Erechtheion (as representing the “old religion”) to the Parthenon; Nikias commissioned a Palladion from Callimachus (438).

23 For this quotation from Heraclitus, see 346 n6.

24 WBY may be thinking of a passage from Longinus quoted by Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, J. B. Bury, ed. (7 vols.; London: Methuen, 1909–14; YL 746), 1:58, and also by H. G. Wells in The Outline of History (London: George Newnes, n.d., 335), although Longinus is a bit late (c. 213–73 CE). See also J. P. Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece from Homer to Menander (7th ed. [London: Macmillan, 1907], 433–34), citing Cicero’s De natura deorum (1.28) and the twenty-first oration of Dio Chrysostom.

25 The Greek comic dramatist Aristophanes (c. 448–380 BCE), known for biting satire and bold wit, raised comedy to the highest levels of artistic expression.

26 Aristotle (384–322 BCE) and his teacher Plato are considered to mark the beginning of organized ethical and epistemological Greek thought. See Burnet, for example, who writes that Pre-Socratic philosophy is visual and tactile rather than conceptual: “When, therefore we seek to understand these systems, what we have to do is not to think them by means of rational concepts, but to picture them in our minds by means of images” (27–28). Cf. “The Coming of Wisdom with Time” (line 4, Poems 93): “Now I may wither into the truth.”

27 Platonic dualism is interpreted as promoting a kind of asceticism, in that devaluing the physical world presumably leads to profound dismissals like Stoicism and the practices of Christian hermits in the Egyptian deserts. Suicide was permitted in Stoicism. In the third century, the Egyptian Desert Fathers developed forms of spirituality that encouraged physical privation; their ways of life led to Christian monasticism (see n38 below).

28 Alexander III of Macedon (356–323 BCE), known as Alexander the Great, conquered the Persian Empire, including Anatolia, Syria, Phoenicia, Gaza, Egypt, Bactria, and Mesopotamia, and extended the boundaries of his own empire (which had originally included only the unified city-states of ancient Greece) as far as the Punjab. Following the Asian campaign, Alexander turned back westward, possibly intending to conquer Arabia and then perhaps Carthage, Sicily, and Italy (although his intentions have long been disputed). After his death, his empire was divided among his officers, marking the beginning of the Hellenistic period, when Greek culture spread among and was changed by the non-Greek peoples conquered by Alexander.

29 The word “adore” suggests Byzantine emperor worship. WBY had learned of this in such works as W. G. Holmes, The Age of Justinian and Theodora: A History of the Sixth Century A.D. (2nd ed., 2 vols.; London: G. Bell, 1912; YL 903). See also Gibbon: “The mode of adoration, of falling prostrate on the ground and kissing the feet of the emperor, was borrowed by Diocletian from Persian servitude; but it was continued and aggravated till the last age of the Greek monarchy” (6:83).

30 On the taurobolium, or ritual bull-sacrifice, see Frazer, The Golden Bough, Part 4, Adonis Attis Osiris (2nd ed.; London: Macmillan, 1907; YL 700), 229–30; Grant Showerman, “Taurobolium,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th ed., s.v. “Taurobolium,” 26:455); and Franz Cumont, The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism (trans. Grant Showerman [Chicago: Open Court, 1911]). Cumont twice uses the metaphor of the shower-bath (on 71–72 and 208); see also Wells, The Outline of History 337.

31 Stoicism and Epicureanism have often been pitted against each other in popular thinking, the former associated with the denial of pleasure and the latter with hedonism. The school of thought founded by Epicurus (341–270 BCE), an atomist and materialist, emphasized simple pleasure and friendship. The reference to the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras (c. 500–c. 428 BCE) may derive from translated passages about his theory of Nous (“mind” or “reason”) in Burnet 282–85; Burnet also quotes from Plato’s Phaedo (sec. 97) in which Socrates remarks, “I once heard a man reading a book, as he said, of Anaxagoras’, and saying that it was Mind that ordered the world and was the cause of all things” (292).

32 Eugénie Sellers Strong, in Apotheosis and After Life: Three Lectures on Certain Phases of Art and Religion in the Roman Empire, addresses the “apocalyptic-messianic character that centred about Alexander looked upon as the ‘Prince of Peace’ who was to return and unite all mankind under his rule in a brotherhood of love” and the influence of “his portraiture, idealised into a type” upon “the plastic conception of the Christian God” (London: Constable, 1915, 280–81). GY purchased a copy of this book in early 1916 (Saddlemyer 83; YL 2015). On Strong’s influence, see Murphy, Russell Elliott, “ ‘Old Rocky Face, look forth’: W. B. Yeats, the Christ Pantokrator, and the Soul’s History (The Photographic Record),” YAACTS 14 (1996): 82–85.

33 For an almost identical passage written in 1902, see Myth1 43; Myth2 28.

34 The often-depicted biblical story of the death of John the Baptist at the behest of Salome is told in Mark 6:14–29. WBY’s description echoes popular treatments of Salome in the nineteenth century, she is an exotic femme fatale in the work of Surrealist and Decadent writers and artists such as Aubrey Beardsley, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Stephane Mallarmé, Gustave Moreau, and Oscar Wilde.

35 In GY’s copy of A Vision (1938; YL 2435), she has written beside this line, “Diary 1930.” See Diary 1930: “Where did I pick up that story of the Byzantine bishop and the singer of Antioch, where learn that to anoint your body with the fat of a lion ensured the favour of a king?” (Ex 291). Concerning the depiction of Roman emperors, see Strong’s Apotheosis and After Life, which is particularly concerned with their deification and the relationship between these depictions and artistic portraits of Christ. Strong mentions a lead medallion with images of “Diocletian and his colleague, who, with their solar nimbi, resemble two enthroned apostles” (96–97, also 103; see also YVP 3:89). See also Cumont, Astrology and Religion Among the Greeks and Romans, 53–56.

36 See also Au 346: “In Christianity what was philosophy in Eastern Asia became life, biography and drama.”

37 These dates comprise a cycle: 1,050 years is also half the larger cycle, to end in 2100 with the coming of the New Messiah. The manuscript at this point is headed “AD 1 to AD 100” (NLI 36,269/1, leaf 4).

38 Scopas (or Skopas, fl. 4th cent. BCE) was a Greek sculptor of the late classical period. The Thebaid is a region near Thebes in ancient Egypt, associated with early Christian monasticism such as that of St. Anthony. Among WBY’s sources are James O. Hannay’s The Spirit and Origin of Christian Monasticism (London: Methuen, 1903) and The Wisdom of the Desert (London: Methuen, 1904); Gustave Flaubert’s The Temptation of St. Anthony (trans. D. F. Hannigan [London: H. S. Nichols, 1895]); and Gibbon (Chap. 37). WBY mentions the Thebaid in the poem “Demon and Beast,” especially lines 43–50 (Poems 188–89); see also Ex 301 and Au 238, 242.

39 See O. M. Dalton, Byzantine Art and Archaeology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1911; YL 461): “The Emperor Marcus Aurelius expressed one truth when he said that everything which is beautiful is beautiful in itself and terminates in itself. But to the artists of the Middle Ages, whether in East or West, this was false doctrine. To them the individual was nothing, the immanent idea or eidos was both a type and an ensample” (37).

40 Duhem and Burnet outline Greek discoveries. See Burnet’s account of Diogenes of Apollonia: “The earth itself is round, that is to say, it is a disc: for the language of the doxographers does not point to the spherical form” (365). The theory of the plurality of worlds also appears in Burnet’s accounts of Anaximander (64), Anaximenes (82), Anaxagoras (295), and Leukippos (358). Duhem notes that Aristarchus of Samothrace endorsed the heliocentric theory (1:418–23).

41 See LE 136–37: “Our moral indignation, our uniform law, perhaps even our public spirit, may come from the Christian conviction that the soul has but one life to find or lose salvation in: the Asiatic courtesy from the conviction that there are many lives.”

42 Greek daimons were intermediaries between the gods and humans, like the Christian angel (from Greek angelos, “messenger”); however, unlike angels, Greek daimons could be spirits of human beings, especially heroes. Cf. AVA 239 n62.

43 The AS frequently contrasts love (antithetical) and pity (primary). The distinction is most forceful in a discussion of Judas and Christ (26 Jan 1918, YVP 1:290–92). The contrast is also important to the play Calvary: Christ’s pity is “an objective realisation of a collective despair”; Judas, “the C[reative] G[enius] only,” does not pity (YVP 1:291; see Plays 695–97).

44 Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan appears in Luke 10:29–37.

45 This date is close to Gibbon’s (248 CE) for the turning-point for the worse in Roman history (Gibbon, Chap. 7). The manuscript at this point identifies “Phases 2 to 7 AD. 100 to AD 300” (NLI 36,269/1, leaf 8).

46 Eugénie Strong writes that Roman art “only becomes of paramount importance in the historic chain in the second century after Christ” (Roman Sculpture from Augustus to Constantine [London: Duckworth, 1907], 10). A long entry in one of the notebooks containing records of Sleeps from April 6 [1921] cites Strong’s book. Concerning Phase 27 (“always the union with external strength”), WBY observed: “I do not feel that my old people were creative—I have seen something like them though less kindness in roman faces in the procession, perhaps of the altar of peace in Mrs Strongs book—but their culture is subjective. Will the second master (from 16, 17 or 18) find among such his deciples?, & use their objective method as christ when he personified himself in Judas used the subjective classical method” (YVP 3:87–88). On the “altar of peace,” see Strong, Roman Sculpture 39–58.

47 See Strong, Roman Sculpture 347–76.

48 In Discoveries, WBY refers to “the young horsemen on the Parthenon, that seem happier than our boyhood ever was” (EE 212). And he had surely read Walter Pater’s comment in the essay on “Winckelmann” in The Renaissance: “If a single product only of Hellenic art were to be saved in the wreck of all beside, one might choose perhaps from the ‘beautiful multitude’ of the Panathenaic frieze, that line of youths on horseback, with their level glances, their proud, patient lips, their chastened reins, their whole bodies in exquisite service” (London: Macmillan, 1935; YL 1539), 203–4.

49 See Faure, History of Art, Vol. 1, Ancient Art: “Sarcophagi and statues were made in advance: the orator dressed in his toga, the general in his cuirass, the tribune, the quaestor, the consul, the senator, or the imperator, could be supplied at any time. The body was interchangeable. The head was screwed on to the shoulders” (284–85).

50 Cf. “The Statues,” lines 20–22 (Poems 345). After this point, the manuscript has a header, “Phases 8 & 9. AD 300 to 450” (NLI 36,269/1, leaf 12). In the typescript derived from it, which has several variations in dates, the subtitle reads “Phase 8. A D 325 to 395” (NLI 36,269/4, leaf 12).

51 Blake, “The Mental Traveller,” line 95 (Blake 486; WWB 2:33). See also 80, where WBY quotes this line slightly differently.

52 The Yeatses were more interested in the mental than the physical phenomena of spiritualism, but they were widely read on the topic and had both attended séances in which the medium communicated with the dead using methods including trance or “direct voice” speaking and rapping on or tipping tables.

53 See Gibbon: “In the Byzantine palace, the emperor was the first slave of . . . the rigid forms which . . . besieged him in the palace. . . . The legislative and executive power were centered in the person of the monarch” (6:89–90). See also Holmes, The Age of Justinian and Theodora, concerning the Roman Empire under Anastasius:

In earlier times a Roman proconsul in his spacious province was almost an independent potentate during his term of office, the head alike of the civil and military power. But in the new dispensation no man was intrusted with such plenary authority. . . . a shift of authority was made, and the reins of government were delivered into fewer hands, until, at the head of the system, the source of all power, stood the Emperor himself. (1:332)

54 See Gibbon:

Since the time of the Peloponnesian and Punic wars, the sphere of action had not been enlarged; and the science of naval architecture appears to have declined. . . . The principles of maritime tactics had not undergone any change since the time of Thucydides; a squadron of galleys still advanced in a crescent. . . . Steel and iron were still the common instruments of destruction and safety; and the helmets, cuirasses, and shields of the tenth century did not, either in form or substance, essentially differ from those which had covered the companions of Alexander or Achilles. (6:92–94)

55 Thaumaturgy, or wonder-working (from Gr. thauma, wonder or marvel, and ergon, work), was associated with holy men and women in Christian times; it was first used in English by Dr. Dee (1570), who also gave it the associations with magic it now carries.

56 Ammonius Saccas (first half of the third century CE), the Alexandrian self-taught philosopher and teacher of Plotinus and Origen, is usually considered the founder of Neoplatonism, although he left no writings; his second name literally indicates that he had been a sack-carrier in his youth.

57 In GY’s copy of A Vision (1938; YL 2435), this last phrase is underlined, and a note in the margin reads, “+ re-read in Sept. 1913 at the Prelude, Coleman’s Hatch GY.”

58 Origen (Oregenes Adamantius, c. 185–c. 254) was the most learned theologian and biblical scholar of the early Greek church. He studied with Clement of Alexandria, and Porphyry attests to his having attended lectures given by Ammonius Saccas. His deep knowledge of Neoplatonism made him suspect to late Church Fathers, but it probably explains his attractiveness to WBY and GY. GY studied Origen in 1913 (Saddlemyer 48); in 1928, WBY wrote that Origen was the only “Father of the Church . . . I have read or rather dipped into” (L 734).

59 Constantine I (Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus, 272–337) defeated Maxentius, one of his many rivals for the imperial throne, at the battle of the Milvian Bridge near Rome (312). According to H. B. Workman in Hastings, Constantine “was warned in a dream on the night before the battle to draw the monogram of Christ [the labarum or Chi Rho] upon the shields of his soldiers.” Workman’s essay also discusses the complex topic of Constantine’s relation with Christianity, including his deathbed baptism, and the story of “The return of his aged mother Helena from her pilgrimage to Palestine . . . with two nails from the Cross, one of which he turned into the bit of his war-horse” (4:77–78). Having placed his capital at Constantinople, Constantine established Christianity as the state religion in 324.

Gibbon tells the famous story and analyzes the vision of the cross (2:299–305). He also stresses that Constantine’s conversion was both genuine and political: “In an age of religious fervour, the most artful statesmen are observed to feel some part of the enthusiasm which they inspire” (2:305–6).

60 The comment comes from a prophecy attributed to the pagan philosopher Antoninus as recounted by Eunapius in his Lives of the Philosophers, in the section usually called “Life of Maximus.” WBY is likely to have found it in an article or in a lecture by William Ralph Inge, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral (1860–1954). In his article “Neo-Platonism” in Hastings, Dean Inge notes, “The real objection felt against Christianity was that it was the religion of ‘barbarians.’ One of the 4th cent. Neo-Platonists, Antoninus, predicted plaintively that ‘a fabulous and formless darkness is about to tyrannize over all that is beautiful on earth’ ” (Hastings 9:317). In his Gifford lectures, Dean Inge remarks further that “Modern historians too, lamenting the wreck of the ancient culture and the destruction of its treasures in the stormy night of the Dark Ages, have felt a thrill of sympathy with the melancholy prophecy of Antoninus, son of Eustathius, that soon ‘a fabulous and formless darkness shall tyrannise over the fairest things on the earth’ ” (The Philosophy of Plotinus, The Gifford Lectures at St. Andrews, 1917–18 [2 vols.; London: Longmans, Green, 1918; YL 954], 26). GY’s copy of this book contains marginalia referring to A Vision. The text can be found in Eusebius, Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists, in Philostratus and Eunapius, The Lives of the Sophists (ed. and trans. Wilmer Cave Wright [Loeb, 1922], 417). The passage is also quoted by E. R. Dodds, Select Passages Illustrating Neoplatonism (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1923), 8. In his autobiography, Dodds assumes credit for having introduced WBY to the phrase (Missing Persons [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977]), 60. The phrase also appears in WBY’s note to Fighting the Waves (Plays 706) and is alluded to in the opening song from The Resurrection (Plays 482), also published as one of “Two Songs from a Play” (line 16, Poems 217). We are grateful to Neil Mann for his assistance: see Mann, “A Vision [1925]: A Review Essay,” YA 18 (2013), 282.

61 WBY’s primary sources for Byzantine history include Holmes, The Age of Justinian and Theodora (YL 903); Dalton, Byzantine Art and Archaeology (YL 461); Strong, Apotheosis and After Life (YL 2015); Gibbon; the Encyclopaedia Britannica; and the Cambridge Mediaeval History (see Jeffares, New Commentary on the Collected Poems 212).

62 The manuscript, much revised in this section, identifies “Phases 10 11 12 13.14.15.16” with “AD 450. to 600” (NLI 36,269/1, leaf 13).

63 The book of Revelation (sometimes called the Apocalypse after its Greek title, taken from the first word of the text) is the last book of the New Testament. The writer, who identifies himself as John, offers a prophetic vision of the new Jerusalem (21:1–22:5).

64 Justinian I (Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Justinianus, 483–565) was emperor of Byzantium from 527 until his death. He closed the Academy of Plato in Athens in 529 and opened the domed basilica of Hagia Sophia, rebuilt under his direction into the greatest cathedral of its time, in 537.

65 This idea echoes a famous passage from Gregory of Nyssa’s “Oratio de deitate Filii et Spiritus Sancti”:

This city [Constantinople] . . . is full of mechanics and slaves, who are all of them profound theologians, and preach in the shops and in the streets. If you desire a man to change a piece of silver, he informs you wherein the Son differs from the Father; if you ask the price of a loaf, you are told, by way of reply, that the Son is inferior to the Father; and if you inquire whether the bath is ready, the answer is, that the Son was made out of nothing.

This passage is quoted in Gibbon (3:142–43), in Holmes (1:280n), and in G. W. F. Hegel’s The Philosophy of History (3.3.3; trans. J. Sibree [1858; rev. ed., New York: The Colonial Press, 1899], 339).

66 Cf. O. M. Dalton, Byzantine Art and Archaeology:

Suppose a Venice, suddenly enriched and without individual tradition, opening her gates not to one or two foreign artists, but to a host, a colluvies pictorum, from any quarter where a vigorous art flourished, and you have some parallel to the position of Constantinople in the fourth century. . . . by Justinian’s reign the capital had attained a full self-consciousness; it had assumed to itself a directive power; and this epoch has been justly described as the First Golden Age of Byzantine Art. (10)

67 Satan as “the half-divine Serpent” suggests the myth of Eden, in which a serpent tempts Eve (Genesis 3), rather than representations of Satan as a devil (Revelation 12:9 and 20:22 conflate the two depictions, “that old serpent” and “the Devil”). The most common image of Satan in eastern Christian art occurs in iconic images of St. George killing the dragon (although the earliest images are from the twelfth century, later than the period WBY describes here), paralleling imagery of St. Michael and Satan in later art (often only the wings of Michael make it possible to differentiate). Cf. “Michael Robartes and the Dancer,” Poems 177–78.

68 As articles on asceticism in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Hastings explain, the word “ascetic” derives from the Greek askesis, meaning practice or exercise, and once referred to the discipline of the Greek athlete. See James O. Hannay, The Spirit and Origin of Christian Monasticism, who notes that in Eusebius “there is mention of Apphianus, an ‘athlete of piety’ . . . that is to say, an ascetic. This metaphorical use of the word athlete to denote an ascetic striver after perfection probably had its origin in St Paul’s writings. It is common in the accounts of the fourth-century Egyptian hermits” (81). See also Hannay, The Wisdom of the Desert (London: Methuen, 1904), 21 and 143. In a passage cited by Aquinas and widely known, Origen uses this metaphor: “Many are strengthened in the flesh, and their bodies become more powerful. But an athlete of God should become more powerful in spirit” (Homilies on Luke, Fragments on Luke, ed. Joseph T. Lienhard, S.J. [Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1996], 11.3, 45). As Neil Mann notes, translations of Origen’s homily available to WBY use the term “wrestler” rather than “athlete,” but a passage in Eusebius, which mentions Alexandria, is suggestive:

When Severus began to persecute the churches, glorious testimonies were given everywhere by the athletes of religion. This was especially the case in Alexandria, to which city, as to a most prominent theater, athletes of God were brought from Egypt and all Thebais according to their merit, and won crowns from God through their great patience under many tortures and every mode of death. Among these was Leonides, who was called the father of Origen, and who was beheaded while his son was still young.

(Eusebius, Church History, 6.1, trans. A. C. McGiffert, in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2nd Series, ed. P. Schaff and H. Wace [London: Parker & Co., 1890], 1:249)

69 Cf. 18, 211, and 319 n47 in this edition.

70 The Greek hagios means both “holy” as an adjective and “saint” when combined with a name, and sophia means “wisdom”; the cathedral in Constantinople is literally both St. Sophia and “holy wisdom” (see also LE 133).

71 In AVA, the mosaics were “of Rome and Sicily” (159). In January and February 1925, the Yeatses traveled in Italy, visiting Sicily, Naples, Capri, and Rome. WBY’s interest in Byzantine mosaics may have begun with his visit to Ravenna and Venice in 1907 (Foster 2:279, 1:367–69). On the details of WBY’s visual encounters with Byzantine mosaics, see Murphy, “ ‘Old Rocky Face, look forth’,” 69–117; and Melchiori, The Whole Mystery of Art. See “Sailing to Byzantium” (Poems 197–98).

72 Faure follows this narrative, describing Greco-Roman art, in which “at the contact of Roman energy the Greek element recovered a certain dignity” and later Greco-Egyptian faces “with their faces of enigma and their shadowy eyes in which a light trembles” (History of Art, Vol. 1, Ancient Art, 214 and 228, figure on 226. Palmyra, an ancient city in central Syria, is famous for its archaeological sites including a necropolis featuring “sculptured portraits of the dead” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., s.v. “Palmyra,” 20.652). On Fayyum mummy portraits, see W. M. Flinders Petrie, Roman Portraits and Memphis (IV) (London: School of Archaeology in Egypt and Bernard Quaritch, 1911). On conventional vs. realistic images of human forms, see Chap. 7 of Josef Strzygowski’s Origin of Christian Church Art. See also Chap. 13 of O. M. Dalton’s Byzantine Art and Archaeology. On the motif of the vine, see Strzygowski, 150–51 and Dalton 700–703.

73 See Strzygowski’s Origin of Christian Church Art, Chap. 6, “Non-Representational Church Art, and the Subsequent Anti-Representational Movement.” According to Strzygowski, the earliest Christian art was nonrepresentational, influenced by groups of people from east and north of Rome. He mentions that conflicts over the issue of representation occurred in tandem with the Council of Chalcedon (451), which insisted on the two natures of Christ (as God and man), 133–34. See also his discussion of the symbol of the cross (149). WBY presented these differing views of Christ’s nature in The Resurrection, begun in 1925.

74 The opening of Hagia Sophia in 537 precedes the date 560 for the “climax” that is the midpoint Phase 15 on the diagram “The Historical Cones,” fig. 22 (193).

75 In the Yeatses’ system, the Age of Phidias, the Age of Justinian, and the Renaissance are parallel as fifteenth phases of millennial eras.

76 Leo III (c. 680–741), emperor from 717 to his death, issued a series of edicts in 726–29 prohibiting the worship of holy images. The source for this information is an entry in Hastings by Adrian Fortescue, who mentions that a “Jacobite bishop, Xenaias of Hierapolis, was a forerunner of the Iconclasts; and, when this party succeeded in getting the ear of the Emperor, the Iconclast persecution began” (“Iconoclasm,” Hastings 7:78). Xenaias or Philoxenus was bishop (late fifth century–523) of Mabbug (Arabic Manbij) or Hierapolis Bambyce in what is now Eastern Turkey. He was an outspoken advocate of miaphysitism, a doctrine that holds that Christ has a single nature that is both divine and human, rather than two separate natures in one person. Miaphysitism (an orthodox position in Eastern Orthodox churches) is often identified with monophysitism, which claims that Christ has a single nature, the divine having dissolved the human (a doctrine declared heretical by the Fourth Ecumenical Council, held in Chalcedon in 451). At this point, the manuscript has the heading “Phases 16 to 25. A D 600 to 900” (NLI 36,269/1, leaf 19); in the revised typescript it has been changed to “Phase 22. AD. 630 to 900.” 36,269/4, leaf 17).

77 Explaining the Iconoclast movement, Fortescue writes that “Undoubtedly in the 8th cent. the worship of images in the East had arrived at an extreme point. When we read of people who chose, not a living man but some special icon (ei}kw/n), to be the godfather of their child, and who ground an image to powder, mixed this with water, and drank it as a magic medicine, it is not dfficult to understand that a reaction would come” (“Iconoclasm,” Hastings 7:78).

78 Born and educated in Ireland, Johannes Scotus Erigena or Eriugena (c. 815–77) went to the court of Charlemagne about 847, translated Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite from Greek into Latin, and wrote, as WBY put it in the manuscript, “an exposition of the orders of the angels according to the vision of Dionysius” (i.e., The Celestial Hierarchy).

79 Phase 22 occurs in one cycle around 323 BCE, with the death of Alexander and the dissolution of his empire, and in another at between roughly 830 to 900 CE, a period that saw the Carolingian empire divided at the death of Charlemagne and contested thereafter; the various wars over succession ended in 843 with the Treaty of Verdun.

80 One draft of this passage in the manuscript has the heading “Phases 26. 27. 28. AD 900 to A D 1000,” with “or 1100” crossed out (NLI 36,269/1, leaf 20); the next draft is headed “Phases 25 26. 27 AD 900 to 1000” (NLI 36,269/1, leaf 21).

81 Identification of “some book” and “another book” is problematic, perhaps because these are rhetorical tags and not references to any particular books. This period was often defined by historians in terms of “anarchy” (Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion: An Historical Enquiry [London: Sheed and Ward, 1929], 165; The Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of European Unity [London: Sheed & Ward, 1932], 266); WBY quotes from Dawson in Rapallo Notebook D (NLI 13,581, leaf 2). See also Faure, History of Art, Vol. 2, Medieval Art. Of this period, Faure remarks, “The Crusaders, from the end of the eleventh century onward, were hurling Europe upon the Orient in troubled torrents. . . . Europe breaks down the rampart that protects her from Asia” (227); “The religious communities had remained, up to the Crusades, the only isles of light in darkened Europe” (266).

82 Sydenham chorea (also known as St. Vitus Dance) is a neurological disorder characterized by brief, irregular contractions that appear to flow from one muscle to the next.

83 This passage may be influenced by Strzygowski’s discussion of Northern and Eastern influence on Romanesque design. Strzygowski traces East Iranian motifs on one church—“the vinescroll with enclosed animals”—and suggests that comparison “reveals that fusion of Iranian and Greek art which succeeded the displacement of the latter in late Roman times, and led gradually to the development of Byzantine art on the Mediterranean, of ‘Romanesque’ in the West, and to the complete triumph of Iranian art in the world of Islam” (Origins of Christian Church Art 112–14). Romanesque art, sculpture, painting, and manuscript illumination flourished in France, Italy, Britain, and German lands from about 1000 until about 1150; the Romanesque period was succeeded by the Gothic.

84 Cf. 175.

85 See Gibbon:

The influence of two sister prostitutes, Marozia and Theodora, was founded on their wealth and beauty, their political and amorous intrigues: the most strenuous of their lovers were rewarded with the Roman mitre, and their reign may have suggested to the darker ages the fable of a female pope. The bastard son, the grandson, and the great-grandson of Marozia, a rare genealogy, were seated in the chair of St Peter; and it was at the age of nineteen years that the second of these became the head of the Latin Church. (5:297–98)

H. G. Wells notes of Theodora and Marozia, noblewomen of Rome whose histories are complex, that “these two women were as bold, unscrupulous, and dissolute as any male prince of the time could have been, and they are abused by historians as though they were ten times worse” (The Outline of History 448).

86 The Norman cathedrals at Cefalù (begun 1131) and Monreale (founded 1174) in Sicily are Byzantine in aesthetic. See Dalton, Byzantine Art and Archaeology, 410–12, and cf. Diary 1930, which mentions “a terrible Christ like that in the apse at Cefalù” (Ex 317). The Yeatses visited both Cefalù and Monreale in early 1925 during their travels in southern Italy with the Pounds. See Murphy, “ ‘Old Rocky Face, look forth’,” 69–117. On Phidias’s Zeus Olympios, see Pausanias, 5.11.1 (Description of Greece, Books 2–5, trans. W. H. S. Jones [Loeb, 1926], 436–37), and note 688 above. For Byzantine images of Christ, see, for example, Christ Pantokrator, Dalton 409, 671; of the Virgin, Dalton 320, 402.

87 The source is “The Life of St. Pelagia.” The tale is widespread, found in such collections as the Legenda Aurea (compiled by Jacobus de Voraigne, trans. William Caxton, ed. F. S. Ellis [London: Temple Classics, 1900], Vol. 5, 235; http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/goldenlegend/GoldenLegend-Volume5.asp#Pelagienne. WBY demonstrated familiarity with a similar tale in The Celtic Twilight (Myth1 49, Myth2 32). See also a diary entry in Diary 1930 (Ex 291).

88 From “The Tale of the Girl Heart’s-Miracle, Lieutenant of the Birds” in The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night; compiled and trans. J. C. Mardrus, ed. and rendered into English by E. Powys Mathers (2nd ed., 4 vols.; London: Casanova Society, 1923); YL 251 (Vol. 1), 4:495.

89 This passage draws not from the late twelfth-century poet Chrétien de Troyes but, as William O’Donnell notes, from William Wells Newell, King Arthur and the Table Round. Tales chiefly after the Old French of Chrestien of Troyes, with an account of Arthurian romance, and notes (2 vols.; London: A. P. Watt; Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1897), 2:137–39. See also LE 56, 163, and 384 n28.

90 See Parzival: A Knightly Epic by the German knight and poet Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1170–c. 1220), trans. Jessie L. Weston (2 vols.; London: David Nutt, 1894). Weston’s notes suggest,

It is very curious that, constantly as Baptism is insisted upon as essential to salvation, the equal necessity for the Second Great Sacrament of the Faith is passed over. It is perfectly true that Wolfram’s knights attend Mass, and that Mass is apparently celebrated with regularity, but here their obligation seems to end; never once do we hear of one of his knights communicating, even Gamuret, when dying, though he receives absolution, does not receive the viaticum. (2:196)

At one point, Kunnewaare’s squire comes upon Parzival and sees “A helmet all battle-dinted, and a shield which yet traces bore / Of many a bitter conflict that was foughten for lady fair” (1:161, lines 70–71). See also IDM 30, 103; Au 138.

91 The locus classicus of Gothic freedom is “The Nature of Gothic” in John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (3 vols.; London: J. M. Dent, n.d., 2:138–212), which was published separately in 1892 in an ornamental edition by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press. Blake (in many places) and William Morris (in Gothic Architecture) similarly suggest that Gothic architecture allowed the workmen to cooperate yet express their individual views freely. St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), the founder of the Cistercian order, explains his opposition to the wealthy Benedictine monks at Cluny in his Apology to Abbot William of St. Thierry (trans. Michael Casey, n.p.: Cistercian Publishers, 1970). In Chap. 12, he decries the Romanesque features of the wealthy abbey in Cluny as unworthy of monks; Faure cites it for its detailed descriptions of Romanesque architecture and sculpture (History of Art, Vol. 2, Medieval Art [YL 664], 336).

92 The thirteenth-century French architect Villard de Honnecourt’s book of drawings (published Paris, 1858) contains sketches of machines, architecture, monuments, human figures, animals, and important Gothic churches in process. WBY visited Maud Gonne in Normandy in May 1910, and together they saw Mont Saint-Michel, home to the unusual Benedictine Abbey and steepled church (built between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries); see Mem 249–50, EE 245–46, and Foster 1:421. About Mont Saint-Michel WBY wrote,

Yet at Mont-Saint-Michel I have been seeing a different art, a marvellous powerful living thing created by a community working for hundreds of years and allowing only a very little place for the individual. Are there not groups which obtain, through powerful emotion, organic vitality? How do they differ from the mob of casual men who are the enemies of all that has fineness? Why is it that the general thought is our enemy in the towns of Ireland, and would be our friend in the country if we had the same symbols? (Mem 250)

WBY had also read Henry Adams’s Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913; YL 19): “I have read all Adams and find an exact agreement even to dates with my own ‘law of history’ ” (L 666).

93 In GY’s copy of A Vision (1938; YL 2435), “grown transparent” is underlined, and a note in the margin reads “Justinian & Theodora.”

94 The Dominican order was founded by St. Dominic in 1216. Dominic wanted to bring the dedication and systematic education of the older monastic orders (like the Benedictines) to bear on the religious problems of the burgeoning city populations.

95 A chronology at the end of one of the notebooks shows that WBY’s source was Adams: for the years 1180 to 1250, WBY wrote “(5.6.7) 1150 to 1250 given by Henry Adams as time when man most felt his unity in a unified world. He seeks its expression in ‘Amiens Cathedral & the Works of Thomas Aquinas[’]” (YVP 3:70). See The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 435.

96 This passage is also indebted to Adams. In the same note, WBY wrote: “325 to 400 AD (8) Constantine (Constantinople founded 324 (Gibbon) Henry Adams takes 310 as significant date ‘Cross took the place of the Legions’ (? coming of unification by Church)” (YVP 3:70). Compare with Adams: “. . . the nearest approach to the revolution of 1900 was that of 310, when Constantine set up the Cross” (Education 383). Gibbon devotes Chap. 17 to the establishment of Constantinople, which he dates to 324 or 326 (2:140). Another section of the chronology in WBY’s notebook is pertinent: “1250 to 1300. Aparently struggles to establish Kingly Powers. Note C[haucer]’[s] allusion to King Arthur” (YVP 3:70). According to an entry for December 20, 1920, WBY had confirmation of his theory about this period from one of his Controls: “Was looking through some books of history to find why 1250 is the start of 50 years attributed to phase 8 & wondered if St Clovis consolidation of his power was typical of period when George heard a voice say ‘Percys Reliques Vol III poem 5’[.] This proved to be a ballad about Arthurs struggle with his barons & so confirmed the opinion” (YVP 3:64). The poem cited is “The Legend of King Arthur” in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765).

97 See WBY’s essay “A People’s Theatre” (1919):

Dante in that passage in the Convito which is, I think, the first passage of poignant autobiography in literary history, for there is nothing in S. Augustine not formal and abstract beside it, in describing his poverty and his exile counts as his chief misfortune that he has had to show himself to all Italy and so publish his human frailties that men who honoured him unknown honour him no more. Lacking means he had lacked seclusion, and he explains that men such as he should have but few and intimate friends. (IDM 128)

The first treatise of the Convito laments the poet’s exile and the consequent need to explain his work; see 1.3 and 4 (14–21).

98 Italian painters Giotto di Bondone (1267–1337) and Fra Angelico (Il Beato Fra Giovanni Angelico da Fiesole, 1395–1455) join French chronicler Jean Froissart (c. 1337–c. 1405).

99 References here are to Italian painter Masaccio (Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Mone Cassai, 1401–28), English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400), and French poet François Villon (c. 1431–c. 1474).

100 Masaccio is usually said to have lived one more year than he is here allowed; WBY’s friend Beardsley lived from 1872 to 1898.

101 This passage refers to three of Masaccio’s paintings in the Brancacci Chapel (Florence): The Baptism of the Neophytes, The Rendering of the Tribute Money, and The Expulsion of Adam and Eve.

102 After a life of crime and several narrow escapes from death sentences, François Villon disappeared, leaving his partly serious, partly humorous Testament. See L 583 and Au 217, 240.

103 Casts of sculpture and architectural features from classical Greece and Rome and also from later periods in European art were part of the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum from its establishment in 1852. Acquisitions from the 1860s to the 1880s especially emphasized the medieval and Renaissance periods, and after the Architectural or Cast courts opened in 1873, the large exhibit space allowed for considerable expansion of an already extensive collection. In 1916, the cast collection of the Architectural Museum, which was particularly strong in examples of Gothic architectural ornament, was brought permanently to the museum. The collection of casts of post-classical European statuary at the V & A is still perhaps the most comprehensive in the world.

104 The sculptor Donatello (Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, c. 1386–1466); Michelangelo; the sculptor Jacopo della Quercia (c. 1374–1438); and the painter, draughtsman, and architect Raphael (Raffaelo Sanzio, 1483–1520) are all associated with the Italian Renaissance. The Greek sculptor Myron of Eleutherai (c. 470–c. 440 BCE) was a leading early classical bronze sculptor of the Attic school. There may be an echo here of Furtwängler, who observes of Myron that “the ancient orators name him among the last masters of the severe style” (Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture 182).

105 The Platonic Academy of Cosimo de’ Medici, headed by Marsilio Ficino, was a fifteenth-century intellectual group loosely based on the Academy of Plato; members included Pico della Mirandola and Angelo Ambrogini (Poliziano).

106 The phrase “vestibule of Christianity” was a fairly common expression for periods leading into the Christian era. See, for instance, the title of Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger’s Heidenthum und Judenthum, Vorhalle des Christenthums (Regensburg: Verlag von G. Joseph Manz, 1857). See also F. X. Kraus in “Medicean Rome” (Vol. 2 of The Cambridge Modern History, ed. A. W. Ward et al. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902–11], 2:61; YL 14). After describing the work of Julius II (1443–1513, pope from 1503–13), Kraus adds: “Not only Judaism, but also Graeco-Roman paganism, is an antechamber to Christianity . . .” (2:61). The German painter, draughtsman, and printmaker Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) made two trips to Venice, in 1494–95 and 1505–7, during which he secured the commission for an altarpiece in San Bartolomeo, the church of the German community. The finished piece paid tribute to the aesthetics of Venetian painting of the time. On the “perfectly proportioned human body,” see 353 n37 and 188.

107 See 203–4 and n68 above. This epoch takes its distinctive image from the roof of the Sistine Chapel: see “Under Ben Bulben” (Poems 333–36, lines 45–52) and “Long-legged Fly” (Poems 347, lines 21–22).

108 The National Gallery Illustrated General Catalogue (London, 1973) translates the inscription to Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity (1500) discussed in WBY’s note: “I Sandro painted this picture at the end of the year 1500 (?) in the troubles of Italy in the half time according to the 11th chapter of S. John in the second woe of the Apocalypse in the loosing of the devil for three and a half years then he will be chained in the 12th chapter and we shall see clearly (?) [damage] as in this picture” (62; insertions are from the Catalogue).

The Yeatses visited Capri in 1925, and as Murphy notes, WBY in the note refers to the natural Grotta di Matermania, transformed during Roman times into a nymphaeum, which has frequently, as in WBY’s Baedeker (1912), been wrongly associated with Mithra. See Karl Baedeker, Handbook for Travelers: Southern Italy and Sicily (17th rev. ed. [Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1912], 187), and Murphy, “ ‘Old Rocky Face, look forth,’ ” 70. On the linking of the Mithraic cave with the Christian manger, see Murphy, “ ‘Old Rocky Face, look forth,’ ” 104–6.

109 Italian Renaissance painters Carlo Crivelli (1435–95) and Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431–1506), like Botticelli and Da Vinci, are of the generation following Masaccio, who is usually considered the first of the great quattrocento painters.

110 The quotation is from Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (London: David Nutt, 1900; YL 351): “Therefore Beautie is the true monument and spoile of the victory of the soule, when she with heavenly influence beareth rule over martiall and grosse nature, and with her light overcometh the darkenesse of the bodie” (311). See Mem 157.

111 Roughly here in the manuscript, WBY marked the next division, then crossed out the following: “1500 to—Phases 16, 17, & 18.” The terminal date was to have been 1640, the start of the next division, which extended to “?1880” (NLI 36,269/1, leaves 29, 32). Cf. Au 227–28.

112 A new generation of artists exemplifies the waning moon that begins after the phase of “complete beauty” that “knows nothing of desire, for desire implies effort” (101). See “Under Ben Bulben,” lines 45–52 (Poems 334). Cf. the theory of eugenics WBY developed in On the Boiler (LE 220–51).

113 Pope Julius II directed the decoration of these rooms in the Vatican palace. In 1508–12, Michelangelo decorated the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (the pope’s private chapel and the site of conclaves for the election of popes), alternating Hebrew prophets and pagan sibyls in seated positions around the lower curved part of the barrel-vaulted room. Raphael painted the Stanza della Segnatura (1508–11), where the pope signed bulls and briefs. The long wall opposite the entry to the Stanza holds the Disputa, or “Disputation of the Holy Sacrament,” a discussion about the Eucharist but also a glorification of Roman Catholicism. Opposite it is the School of Athens, showing the triumph of philosophy and a balance to the triumph of theology.

114 John Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (1629) stresses that the coming of Christ silenced the pagan oracles (The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler [London and Harlow: Longmans, Green, 1968], 109). The Yeatses’ library contains a copy of the poem with illustrations by William Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923; YL 1320).

115 On the diagram of historical cones, Phases 16–18 are dated 1550, and the next gyre (Phases 19–21) has a date of 1680. In 1603, Elizabeth I died, and James VI of Scotland (1567–1625) assumed the throne of England as James I of England. The Jacobean Age, like the Elizabethan, is known for its flourishing literary culture. The English poets Abraham Cowley (1618–67) and John Dryden (1631–1700) wrote during the latter part of the seventeenth century.

116 The Flemish painter Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641) became an important portrait painter in the English court of Charles I. The description of art from the Low Countries suggests the genre painting of Pieter Bruegel (Brueghel) the Elder (1525–69), as well as that of his sons Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564/65–1636) and Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625).

117 The English philosopher, statesman, and essayist Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) is known for establishing an inductive methodology for scientific inquiry. The Italian sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) designed and created a bronze baroque canopy, 29 meters in height, that acts as a baldachin over the high altar of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The plinths beneath the columns of this baldachin are decorated with images of a woman’s face, contorted as if in pain.

118 WBY refers to the eighteenth-century poets Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and Thomas Gray (1716–71), the man of letters Samuel Johnson (1709–84), and the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–78).

119 In Religio Medici (1643), Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82) declares his belief in witches: “I could believe that Spirits use with man the act of carnality, and that in both sexes; I conceive they may assume, steal, or contrive a body, wherein there may be action enough to content decrepit lust, or passion to satisfie more active veneries . . .” (1.30). WBY quotes the same passage in LE 72; see also Myth1 267, Myth2 177. He owned copies of three editions of this work (YL 289–91).

120 See 381 n210.

121 The quotation is a paraphrase from the second stanza of “Claire de lune” by Verlaine (1844–96): “Ils n’ont pas l’air de croire à leur bonheur / Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune . . .” (Fêtes galantes [1869; nouvelle édition, Paris: Léon Vanier, 1891, 5). This well-known poem (inspiring music by Gabriel Fauré and Claude Debussy) and its collection Fêtes galantes are indebted to the painting of the French rococo painter Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721). Faure considers Thomas Gainsborough the best of English eighteenth-century painters and finds in his portraits of society women a resonance from ancient mythology: “If those ethereal robes were torn, if the dulled tones of the crossed neckloths, the high, powdered coiffures, the laces, the blue ribbons, and the scarfs of pink pearl were to mingle their impalpable dust with the ashes of the airy harmonies which always accompany them, we should doubtless see, appearing for a second and instantly fleeing beneath the trees, tall, chaste huntresses who would not reappear” (History of Art, Vol. 4, Modern Art, 266). Egyptian sculptors worked in wood but often in more durable materials. The most famous face of an Egyptian princess is the beautifully preserved polychrome limestone bust of Nefertiti, wife of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaton (Amenhotep IV), now in the Altes Museum, Berlin.

122 The British painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–92), whose stay in Rome (1749–52) emphasized study of Raphael and Michelangelo, was among the founding members and the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts. Like Blake, who published adverse marginal comments on Reynolds’s Discourses (Erdman 635–62), and like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, WBY rejected Reynolds’s aesthetic and epistemological theories. Faure is equally dismissive: “In the course of his travels on the Continent, Reynolds was not able to see, in Rembrandt, whom he pillages, and in the Venetians, whom he treats loftily in his Discourses, anything but a creamy and triturated paste, melting tones, and lights with warm shadows. . . . He treats his admirable gifts as a painter like frippery to crumble with the tips of the fingers” (History of Art, Vol. 4, Modern Art, 263–64). In practice as well, as Bernadette McCarthy points out, WBY disliked Reynolds’s advocacy of copying Old Masters as a principal method for training artists. WBY’s courses at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art and the Royal Hibernian Academy were based on ideas propounded by Reynolds (Bernadette McCarthy, Chap. 6, “Yeats and the Dublin Art Colleges,” in “The ‘lidless eye’: W. B. Yeats, Visual Practice, and Modernism,” PhD dissertation, University College Cork, 2011, 53–68).

123 The “village providence” apparently refers to the eighteenth-century idea of benevolence. Compare LE 44: “To Balzac indeed it [the solution of the social question] was but personal charity, the village providence of the eighteenth century . . .” cf. EAR 247. The claim is that the Faust of part 2 (written in Goethe’s elder years) expresses a good-hearted eighteenth-century desire, as did the hero of Samuel Richardson’s novel Sir Charles Grandison (1753). Similarly, in his later years, Voltaire defended religious freedom. Cf. Mem 158: “Faust in the end was only able to reclaim land like some officer of the Agricultural Board.”

124 WBY told Lady Gregory that he had enjoyed reading the novels of English novelist Jane Austen (1775–1817) during the American tour that he and GY took in the spring of 1920 (Foster 2:168).

125 The English writers Blake and Arnold are compared with the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren (1855–1916).

126 The French painter Louis Gustave Ricard (1823–73) was best known for his still lives and portraits in the classical manner. See EE 174. According to the Grove Dictionary of Art, Ricard, a “reclusive, studious aesthete,” “worked for long periods of time on his portraits without his sitters being present. When his task seemed almost complete, he would recall them and was quoted as saying that he took pleasure in seeing how they resembled the portraits he had made of them” (s.v. “Ricard, [Louis-]Gustave”). The English painter and writer Charles Ricketts (1866–1931) founded the Vale Press and, with the English painter and lithographer Charles Shannon (1863–1937), edited The Dial (1897–99). His effect on WBY is clear from letters and from Self-Portrait Taken from the Letters and Journals of Charles Ricketts, R. A., collected and compiled by T. Sturge Moore, ed. Cecil Lewis (London: Peter Davies, 1939). WBY owned a number of Ricketts’s books (YL 1727, 1745–49). Ricketts illustrated the first edition of Oscar Wilde’s poem “The Sphinx” (1894). WBY included “the Charles Ricketts of The Danaides, and of the earlier illustrations of The Sphinx,” among “the great myth-makers and mask-makers” (Au 403–4). Ricketts created three wood engravings for T. Sturge Moore’s Danae: A Poem (London: Hacon and Ricketts, 1903).

127 The first major novel of Charles Dickens (1812–70) was The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, better known as The Pickwick Papers (1836). See WBY’s remarks at the opening meeting of the Dublin University Philosophical Society, as reported in “The Modern Novel” (Irish Times, November 9, 1923):

Sometime in the middle of the eighteenth century there came into the faces of women, as painted by the great painters, an exquisite subtlety which they called a mark of high breeding. They got it in Gainsborough and one or two painters before him, and they got it in the first volume of “Sir Charles Grandison.” Then he [WBY] found the same thing in the novels of Jane Austen. These novels were simply a description, an elaboration, of the pursuit of good breeding—that was to say, a quality which only a few happily nurtured people ever found. Then he did not find that pursuit again until they got to the writings of Henry James.

He discovered, about five years ago, the particular devil that spoiled that celebrated quality in literature. “Pickwick” was the devil. In “Pickwick” the qualities celebrated were qualities any man could possess: good humour, a certain amount of openness of heart, kindness—qualities which everyman might hope to possess; they were democratic qualities. It gave them the kind of sculpture they saw in Dublin, like Tom Moore and the statue in Leinster Lawn. That smile of vacuous benevolence came out of “Pickwick.”

(Quoted in Torchiana, W. B. Yeats and Georgian Ireland [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966], 212)

See also Lady Gregory’s journal entry for November 11, 1925: “Talking of novels, Yeats said Jane Austen and Richardson had written only of the upper classes. ‘Dickens changed all that’ ” (Lady Gregory’s Journals 1916–1930, ed. Lennox Robinson (London: Putnam, 1946), 262.

128 In addition to Blake, Nietzsche, and Spencer, this list includes the English poet and critic Coventry Patmore, the English novelist Samuel Richardson (1689–1781), the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, and the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). In AVA, the last cluster also includes the English philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill.

129 The idea of Eternal Return, that one’s life might recur in exactly the same way, requires the “highest formulation of affirmation that is at all attainable” (EH 3:Z-1) and is an important concept in Nietzsche’s work. In 1902, WBY wrote excitedly to Lady Gregory about his discovery of Nietzsche, “that strong enchanter”: “I have read him so much that I have made my eyes bad again. . . . Nietzsche completes Blake and has the same roots” (L 379).

130 See 309–10 n14.

131 The references are to the novels War and Peace (1865–69) by Tolstoy and La tentation de Saint Antoine (The Temptation of Saint Anthony) by Flaubert.

132 The “recent mathematical research” recalls The Education of Henry Adams, Chap. 31, in which the work of various modern scientists and mathematicians (“since Bacon and Newton”) suggest to Adams that “Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man” (451); the older scientific view had transitioned to a scientific relativism where—as Poincaré had said—Euclidean geometry is not more true but more convenient than non-Euclidean types (455). In the reference to “a new dimension,” there may be an echo of the discussion of “The Limited Universe” in Lyndon Bolton’s Introduction to the Theory of Relativity: “The curvature of space, or of the aether, leads to the conclusion that any region, if sufficiently extended, may eventually bend round into itself, and thus that the universe of experience may be limited” (London: Methuen, 1921; YL 240, 170–71). The new dimension is time.

133 At this point, AVA continues with explanation and prophecy of the recent past and near future. With the manuscript of the new material, WBY gave instructions to the compositors:

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”. (NLI 36,272/6/2c, leaf 10)

134 Several extant drafts (from 1932) discuss the contemporary period, including political and artistic figures and movements. A letter to Olivia Shakespear of July 23, 1933, mentions being introduced to General O’Duffy of the Fascist Blueshirt movement; WBY writes, “I was ready, for I had just re-written for the seventh time the part of A Vision that deals with the future” (L 812). See Foster’s account of the meeting between two men “on different levels,” as GY put it (2:474). However, WBY finally trusted his own admission that (in the words of one draft) “No more can perhaps be said” and omitted most analysis and prophecy from his conclusion (NLI 36,272/4/2).

A heavily corrected nine-page typescript entitled “Michael Robartes Foretells” is probably one of the discarded versions of the ending of A Vision (published in YO 219–24 and separately in Hazard Adams, Blake and Yeats: The Contrary Vision [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1955], 301–5). This section of the text was reworked many times. See, for instance, NLI 36,272/31 (dated “Oct 16, 1931”) and 36,272/32, which is substantially different. One TS, dated September 1932 and preserved with the TS carbon, represents a radically different conception of this section from that printed in 1937: see Appendix II.

135 Balzac had a famous infatuation (which ended badly) with Claire Clémence Henriette Claudine de Maillé de La Tour-Landry, the Duchesse de Castries (1796–1861). See the story “L’Illustre Gaudissart” (“Gaudissart the Great”), which opens Parisians in the Country, trans. James Waring (one volume of the Temple reprint of the J. M. Dent complete Comédie Humaine [New York: Macmillan, 1901]; YL 99). Dedicated “To Madame la Duchesse de Castries,” it begins:

Is not the commercial traveller—a being unknown in earlier times—one of the most curious types produced by the manners and customs of this age? And is it not his peculiar function to carry out in a certain class of things the immense transition which connects the age of material development with that of intellectual development? Our epoch will be the link between the age of isolated forces rich in original creativeness, and that of the uniform but levelling force which gives monotony to its products, casting them in masses, and following out a unifying idea—the ultimate expression of social communities. After the Saturnalia of intellectual communism, after the struggles of many civilisations concentrating all the treasures of the world on a single spot, must not the darkness of barbarism invariably supervene? (1)

WBY refers to the idea of “history as a personal experience” expressed by “Balzac in his letter to the Duchess de Castries” in the “Private Thoughts” section of On the Boiler (Ex 429–30). Cf. Warwick Gould, “The ‘myth [in] . . . reply to a myth’—Yeats, Balzac, and Joachim of Fiore,” YA 5 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), 238–51.

136 See Au 130–39 for WBY’s recollection of gatherings at the “old stable beside Kelmscott House, William Morris’s house at Hammersmith,” the “debates held there upon Sunday evenings by the Socialist League” and “the little group who had supper with Morris afterwards” (Au 130). See also Philip Henderson, William Morris: His Life, Work, and Friends (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 301–2.

137 Toyohiko Kagawa (1888–1960) was a Japanese Christian peace activist, labor organizer, and writer, especially honored by Protestants in the United States; he was twice nominated for a Nobel Prize and is venerated by the Episcopal Church (USA) and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. On August 19, 1927, WBY mentioned in a letter to the Japanese scholar Shōtarō Oshima that he had been reading “Toyohiko Kagawa’s Novel which is translated into English under the title ‘before the Dawn’, and find it about the most moving account of a modern saint that I have met, a Tolstoyan saint which is probably all wrong for Japan, but very exciting to an European” (CL InteLex 5014). See also a diary entry in Diary 1930, Ex 326–29. We have not identified the “Galway clergyman.”

138 Captain J. R. White (1879–1946), born in County Antrim, was an officer in the British Army before resigning his commission and returning to Ireland, working for Home Rule, the workers movement, and leftist republican politics. He cofounded the Irish Citizens Army with James Larkin. Chap. 16 of his memoir Misfit (London and Toronto: Jonathan Cape, 1930) describes his experience in Whiteway Colony, a communist experimental community in the Cotswold Hills, including his encounter with Francis Sedlak, “the only man I have ever met who claimed to have mastered and digested Hegel’s logic.”

He had written a book called A Holiday with a Hegelian, which no one on earth but himself could understand. I, as little as any; but I could understand that Francis understood. He had entered a world of pure thought with the key of Hegel’s logic that suited him. He retained his giant’s body, but he lived in his mind. He was no longer a groundling, but on the road to become a god. He declared he had found a key to the movements of the heavenly bodies in the fifty-two movements of thought in Hegel’s logic and could make thereby slight corrections in astronomical calendars. (147)

Sedlak’s appearance is described by Nellie Shaw (“the lady to whom he once described himself as ‘married but not legally, my wife objecting to chattel slavery’ ” [146]) in her own words:

In those days we was pure Communists. . . . Well, as I was sayin’, we was eating our lunch one day when I looked up, and there was the queerest sight comin’ along the road ever I seen in all my life; a great ’airy giant of a man as naked as ’is mother made ’im to the waist, and nothing but a pair of running-drawers, and sandals below that. (149–50)

139 WBY refers here to the fascio, a bundle of sticks bound together with an axe, borrowed from Roman iconography and used in Fascist Italy as a symbol of the state.

140 These two lines vary only slightly from those of WBY’s poem “Conjunctions,” from the sequence “Supernatural Songs” (Poems 294). In a letter to Olivia Shakespear, August 25, 1934, WBY frames a full quotation of the poem: “I was told, you may remember, that my two children would be Mars conjunctive Venus, Saturn conjunctive Jupiter respectively; and so they were—Anne the Mars-Venus personality. Then I was told that they would develop so that I could study in them the alternating dispensations, the Christian or objective, then the Antithetical or subjective. The Christian is Mars-Venus—it is democratic. The Jupiter-Saturn civilization is born free among the most cultivated, out of tradition, out of rule” (L 827–28).

141 See 407 n36.

All Souls’ Night

1 Written in November 1920 and published in March 1921 (in The New Republic and The London Mercury), the poem would later appear as the close of The Tower (London and New York: Macmillan, 1928). In the Roman Catholic Church, All Souls’ Day (usually November 2) is the feast on which the earthly church prays for the souls of the faithful departed suffering in Purgatory. It is also “the night before the Irish Samhain,” which “was the proper time for prophecy and the unveiling of mysteries” (John Rhys, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom, 2nd ed. [London: William and Norgate, 1892; YL 1741], 514). See also Frazer, The Golden Bough, 6:51–83 and cf. 10:224; and IDM 10.

2 Like the other two friends whose ghosts are summoned in the poem, William Thomas Horton (1864–1919) was a fellow member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. He was a visionary artist; WBY wrote the introduction for his A Book of Images (London: The Unicorn Press, 1898; YL 918, Wade 255). Horton’s ecstatic Platonic love for the historian Amy Audrey Locke (who died in 1916) left him inconsolable. After her death, according to WBY, Horton “saw her in apparition & he believed, & held communion with her . . . & attained through her certain of the traditional experiences of the saints” (qtd. in George Mills Harper, W. B. Yeats and W. T. Horton: The Record of An Occult Friendship [London: Macmillan, 1980], 2).

3 For Florence Farr Emery, see 402 n17.

4 For “Chance and Choice,” cf. “Solomon and the Witch,” lines 20–32 (Poems 179); on how a soul might “sink into its own delight,” cf. “A Prayer for My Daughter,” lines 65–72 (Poems 192). These existential polarities are related to the distinctions between Destiny and Fate, which depend upon the Daimon. See 64, 101–2, and 139 in this edition, and cf. PASL: “I think that all religious men believe that there is a hand not ours in the events of life, and that, as somebody says in Wilhelm Meister, accident is destiny; and I think it was Heraclitus who said: the Daemon is our destiny” (LE 11).

5 For WBY’s reminiscences of Samuel Liddell (MacGregor) Mathers (1854–1918), the founding chief of the Golden Dawn, see Au 159–62. Yeats dedicated AVA to Moina (Bergson) Mathers, MacGregor’s wife, who was the sister of Henri Bergson (liii–lvi).

Appendix I

1 In Alspach, the mark “see table” has been replaced by the language from the table.

2 See n1 above.

3 In Alspach, this correction is made properly, to “Cimitière Marin.”

4 On the first-pull Coole proofs, right-hand headings are written in to correlate with the section of A Vision (“A Packet for Ezra Pound,” “Michael Robartes and his Friends,” etc.). These headings are printed on the second-pull proofs.

5 In the bound unmarked proofs for signature P, the text reads: Wheel [upper-case].

6 Again, in the bound unmarked proofs for signature P, the text reads: Wheel [upper-case].

7 In the bound unmarked proofs for signature P, the text reads: jelly fish [no hyphen].

8 In the bound unmarked proofs for signature P, the text reads: November, and, [with comma].

9 In the bound unmarked proofs for signature P, the text reads: I or West [no commas].

10 In the bound unmarked proofs for signature P, the text reads: wheel [lower-case].

11 On the second-pull proof, this section of the word is printed upside down.

Appendix II

1 WBY refers to Enneads 3.4, titled in MacKenna’s translation “Our Tutelary Spirit” (Plotinus 2:46–53).

2 WBY quotes the same comment in “J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time,” sec. 9 (EE 238). Synge wrote in a notebook of 1895–98: “Lyrics can be written by people who are immature, drama cannot. There is little great lyrical poetry. Dramatic literature is relatively more mature. . . . Lyrical art is the art of national adolescence” (Collected Works: Prose, ed. Robin Skelton [Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe; Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1982], 350).

3 WBY refers to specific poems from Personae. The poems of Cathay (London: Elkin Mathews, 1915; Gallup A9) are translations from Chinese poetry, and “Homage to Sextus Propertius” appeared in Quia Pauper Amavi (London: The Egoist, 1919; Gallup A17).

4 This quotation that concludes the Cuala version of the passage is the first three of four lines of Pound’s short poem “Ité,” first published in Poetry in November 1913 and then in Lustra (1916). WBY leaves off the last line, “And take your wounds from it gladly” (Personae 95).

5 WBY seems to draw the idea that “in eternity opposites coincide” from Nicholas of Cusa, who in De Possest (1460) writes that in God all opposites coincide. See 425–26 n19 above.

6 WBY’s note here about Blake’s “Mental Traveller” also appears in the text on 139.

7 At this point in the TS, an “x” refers readers to a note the same as WBY’s note to 146.

8 At this point in the TS, an “x” refers readers to a note corresponding to WBY’s second note on 162.

9 William Lilly (1602–81), practitioner of horary astrology, was considered England’s leading astrologer during the period of the Civil War: he predicted the defeat of Charles I at Naseby, advised many politicians and soldiers, and predicted the Great Fire fourteen years in advance. His library is preserved in the Ashmolean collection at Oxford.

10 The marked version of this text includes the following text, struck through: “and certain young men not all affected by Marxian Russia who in criticising literature repudiate as bourgeois all individual characterisation and commend let us say the second act of O’Caey’s [sic] Silver Tassie because man is there described in the mass. Have not similar though finer susceptibilities exalted Ulysses and the Waste Land where character and detail however clearly seen lead the mind away into some undefined immensity, into sacred books. I think of Pirandello whose dramatis personae feel their own charact [sheet cut off] parasites who create by some carefully selected vice or crime or eccentricity an artificial character” (leaves 2–3).

11 WBY refers to Seán O’Casey’s four-act play The Silver Tassie (1927–28), which WBY had rejected for the Abbey Theatre.

12 In addition to James Joyce’s Ulysses, WBY refers here to T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922).

13 The marked version of this text includes the following text, struck through: “These artificial characters are invented not out of any personal bias but from the mere pleasure of inventing; they claim no such authority as the Hunchback claims; they are technical tricks learned from the environment; there [sic] object is not permanence but plasticity; they are that 23rd phase which is symbolised by a juggler and by a man who beats his shadow with a whip. Phase24 [sic] must come with the acceptance of an external code, an ideal in life fixed by public opinion. One foresees an exagerration [sic] of everything that makes the good as the mass of men understand perceive it, the general standard. Somebody has pointed out that civilisations in their final phase abandon in their practical life difficult or unattainable ideas, delight in some form of mass production whether of thoughts commodities or populations. One can expect some self-conscious” (leaf 5).