In the year 1909, Freud and Jung set out together from Bremen for the United States. They took the opportunity to psychoanalyse one another, and every morning for seven weeks, told one another their dreams. Freud found one of Jung’s dreams particularly baffling:
I was in a house that I did not know’, [Jung relates], which had two storeys. It was ‘my house’. I found myself in the upper storey, where there was a kind of salon furnished with fine old pieces in rococo style. On the walls hung a number of precious old paintings… But then it occurred to me that I did not know what the lower floor looked like. Descending the stairs, I reached the ground floor. There everything was much older, and I realised that this part of the house must date from about the fifteenth or sixteenth century. The furnishings were medieval; the floors were of red brick … I came upon a heavy door and opened it. Beyond it, I discovered a stone stairway that led down into the cellar. Descending again, I found myself in a beautifully vaulted room which looked exceedingly ancient. Examining the walls I discovered layers of brick among the ordinary stone blocks, and chips of brick in the mortar. As soon as I saw this, I knew the walls dated from Roman times. My interest by now was intense. I looked more closely at the floor. It was of stone slabs, and in one of these I discovered a ring. When I pulled it, the stone slab lifted, and again I saw a stairway of narrow stone steps leading down into the depths. These, too, I descended, and entered a low cave cut into the rock. Thick dust lay on the floor, and in the dust were scattered bones and broken pottery, like remains of a primitive culture. I discovered two human skulls, obviously very old and half disintegrated. Then I awoke.
Freud’s conclusion was that the two skulls indicated death. ‘Is there anyone you’d like to see dead?’ asked Freud. Jung said no. But as Freud pressed the point, Jung admitted—to please him—that the skulls could be those of his wife and sister-in-law. ‘That’s it,’ said Freud with satisfaction. ‘You want to get rid of your wife and bury her under two cellars.’
Jung disliked this kind of arbitrary interpretation. To him it seemed more likely that the dream was about a descent into the past. But the idea of a descent had another significance for a psychoanalyst—the descent into the depths of the mind, in which case, the ‘house’ must represent the dreamer himself, and the different periods of history, different levels of his own being. That seemed to imply that the individual psyche was not all that individual but was built upon the foundation of past generations. It was then, says Jung, that he first conceived the idea of the ‘collective unconscious’, the notion that all human beings might share the same subconscious mind, or at least, certain basic feelings and ideas.
In the following year, two events provided confirmation of the theory. Jung came across the translation of a Greek magical papyrus, believed to be a liturgy of the Mithraic cult, and was struck by a description of a tube hanging down from the sun, which was described as the origin of the wind. Four years before, in 1906, an insane Greek patient had taken Jung to the window, pointed at the sun, and asked him if he could see the sun’s phallus, which was the origin of the wind. Jung also found evidence of the same notion in medieval myths. It looked as if the unconscious mind of the patient had somehow produced one of the basic magical symbols.
In the same year, Jung read an account of the discovery of a cache of ‘soul stones’ near Arlesheim. No details were given about the stones, but Jung suddenly knew that they were oblong, blackish, and had the upper and lower halves painted different shades. At the same time, he recalled a forgotten event of his childhood: he had carved a small wooden figure from the end of a ruler and made a cloak for it. This figure was kept in a pencil box, together with an oblong stone which Jung had painted in two colours, and the box was carefully hidden on a beam in the attic. During school hours, Jung wrote coded messages on tiny pieces of paper and periodically stole up to the attic to place these ‘scrolls’ in the pencil case. It now struck Jung that his little wooden man was like the cloaked figure of Telesphoros, the guardian spirit of convalescence, who is often seen on Greek monuments reading a scroll to Ascelepius, the god of healing, and that he had been instinctively performing some primitive rite connected with the release of the creative impulse. (Years later, he saw a similar ritual performed in Africa by natives.) Describing the event later in his autobiography, Jung tells how ‘there came to me, for the first time, the conviction that there are archaic psychic components which have entered the individual psyche without any direct line of tradition’. He called these ‘archaic components’ archetypes.
(It is worth mentioning in this connection a story reported by Charles Fort in The Book of the Damned;1 Fort took it from the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquarians of Scotland. In July 1836, some boys searching for rabbit holes on the slopes of Arthur’s Seat near Edinburgh came upon a small cave concealed by sheets of slate; it held seventeen tiny coffins, three or four inches long. The coffins were arranged in three rows, the bottom two consisting of eight coffins each, the third row of only one. They proved to contain small wooden figures wrapped in graveclothes. In the bottom row, the coffins were decayed, and the wrappings were mouldering. The second row was less decayed, while the single coffin in the top row was relatively new. Whatever strange ceremony was involved, it had been taking place for a long time—perhaps centuries—and was still taking place. In ancient Egypt, small wooden carvings known as Shabti figures were buried with the dead; their purpose was to act as servants in the underworld. Is it possible that, in some Scottish family, an actual burial of a member of the family was accompanied by this ritual entombment of a kind of Shabti figure?)
Another wooden figure played a central role in one of Jung’s dreams in 1913, the year after his break with Freud. Jung dreamed he was walking down a lane with rows of tombs, and as he passed the figures on the tombs, they stirred and came to life. The last was a wooden figure of a crusader in chain mail, which at first seemed quite dead; then a finger stirred, showing signs of life. Again, Jung had a feeling that the dream was more than a personal fantasy; that it was expressing an objective meaning by means of symbols.
In October 1913, on a journey, Jung had a kind of waking vision of floods covering the land, and thousands of drowned bodies. Then the sea turned to blood. Similar visions and dreams kept recurring. When war broke out in August 1914, Jung concluded that his dreams had been premonitions of the European disaster, not merely the expression of personal problems. He had even dreamed of shooting the legendary hero Siegfried with a rifle—a clear indication of the identity of the ‘enemy’.
But it was not until 1918 that Jung finally overcame his lingering doubts—and his Freudian training—and became convinced of the reality of archetypes and the collective unconscious. An increasing number of his patients, deeply disturbed by the war, produced dream images that Jung recognised as symbols out of myths or fairy tales.2 ‘The archetypes I had observed expressed primitivity, violence, cruelty.’ One woman dreamed that, as she was singing a hymn about redemption, she looked out of the window and saw a bull running wild. Suddenly it fell, broke its leg, and lay writhing in agony on the ground. Jung had no doubt that the bull symbolised the war and was somehow connected with Christian sacrifice. But in Christianity, the saviour is symbolised by a lamb; it is in the parallel religion of Mithraism that the sacrifice is a bull. Jung was not suggesting that his patient’s subconscious mind was somehow aware of the cult of Mithras; only that the bull in her dream and the bull in Mithraism are archetypal symbols representing animal instinct.
Many Jungians have insisted that the ‘collective unconscious’ should not be understood as a kind of ‘group mind’. But Jung himself contradicts this in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. He tells the story of a patient who went through a period of depression, from which Jung was able to rescue him. The patient then made an unsatisfactory marriage; his wife became jealous of Jung and his influence over her husband. The patient’s ‘transference’—identification with the doctor—had created a particularly powerful link between them. One evening, Jung returned from a lecture and went to bed in his hotel room. Suddenly he woke with a start, convinced that someone had opened the door and come into the room; he switched on the light, but there was no one there. At this point he recollected that he had been awakened by a dull pain, as if something had struck his forehead, then the back of his skull. The next day he received a telegram telling him that his patient had shot himself. He learned later that the bullet had entered the forehead and come to rest at the back of the skull. Jung’s explanation is that the phenomenon took place ‘by means of the relativisation of time and space in the unconscious’, and goes on: ‘The collective unconscious is common to us all; it is the foundation of what the ancients called “the sympathy of all things”. In this case, the unconscious had knowledge of my patient’s condition. All that evening, in fact, I had felt curiously restive and nervous.’3 We may question Jung’s explanation about the cause of the experience and prefer to ascribe it to telepathy; but the story leaves no doubt that Jung saw the collective unconscious as somehow common to all human beings. Oddly enough, Freud himself, who began by totally rejecting the idea, came to accept it in his later works; in Moses and Monotheism he speaks of ‘the archaic heritage of mankind’ which includes ‘memory traces of former generations’.
The outline of Jung’s analytical psychology, as it began to emerge around 1920, could be summarised as follows. The human psyche consists of three parts: the conscious, the ‘personal unconscious’, and the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious lies near the surface; one of its chief components is known as ‘the Shadow’, the primitive, uncivilised part of ourselves. (Jung felt that the Second World War was a case of a whole nation becoming possessed by its Shadow.) When it appears in dreams, the Shadow is usually symbolised by a person of the same sex as the dreamer. Below the fairly shallow waters of the personal unconscious lie the immense depths of the collective unconscious, some so deep that they can never, under any circumstances, come to consciousness. According to Jung—and here he differed fundamentally from Freud—the collective unconscious contains man’s religious aspirations. (For Freud, these were merely sublimated sex drives.) He insisted that one of man’s fundamental needs is to find the meaning of existence, and that neurosis is often the result of trying to live ‘within too narrow a spiritual horizon’. ‘Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.’ When these deeper aspirations from the collective unconscious appear in dreams, they usually manifest themselves as a person of the opposite sex from the dreamer. This manifestation of the dreamer’s ‘soul’ Jung called the anima, Latin for soul. (In the case of women, this soul-being is male, and is called the animus.)
The collective unconscious contains dreams and symbols from the whole history of mankind. Jung would see nothing surprising in an untutored peasant, with no knowledge of ancient history, dreaming of prehistoric animals; memories of them are floating somewhere down there, in the depths of the sea. Moreover, they are not dead memories; they possess a life of their own. And on occasions, like the Loch Ness monster, they may decide to surface.
Perhaps the simplest way of demonstrating the actual use of these concepts is to describe a case in which they played a central part, like the one described in The Lady of the Hare by the Jungian psychiatrist John Layard.4
In 1940, Layard was asked if he could help a sixteen-year-old girl, who was so subnormal that she seldom spoke. When Layard interviewed the girl, Margaret Wright, he was unable to persuade her to say anything but yes and no as she stared in front of her with expressionless eyes. Unwilling to concede defeat, Layard decided to see if he could reach her through the medium of her mother.
Mrs Wright was the wife of a labourer, with whom she was obviously very much in love. She was a midwife, an Irishwoman of only moderate intelligence but calm and placid. She was deeply, though not demonstratively, religious. The only negative force in the household seemed to be Mrs Wright’s sister, an embittered woman who was disliked by everyone. Mrs Wright allowed her to live with them because no one else would put up with her.
Mrs Wright was apparently psychic—at least, on occasions. At the age of nineteen she had seen a vision of a shining angel, pointing upwards; shortly afterwards, she had narrowly escaped death by being run over. She also saw strange yellow lights when someone was going to die.
The ‘therapy’ consisted almost entirely of analysis of Mrs Wright’s dreams. Layard was inclined to treat her problem—and ultimately her daughter’s problem—as ‘trying to live within too narrow a spiritual horizon’, and to regard the symbolism of her dreams as basically religious rather than sexual: an attempt by her animus to make her understand what was going wrong. In one dream, she was standing by a lake of deep and muddy water with a steep mountainside behind her and a beautiful pasture on the other side. She wanted to get to the pasture but for some reason, thought she had to do it by climbing the mountain. However, the loose earth kept slipping, making it impossible to climb.
The symbolism here was fairly clear. The deep and muddy water was Mrs Wright’s situation. She wanted to get to the green meadow but for some reason thought she had to reach it by climbing the mountain. Layard linked this with the vision of the angel pointing upward, and asked her what she thought the angel was pointing to. ‘Heaven!’ ‘But heaven was the green pasture, so you were going the wrong way.’ Mrs Wright said she had always been taught that heaven was above; Layard replied that perhaps this was a misconception: perhaps heaven was to be found inside her.
Layard continued to interpret her dreams in terms of religious symbolism—an approach she found immensely reassuring. But the climactic dream of the series, at least, as far as the psychiatrist was concerned, was the dream of the hare from which the book takes its title. The dreamer walked from the snow—in which she had left no footprints—into a kitchen that was full of white light. The hare lay in a bowl of water on the table, and Mrs Wright was ordered to sacrifice it. As she was about to plunge the knife into its back, the hare looked round at her with an expression of extreme satisfaction and trust. As she cut it down the centre of its back, her hand trembled, but she observed that the hare did not seem to mind the operation.
This was how Layard interpreted the dream: ‘The bowl is the [Communion] cup. The whole dream is a preparation for the Communion Rite, in which Christ sheds His blood for the redemption of your sin. Your sin has been being too ‘good’, in a mistakenly idealistic way, so God sends his blood to correct the too great whiteness of the snow.’ Mrs Wright was deeply impressed by this interpretation—so much so that Layard goes on to comment: ‘The analytical process is itself like the Mass, and like all true ritual as well as great works of dramatic art, in that it leads to peaks of emotion from which the participant has to be led back from scenes of glory very gently into the realms of everyday life.’
From the point of view of both the patient and the doctor, the analytical process was highly successful. Mrs Wright was steadily gaining self-confidence. After one session she remarked, ‘I had thought it was only in olden times that men had had dreams to show them how to live. I never dreamt we had it in us now.’ The thought that her dreams—and perhaps God himself—were trying to tell her something, improved her self-esteem and made her less passive and fatalistic. The daughter, who reflected her mother’s attitudes, also became less passive and began to speak normally.
But for Layard, this was only the beginning of the investigation. He was intrigued by the symbolism of various dreams, but particularly by the hare. He asked the same question that Jung had asked in the case of the lady who dreamed of a bull: why had the ‘lamb’ been transmuted into another animal? Like Jung, Layard interpreted the sacrifice as the transformation of animal instinct into spiritual power. But why had Mrs Wright’s subconscious mind chosen this symbol? What was the significance of the hare archetype?
Layard spent more than two years studying the symbolism of the hare in world mythologies: the results of his investigation occupy more than half his book. Predictably, the hare is one of the major symbols of the moon; many cultures have a ‘hare in the moon’ instead of a man in the moon. It also seems to be widely known as a symbol of sacrifice, and in Christian mythology is associated with Easter. Layard quotes a legend that if a hare-breeder wishes to kill the hare, he has only to tell it so, and the hare will kill itself—another example of the notion that the hare is capable of self-sacrifice. Another legend states that the hare will sacrifice itself by leaping into a fire. (This may have arisen from the behaviour of hares when farmers are burning stubble. Instead of running away long before the flames reach them, as rabbits do, the hare will often wait until its fur catches fire and then burns to death.) Layard also discovered that the hare is constantly associated with snow and with the colour white.
Layard’s final interpretation of the case of Mrs Wright was as follows: Mrs Wright had been brought up in a strict Presbyterian tradition. When her daughter was born, she stifled her maternal feelings and refused to have the child in bed with her. The girl’s later illness was basically the result of this early starvation of love. But after the dream of the hare, Mrs Wright had another dream in which a man told her; ‘Margaret and her mother may sleep together.’ The symbolic sacrifice of the hare meant that Christian love had overcome her dogmatic religious notions, and that from now on ‘her own improvement would convey itself automatically to her daughter through the channel of the Collective Unconscious’. And this seems to have happened.
There are obvious objections to this kind of interpretation. It could be argued that the daughter’s illness stemmed from her mother’s emotional passivity. Mrs Wright’s religious upbringing tended to strengthen this attitude by encouraging her to accept the general unsatisfactoriness of her life fatalistically. Layard’s role was less that of a psychiatrist than a spiritual adviser, re-awakening her sense of religious realities. As to the symbolism of the hare, it may simply have originated in Mrs Wright’s country childhood.
Obviously, no one can prove that Mrs Wright’s hare was a symbolic archetype rather than a real hare. Yet this hardly invalidates Layard’s book. What is surprising is that the hare proves to be a universal religious symbol, and that its meaning is so remarkably constant. Lethbridge noted the symbolism of the hare when he dug up the tile associating the hare with the moon.5 It was Lethbridge who pointed out that ‘the hare is the commonest type of animal into which a witch is supposed to be able to change and in which form she could only be killed by a silver bullet’. Lethbridge would have regarded the universality of hare symbolism as a proof of Margaret Murray’s theory about wicca, the ancient religion. Layard never once mentions Margaret Murray, although he notes the association of hares with witches. But he demonstrates beyond all doubt that the hare symbol is to be found in most primitive cultures, from the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians to American Indians, and that it is almost invariably associated with the moon. (Layard also points out that in the oldest cultures, it is also associated with the sun, although in these cultures, the sun was regarded as feminine.)
My own attitude towards Layard’s theory was at first intensely sceptical. I knew Layard slightly and heard a great deal about him from friends who knew him well; everything I heard inclined me to believe that he was a silly old man who was obsessed by sexual symbolism. (Contrary to the general view, Jung never rejected Freud’s notion of the importance of the sex-drive.) I read The Lady of the Hare only after his death, and it re-awakened my feeling that he was inclined to assign his own wildly arbitrary interpretations to dream symbolism. Yet the long section on the mythology of the hare is, by any standard, a remarkable piece of scholarship, designed to convince the most irritable sceptic that the recurrence of the hare symbol in world mythology cannot be explained in terms of coincidence. The hare is not a common animal; it can never have been as common as the rabbit, which seems to have no particular mythological meaning. (For example, it is not even mentioned in J. E. Cirlot’s Dictionary of Symbols.) In short, Layard proves, as far as anyone can prove, that the hare is a ‘universal archetype’.
Once this is granted, his cure of Mrs Wright and her daughter becomes altogether more acceptable. It is quite clear, from its context alone, that Mrs Wright’s dream is full of symbolism, and that this symbolism has to do with religious redemption. Which raises the question of why a hare should be associated with sacrifice and redemption. It could still be argued that there is no necessary connection between Mrs Wright’s dream hare and the hare as a symbolic archetype; but then, I doubt whether there is any logical method of establishing such a connection. On the whole, I have to admit that Layard has me fairly convinced.
It remains to wonder whether Layard missed the ultimate significance of the hare symbol. It is probably pointless to ask how the hare became associated with the moon originally (although one possibility is that hares in northern latitudes become white in the winter, grey in summer—both ‘moon colours’). The association is obviously of the greatest antiquity. But is it possible that the hare was the moon-sacrifice of our remote ancestors, and that this is the reason it remains associated with sacrifice, witches and the moon? (Even the legend that it can be killed only with a silver bullet suggests that it is the property of the moon goddess.) In which case, it would seem conceivable that the ‘ancient religion’ of the mother goddess is one of the major sources of the Jungian archetypes. The association of the hare with fertility religions is suggested by the fact that the animal was reverenced in ancient Europe as the spirit of the corn; cutting the last of the corn was known as ‘cutting the hare’ or ‘cutting off the hare’s tail’. In Hallaton, in Leicestershire, a large hare pie is baked every Easter Monday, and the locals ‘scramble’ for it; the ceremony has the overtones of a ritual sacrifice. Layard points out that ‘Hallaton’ is said to be a corruption of ‘Holy town’, that its piece of ‘holy land’ was known as ‘hare-cropleys.’
In an essay on ‘The Nature of the Psyche’,6Jung quotes an opponent of the whole idea of depth psychology: ‘Once [the unconscious] is admitted, one finds oneself at the mercy of all manner of hypotheses concerning this unconscious life, hypotheses which cannot be controlled by any observation.’ Jung accuses the critic of fear of encountering difficulties. Yet it cannot be denied that the objection is perfectly fair. Science is an attempt to become conscious of the laws of nature; and how can we become conscious of the unconscious? Freud declared that we can explore the subconscious through dreams; but we have no guarantee that his interpretation of dreams is not the wildest kind of arbitrary nonsense.
It was in 1913, in the period when he was experiencing visions of the coming war, that Jung stumbled up on an answer to this problem. He had been attempting to translate his highly-disturbed emotions into images. As a result, he began to feel as if he were becoming the victim of fantasies. He decided upon a dangerous solution: ‘In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me “underground”, I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them.’ On December 12, 1913, he decided to try the experiment. ‘I was sitting at my desk … thinking over my fears. Then I let myself drop. Suddenly it was as though the ground literally gave way beneath my feet, and I plunged down into dark depths.’ His experience sounds rather like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. ‘But then, abruptly, at not too great a depth, I landed on my feet in a soft, sticky mess.’
What followed was a waking dream, in which Jung found himself in a cave, guarded by a mummified dwarf. In an underground stream he saw the floating body of a blond youth with a head wound; this was followed by a gigantic black beetle, then a rising sun. Again the dream ended with a vision of water turning to blood.
Jung was once more convinced that the images welled up from the collective unconscious. (The dead youth seems to have been another vision of Siegfried.) What was even more important was that he seemed to have discovered a more-or-less conscious method of investigating the unconscious. Most of wish that we could descend into our own dreams and control them; the trouble is that once we fall asleep, the controlling ego vanishes. Because Jung was in an intensely disturbed state, he was able to ‘dream’ while still fully awake. Later still, there were equally ‘real’ fantasies of Elijah, Salome, and an old man who called himself Philemon. Jung noted that in his conversations with Philemon, ‘he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I’. It led him to recognise that ‘there are things in the psyche which I do not produce’.7
Jung developed this ‘conscious dreaming’ into a technique, which he called ‘active imagination’. He regarded it as one of his most important discoveries and taught it to some of his patients. Yet oddly enough, there is very little about it in the sixteen volumes of his collected works, and his major paper on the subject is disappointingly cagey.8 One of his few clear statements of the principle appears in his book on alchemy, Mysterium Conjunctionis (1955–6):
Take the unconscious in one of its handiest forms, say a spontaneous fantasy, a dream, an irrational mood, … or something of the kind, and operate with it. Give it your special attention, concentrate on it, and observe its alterations objectively. Spare no effort to devote yourself to this task, follow the subsequent transformations of the spontaneous fantasy attentively and carefully. Above all, don’t let anything from outside, that does not belong, get into it, for the fantasy-image has ‘everything that it needs’.9
One of his few actual descriptions of ‘active imagination’ in action occurs in some lectures he gave at the Tavistock Clinic in 1935. Jung described the case of a young artist who at first had the utmost difficulty in grasping what he meant by active imagination. ‘The difficulty with him was that he could not think. Musicians, painters, artists of all kinds, often can’t think at all, because they never intentionally use their brains.’
On his way to see Jung, the artist often looked at a poster advertising the Bernese Alps on the wall of a railway station. One day, he decided to try ‘active imagination’ on the poster. ‘I might for instance imagine that I am myself in the poster, that the scenery is real, and that I could walk up the hill among the cows and then look down on the other side…’ He sat in front of the poster, stared at it and imagined himself walking up the hill. On the other side, there was a hedge with a stile. The path ran around a ravine and a rock, and on the other side of the rock was a small chapel with its door standing ajar. He pushed open the door and saw an altar decorated with flowers and an image of the Virgin. As he looked at her face, something with pointed ears disappeared behind the altar. At this point the fantasy dissolved, and the artist left the station.
The artist found himself wondering whether the chapel really existed, in some odd sense. So he tried imagining the poster, and himself walking up the hill. Everything was exactly as it was before—the stile, the ravine, the rock, the chapel. As he went into the chapel he again saw the image of the Virgin Mary, and again saw the figure with pointed ears vanishing behind the altar.10
Unfortunately, Jung tells us no more about the history of his patient. But he adds the interesting warning that ‘active imagination’ demands the use of ‘true imagination’, not the ‘fantastical one’. He is distinguishing between imagination as a faculty for creating false images and as an instrument for grasping reality, that is, as a form of Faculty X.
In recognising the archetypes of the collective unconscious, Jung had re-discovered the basic principle of magic. The simplest form of magic is based upon the saying attributed to Hermes Trismegistos: ‘As above, so below.’ This meant that the laws of the heavens—the macrocosm—were reflected in man himself, the microcosm. A modern practitioner might well interpret this to mean that man contains an inner universe (or ‘firmament’), with its own equivalents of stars and planets; William Blake said as much when he stated that eternity opens from the centre of an atom. But for the ordinary student of magic in the Middle Ages, the saying had a more concrete meaning.
The ancients knew of seven planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the sun and moon, which they also classified as planets. Each planet had a cosmic principle associated with it (i.e. Jupiter was the ruler, Venus the planet of love, Saturn of wisdom, and so on.) And each planet had various colours, metals, flowers, animals, birds, numbers, even perfumes, associated with it. So Venus was associated with the number seven, the colour green, the metal copper, with emeralds and turquoises, with myrtles, roses and clover, with sparrows, doves and swans, with sandalwood and other ‘voluptuous’ odours, and with the symbol of the girdle. Mars was associated with the number five, the colour red, the metal iron, with horses, bears and wolves, rubies, absinthe and rue, and its symbol was the sword. Jupiter was associated with the number four, the colour violet or blue (both regal colours), the eagle, the oak, the amethyst and lapis-lazuli, and his symbol was the sceptre. This system was known as ‘the magical correspondences’.
It is perfectly natural to feel that a list of this sort is an absurdity, a purely arbitrary system invented by primitive people who knew no better. But before jumping to this conclusion, it may be worth recalling Lethbridge’s tables of ‘rates’ for the pendulum. We may, of course, totally reject the idea that various objects and substances have ‘rates’; but we must at least acknowledge that Lethbridge was a careful and serious investigator, and that he believed that there was a sound reason for classifying together under the number ten such a heterogeneous collection as: east, fire, sun, light youth, graphite, milk, red, Bulgaria and Italy; or under thirty: west, water, hydrogen, green, sound, moon and age.
In his chapter on ‘Correspondences’ in The Black Arts, Richard Cavendish points out that people’s reactions to colours match their ‘occult significance’ fairly closely. Green, the colour of love and harmony, does exert a peaceful and tranquilising influence; red has an exciting influence, and so on. We could take this observation further, and study the psychological significance of colours in the well-known Lüscher colour test, devised by the German psychologist Max Lüscher, and widely used by psychologists in character analysis and the detection of hidden stresses. In the simplified version of the test, subjects are asked to look at eight cards of different colours and place them in order of preference. They consist of four primary colours—green, blue, red and yellow, and four ‘mixed’ colours, violet, brown, grey and black. Normal, balanced people show a preference for the primary colours and usually place these in the first four places; to choose one of the ‘mixed’ colours in the first three places indicates the presence of anxieties. These tests were arrived at, not by considering the ‘occult significance’ of the colours, but simply by thousands of trials and errors. Lüscher points out that the colour blue is associated with sweetness, which is why sugar manufacturers use it on their packages. Green is the colour of astringency (associated with green apples, etc.), and sugar in green packs would stay on the grocer’s shelves.
Dark blue—the colour of one of the eight cards—is a colour of peace and passivity probably because primitive man associated it with the coming of night, a time when he was compelled to cease his activities. In the magical correspondences, blue is associated with Jupiter, the king of the gods and the peace-bringer. According to Lüscher, the colour green is associated with defence and preservation; it is the colour of firmness of purpose and resistance to change; in the correspondences, it is the colour of Venus, the female component in human existence, who possesses all these qualities. Red, the colour of Mars, is, according to Lüscher, associated with attack; it is the colour of energy, the will to success and change. (Hence its association with revolutionary movements.) Psychological tests have shown that when subjects are exposed to bright red, blood pressure increases and the heartbeat speeds up. (Exposure to green causes a drop in blood pressure; the same is true of dark blue.) Yellow, the sun colour, is obviously associated with brightness, cheerfulness, outgoingness and relaxation: here the Lüscher characteristics correspond exactly to the magical ones. The same is true of the colour grey. According to Lüscher it is the colour of detachment, of non-involvement, of the man who tries to stand aside from—and above—the problems and involvements of normal human beings. Such people are, in actuality, either philosophers, priests or magicians (three vocations that obviously have much in common). In the magical correspondences, grey is the colour of Hermes, the god of magic. It is also the traditional colour of magicians (as in Tolkien’s Gandalf the Grey).
So, for whatever reason, the colours do correspond remarkably with their ‘magical’ significance. This is largely explainable in perfectly ordinary terms. Green soothes us because it is the colour of nature; brown strikes us as dull and drab because it is the colour of autumn leaves and the bare winter earth. (Market researchers discovered—according to Lüscher—that brown packaging caused beauty preparations to become a drug on the market.) Red excites because it is the colour of blood and therefore of violence. Blue has a subduing effect because it is the colour of nightfall. This has always been so, since animals first developed colour vision. (Oddly enough, experiments have shown that the Lüscher tests work just as well for colour-blind people, which seems to suggest that colours can somehow produce effects even when not recognised.) So, in effect, colours are Jungian archetypes, a part of the collective unconscious.
In traditional magic, the various planets and their corresponding substances or qualities were converted to symbols, and these symbols were used for magical purposes. For example, one of the most widespread uses of natural magic was in the manufacture of talismans or amulets, worn for protection and luck. This again involves the notion that the symbols have a precise and objective meaning. Jung was by no means the first to stumble upon this notion; it runs throughout the history of Western magic and formed the basis of the ‘magic’ practised by the Order of the Golden Dawn at the turn of the century. This was one of the things that startled W. B. Yeats when he first came into contact with MacGregor Mathers, the weird and unbalanced magician who helped to found the Order. In his Autobiography, Yeats tells how the actress Florence Farr visited Mathers and was told to hold a piece of cardboard with a symbol on it against her forehead; she immediately ‘saw’ herself walking on a clifftop with screaming seagulls overhead. She also told Yeats that Mathers had said: ‘I am going to imagine myself a ram’, and that the sheep in the field had run after him.
When Yeats called on Mathers, he was also given a piece of coloured cardboard to press against his forehead. After a few moments he began to experience mental images that he could not control: a desert, with a black Titan rising up among ancient ruins. ‘Mathers explained that I had seen a being of the order of Salamanders [spirits of fire] because he had shown me their symbol, but it was not necessary even to show the symbol, it would have been sufficient if he had imagined it.’
It seems likely that the symbol shown to Yeats was one of a set known as tattwa symbols—tattwa is a system of Hindu philosophy—which are described by Israel Regardie in the fourth volume of his Golden Dawn. These consist of the earth symbol (a yellow square), the air symbol (a blue disc), the fire symbol (a red triangle), the water symbol (a silver crescent moon lying on its back) and the spirit of ether symbol (a black or indigo egg). Regardie goes on to explain the use of these symbols, and it is startlingly close to Jung’s active imagination. The student is advised to stare hard at the symbol for twenty seconds, then to transfer his gaze to the ceiling, or any other white surface; its ‘after image’ will be seen in its complementary colour: yellow will become mauve, and red will become green. He must then close his eyes and try to imagine the symbol in its new colour and at the same time to enlarge it to the size of a door. When this is done, he must imagine himself passing through it. When the ‘door’ is behind him, he should try to see objects or landscapes. ‘Most always these take the form of pale stilled pictures … hillocks, meadows, rocks, vast brown boulders.’ Slow repetition of the name of the deity concerned will cause this landscape to become vivid and dynamic, and a ‘being’ may appear, like Yeats’s salamander. If the student is willing, he may then allow himself to be guided through this realm by the spirit. When the tour is over, he must thank the spirit and return through the door, and conclude the experiment by making the sign of Silence, raising the left forefinger to the lips and stamping the right foot. All this strange procedure sounds a great deal less absurd after one has read Jung on ‘active imagination’. In fact, the two are obviously identical.
Yeats goes on to say; ‘I had soon mastered Mathers’ symbolic system, and discovered that for a considerable minority—whom I could select by certain unanalysable characteristics—the visible world would completely vanish, and that world summoned by the symbol would take its place.’ At first Yeats was inclined to believe that the effect might be due to imagination or telepathy. What convinced him was that when he accidentally gave someone the wrong symbol, the person saw a scene appropriate to the symbol, not to what Yeats was imagining. If Yeats clearly imagined another symbol, the person would see a mixed vision, appropriate to the two symbols. When he tried imagining a mixed symbol of air and water (a crescent moon on a blue circle), the other person had a ‘vision’ of a pigeon with a lobster in its beak. When he tried a star symbol on a female subject (probably Florence Farr), she saw a rough stone house with the skull of a horse in it. When he tried it with a male ‘seer’, he saw a rough stone house with a gold skeleton in it.
At this time—the early 1890s—Yeats was working with Edwin Ellis on an edition of the poems of William Blake. He was fascinated to discover that certain symbols evoked strange personages who corresponded to the mythical beings in Blake’s prophetic books, ‘Though differing a little, as Blake himself said visions differ with the eye of the visionary’.11 Ore, Blake’s spirit of revolution, was seen by one person as black instead of fiery red, and by another as a wolf in armour. Yeats was convinced that Blake’s prophetic books were some form of automatic writing whose source was beyond his conscious mind.
In a footnote to the essay on Magic, added in 1924, Yeats comments on the possibility that these ‘visions’ emerged from the subconscious, and adds: ‘I am certain that [they] draw upon associations which are beyond the reach of the individual “subconscious”.’ Certainly, it is clear that Yeats and Jung are talking about the same thing. ‘The collective unconscious,’ says Jung, ‘seems to be … not a person, but something like an unceasing stream or perhaps ocean of images and figures which drift into consciousness in our dreams or in abnormal states of mind.’ Yeats states one of the basic principles of magic: ‘That the borders of our memory are [ever] shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself, [and] that this … great memory can be evoked by symbols.’12 Elsewhere, he observes ‘that our little memories are but a part of some great Memory that renews the world and men’s thoughts age after age, and that our thoughts are not, as we suppose, the deep, but a little foam upon the deep.’13 Here, in an essay written in 1900, Yeats is already making Jung’s distinction between the personal and the collective unconscious.
Yeats’ essay on magic contains a detailed account of a ‘magical operation’ conducted by MacGregor Mathers and his wife, the sister of the philosopher Bergson, and it enables us to see the interaction of the world of imagination and the underlying world of ‘correspondences’ or magical realities. Yeats tells how he and an acquaintance—a man who was interested in magic but not deeply convinced—went to call on Mathers and his wife, who were then living at a house in Forest Hill, South London; Mathers was curator of a small private museum. The ‘magical chamber’ was a long room with a dais at one end; Yeats and his friend sat in the middle, Mathers on the dais, and Mrs Mathers between them. Mathers held a wooden mace in one hand and turned to a tablet covered with coloured squares, each square bearing a number (or symbol?), repeating some form of incantation.
Almost at once my imagination began to move of itself and to bring before me vivid images that, though never too vivid to be imagination, … had yet a motion of their own, a life I could not change or shape. I remember seeing a number of white figures, and wondering whether their mitred heads had been suggested by the mitred head of the mace, and then, of a sudden, the image of my acquaintance in the midst of them. I told what I had seen, and [Mathers] cried in a deep voice, ‘Let him be blotted out,’ and as he said it the image of my acquaintance vanished …
In his place was a man dressed in black, in the style of the sixteenth century. Mrs Mathers thought he looked like a Fleming and declared that this figure was Yeats’s acquaintance, as he had been in a previous existence. She then ‘saw’ a detailed scene, which Yeats was able to see in glimpses—often seeing what she described before he heard her description. The man walked along a narrow street and went into a building. At this point, Yeats ‘saw’ a dead body on a table near the door, but said nothing, wondering whether Mrs Mathers saw it too. She went on to say that the man in black was a doctor, lecturing to his students. Yeats asked if she saw anything near the door, and she replied: ‘Yes, I see a subject for dissection.’ After this, she described—and Yeats saw in flashes—the man enter a laboratory and out of a vessel over a fire take a model of a human figure. Mathers—who also seems to have shared this vision—said that the man had been trying to make living flesh and had drawn down evil spirits. Yeats thought he heard squeals but said nothing; a moment later, Mrs Mathers said she heard squeals. Mathers also heard them and explained that they were sounds made by pouring some red liquid over the mouth of the clay image. In the vision, they saw the man become seriously ill, then make a partial recovery. But his reputation as a magician had spread through the town, so that he lost all his students.
Yeats’s friend, whom all this concerned, was the only one who saw nothing. (Yeats says this is because he was ‘forbidden’ to see his own life; in the same way, people with powers of precognition are usually unable to foresee their own futures.) Yet he was thoroughly shaken by the description, and admitted that ever since childhood he had had a recurrent dream of trying to animate a figure like the one in the vision. (Yeats does not mention—perhaps he was unaware—that the animation of magical statues is among the oldest of all magical ceremonies.) He added that perhaps his ill health was due to this dangerous experiment in a previous existence. By the time Yeats wrote the essay on magic ten years later (1901) his acquaintance was dead.
In answer to Yeats’s request to reveal some scene of his own past lives, Mathers made another invocation, and this time the three of them experienced another lengthy ‘hallucination’—so long that they broke off in the middle for supper—about a medieval knight who built a great stone cross and spent his days standing against it with his arms outstretched, apparently in penance for some past sin. (Yeats seems to think it was connected with two lovers and the cutting off of the man’s hands.)
Yeats expressed doubt as to whether he was really seeing a vision of his own past life; he seemed inclined to believe that it was some kind of dream created by three minds. If this view were correct, it would be a powerful argument in favour of Jung’s collective unconscious. Telepathy involves simply transmission—usually of a single idea or impression—from one mind to another. If a kind of dream could be shared by three of those present (although not by the fourth; Yeats remarks of his friend that ‘his imagination had no will of its own’), it would seem to imply that men are not separate island universes, each with its own subconscious, but that some part of the mind is ‘shared’.
This view is supported by a certain amount of evidence. P. D. Ouspensky once described how he walked down a thoroughfare in Petrograd in such a state of mystical intensity that he seemed to see people surrounded by their dreams, which hovered like clouds in front of their faces. He experienced the conviction that if he could stare at anyone long enough, he would be able to see the actual content of his dreams.14 A Philadelphia explorer, Harry B. Wright, has described witnessing the Leopard Dance of Dahomey, West Africa; as a naked girl performed the dance to the beating of a drum and the incantations of a priest, Wright’s native companion asked; ‘Look, do you see the two leopards walking beside her?’ Wright saw nothing, but the other natives appeared to be following the leopards with their eyes. And then, in the midst of the ceremony, three leopards walked out of the jungle and across the clearing; Wright was convinced that these were real leopards—perhaps summoned by the ‘imaginary’ leopards in the same way that the sheep were summoned by Mathers’ imaginary ram.15
Perhaps the most striking example of such a collective ‘vision’ is one that occurs in Bruce Lamb’s Wizard of the Upper Amazon, which describes the experiences of Manuel Cordova, a Peruvian youth captured by the Amahuaca Indians of Brazil. After drinking hini xuma, the ‘vision extract’, the natives—including Cordova—experienced shared visions of snakes, birds and animals that continued all night. On a later occasion, after a ‘shared vision’ of jungle cats, Cordova suddenly remembered a black jaguar he had once encountered, and the jaguar immediately appeared, stalking through the middle of the group, causing a terrified shudder. Realising that Cordova was responsible for the vision, the natives nicknamed him ‘black jaguar’.16
What is perhaps most difficult for the Western mind to grasp is the notion that magic could be a purely natural phenomenon, like botany or the game of chess. We tend to think of a ‘magician’ as a man with some strange spiritual power, based on slowly acquired wisdom. This is far from the truth; in The Occult I pointed out that most of the ‘great magicians’ have been highly unsatisfactory human beings, and that it would hardly be unfair to say that most of them were fools. Most of them were certainly ‘Right Men’; and nearly all were unlucky. Mathers is an interesting case in point. Born in West Hackney, London, the son of a commercial clerk, he was already, by the age of twenty-three, signing himself ‘Comte de Glenstrae’. His Christian names were Samuel Liddell; the MacGregor was assumed later when he decided he was of Highland descent. (He was convinced that he was the Young Pretender in a previous incarnation.) Even Yeats, who liked him, conceded that he lived almost entirely in a world of fantasy. Apart from magic, his other major interest was military strategy; he believed he was a great commander and once had a photograph of himself taken in an artillery lieutenant’s uniform—to which he had no right. Yeats once met him in the street in Highland regalia, with knives stuck in his stocking; Mathers told him: ‘When I am dressed like this I feel like a walking flame.’ His overbearing manners and demand for total obedience finally led the other members of the Golden Dawn to rebel and throw him out. This kind of character-disorientation goes beyond eccentricity and verges on madness. It would therefore be a perfectly fair assumption that his magic was entirely fraudulent or illusory. Yeats’s autobiographical writings—and the accounts of other members of the Golden Dawn—make it clear this was not so. He undoubtedly possessed genuine ‘magical’ powers. And the anomaly vanishes if we can once reconcile ourselves to the idea that magic is not a branch of ‘the supernatural’ but an acquired skill, like repairing cars or performing on a trapeze.
It is worth bearing in mind that Mathers’ peculiar psychological make-up endowed him with an abundance of the two qualities most necessary to a ‘magician’—will and imagination. A frantic desire to ‘be’ somebody, a craving for self-esteem, produced an abnormally powerful will-drive, and a Walter-Mitty-ish inclination to fantasise developed his imagination. Fantasy is not the same as imagination, but it provides its foundation. All Mathers had to acquire was a knowledge of the correspondences, the symbolic foundation of magic. By comparison, Yeats, who also practised magic, lacked the fanatical will-drive and single-mindedness. This comes out in a story told by the mystic George Russell (AE) of how he watched Yeats walking up and down the room holding a magical sword and repeating incantations; every time he passed a bowl of plums, Yeats took one. ‘Really Yeats,’ said Russell, ‘you can’t evoke great spirits and eat plums at the same time.’17 The humourless and ascetic Mathers would never have been diverted from a magical operation by a desire for food. And this is what made him a competent magician.
Having said all this, it is necessary to admit that the modern scepticism about magic and magicians is by no means unfounded. It is only necessary to glance into Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy or Francis Barrett’s The Magus to see that no amount of ‘symbolic interpretation’ could make sense of most of it. And this is because, in spite of the three hundred years between them, Agrippa and Barrett both accept that the world is full of sinister and maleficent powers, from basilisks (which can ‘kill with their gaze’) to demons and vampires, as well as all kinds of angels and benevolent spirits, and that magic consists to a large extent of invoking the aid of these spirits.
There are plenty of modern students of the ‘paranormal’ who might be willing to concede that there are such things as disembodied forces of good and evil; but there is a world of difference between their attitude and that of the medieval churchman, who felt that demons were always looking over his shoulder. One of the best known works on magic ever written, Dom Augustine Calmet’s Treatise on Apparitions (first published in 1751, and still immensely popular a century later) devotes its first six chapters to proving the existence of good and bad angels by means of the Scriptures, then goes on to argue that magic is usually the result of intercourse with demons. The ‘examples in proof of magic’ that he offers are so preposterous that it is impossible to take them seriously: for example, Apollonius of Tyana (a famous magician of the ancient world) rid Ephesus of a plague by persuading the citizens to stone an old man to death; the old man promptly turned into a dog, proving that he was the demon who had caused the plague. Yet Calmet concludes the same chapter with a remarkably accurate description of a Lapland shaman going into a trance to the beating of a drum and returning from the spirit world with messages for the living. We have plenty of modern eye-witness accounts of the supernatural power of shamans, for example, Arthur Grimble’s description of the shaman of the Gilbert Islands, who was able to sink into a trance and ‘summon’ porpoises from far out at sea. Grimble was actually present as the porpoises, in a semi-hypnotised state, swam ashore and allowed themselves to be clubbed to death by natives.18
No one would expect a scientific textbook of the seventeeth century to be wholly valid today; we might expect to dismiss as much as fifty per cent of it. This would not prevent us from accepting the other fifty per cent. And it would be logical and sensible to take the same attitude towards works on ‘magic’, particularly in view of the fact that the magic of earlier centuries included science. Modern chemistry grew out of alchemy; modern astronomy grew out of astrology. Isaac Newton practised both magic and science without feeling there was any contradiction. The tremendous advance of science in the century after Newton seemed to make most of the old grimoires and magical works obsolete. The spirit of reason made their obsession with angels and demons seem laughable. The result was that for more than a century, the magical books of the Middle Ages were virtually forgotten. Francis Barret’s attempt to revive the forgotten art in The Magus (1801) was treated by most cultured people as a joke. (Yet Barrett himself knew that magic was not entirely medieval superstition; he wrote: ‘I have, in the country, by only speaking a few words and using some other things, caused terrible rains and claps of thunder.’)
It is significant that the next major work on magic—Eliphaz Levi’s Dogme de la Haute Magie (1855)—pays little attention to demons or other spirits and concentrates almost entirely on magical symbolism. Levi’s approach to magic was basically Jungian. And MacGregor Mathers, who picked up most of his basic ideas from Levi, also remained obsessed with symbolism and ‘correspondences’. There was, in effect, a total break between the magic of earlier centuries, and this new, streamlined tradition of ‘psychological’ magic. But the break was not as drastic as it looks. Mathers translated traditional grimoires like The Key of Solomon and The Sacred Magic of Abrahamelin the Mage, and included elements from them in the Golden Dawn rituals (which he devised). He was a dedicated cabalist and translated Knorr von Rosenroth’s The Kabbalah Unveiled. He simply discarded the obsolete parts of medieval magic and concentrated on its underlying reality, or what he was able to discern of that reality.
It so happened that W. B. Yeats was the ideal person for transmitting these ideas to the twentieth century, although Mathers was inclined to dismiss him as an aesthete. In Dublin, Yeats and George Russell had founded a group for the study of paranormal phenomena which they called the Hermetic Society, and at the first meeting Yeats suggested as a basic principle the notion that ‘whatever the great poets had affirmed in their finest moments was the nearest we could come to an authoritative religion, and that their mythology, their spirits of water and wind, were but literal truth’. Paracelsus would have dismissed such an idea as a contradiction of the objective reality of magic, but he would not have been entirely correct. As a romantic poet, Yeats knew something that Paracelsus and Bruno glimpsed only in flashes: that the efficacy of magic is basically a matter of inner pressure. Yeats knew that the poet’s problem is that he feels dwarfed, negated, by the drabness of the ‘real world’. His problem is analogous to that of a jet aircraft: to maintain a certain inner pressure in spite of the low pressure of the surrounding atmosphere. Most human beings are like punctured tyres; they take low-pressure consciousness for granted. Yeats also spent much of his time in a state of nervous exhaustion; partly because of a habit of auto-eroticism with its attendant guilt feelings but largely because of his distaste for the ugliness and triviality of everyday existence. He records that ‘the toil of getting up in the morning exhausted me’. Like his fellow poets Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson, he made a kind of virtue out of his permanent fatigue by creating a poetry of world rejection. Unlike Dowson and Johnson, he never got into the habit of maintaining his inner pressure by means of brandy and absinthe. Instead, he mastered the first principle of magic: focusing his dream world and holding it clearly in his mind’s eye as he transferred it to paper. His early poems are full of dream images: fading meteors, and mournful lovers who renounce one another as they stand in the twilight. Yet it is always convincing; there is nothing ineffectual about it. The pressure is never high, but it is consistent. And it was this ability to focus his mental world that endowed Yeats with the strength to meet the world on its own terms instead of being destroyed by it, as Dowson and Johnson were.
All of this is simply to say that Yeats recognised the connection between magic and Magic: that is, between moods of deep and intense delight and the ability to summon ‘paranormal’ powers. And he remained a lifelong student—and practitioner—of magic. Long after the occult revival of the 1890s had run out of steam, Yeats continued to act as the propagandist for magic and the principles of hermeticism. He was not notably successful; most of his admirers tended to regard his magical interests as an amiable eccentricity, the price he paid for his poetry. A later generation has come to understand that the two were interdependent: the poetry sprang out of the magic and the magic out of the poetry.
Yeats married in 1917, at the age of fifty-two. A few days later, at a hotel in the Ashdown Forest, his wife decided to try automatic writing. The sentences that came were so exciting that he persuaded her to continue. Yeats spent the next eight years studying and arranging the results; they appeared at the end of 1925 in a book called A Vision. It was dedicated to Mrs Mathers (Mathers had died at the end of the First World War) and is arguably the most important hermetic book since Bruno’s Art of Memory.
A Vision is hermetic in the most precise sense of the word; it is based upon the fundamental proposition of Hermes Trismegistos: ‘As above, so below’, which means, as we have seen, that the world inside man—and down here on earth—corresponds to the world up there in the heavens.
At this point we must pause to examine this highly controversial proposition, which is, of course, the cornerstone of astrology. How is it possible to take seriously a theory that is based on a fundamental error: the notion that there are only seven planets, and that these include the sun and moon?
Most astrologers have a simple answer to this: they don’t know why, but it does work. Astrology is remarkably successful in describing the types of character who are born under various signs of the zodiac.19 The underlying assumption is that the bodies in the solar system exert various forces on one another, and that all living things are influenced by the interaction of these forces. We know, for example, that the moon controls the tides; most people will also agree that the moon affects some people’s mental balance. (Townspeople may find this hard to accept, but most country areas have their list of people who become a little ‘queer’ at the time of the full moon.) The planets are to be sure much farther away than the moon. But we have no idea of what forces we are discussing, and what element in living things could be affected by them.
The picture of the solar system developed by ‘ley hunters’ like John Michell is consistent with the view of astrology. Michell, as we have already seen, believes that human beings are sensitive to earth forces—indeed, that animals navigate by their aid. These earth forces are in turn influenced by the other bodies in the solar system.
According to this view, ancient man would have become aware of these forces, not by studying the heavens and making arbitrary guesses about the planets (i.e. Mars is red and therefore the planet of war), but by the same kind of direct intuition that he uses in dowsing. Presumably the most sensitive dowsers were also the best astrologers, since what they would be ‘sensing’ would be the magnetic influence of the planets on the earth under their feet. It would obviously not make the slightest difference whether or not they thought the sun was a planet or the earth the centre of the universe. Neither would it matter that they were unaware of the existence of Neptune and Pluto and even (until Herschel discovered it in 1781) Uranus; these are too far away to exercise much magnetic influence.
It may, of course, be a mistake to think in terms of simple ‘forces’. Animals and birds can be influenced by sounds that are too high for the human ear to detect; they are not influenced by the ‘force’ of the sound, but by the meaning it has for them. Dowsing also suggests that man can be influenced by ‘meanings’ as well as by mere forces; what forces are involved when a map dowser detects a sunken wreck on the other side of the world? So it is at least conceivable that planets might exert an influence out of all proportion to the actual gravitational force they represent.
This, at all events, enables us to grasp what the hermeticists meant by ‘As above, so below’. The solar system becomes a great complex web of forces and significances, instead of the scientist’s mere physical system, which can be described in terms of vectors and the law of angular momentum. This is the view not only of astrologers but also of poets and mystics. In Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha Karamazov experiences a moment of intense relief and ecstasy when he stares at the stars and feels that ‘there seemed to be threads from all those innumerable worlds of God, linking his soul to theirs…’ This vision of meaning follows a crisis of belief in which he comes close to losing his faith; the body of a saintly monk has shown no sign of being incorruptible, like St Teresa’s, and Alyosha is suddenly struck by the suspicion that the world might, after all, be a mere physical system, on which men try to impose their dreams. His vision of universal meaning is not unlike that of the hermeticists.
By comparison with the intricacies of astrology, the system that Yeats outlines in A Vision is relatively simple. Like all hermeticists, Yeats is inclined to see human existence as a kind of ‘test’, a struggle for power and knowledge. Like Jung, he discerns two basic types of human being, introvert and extravert; Yeats distinguishes them by saying that one gains power through his struggle with himself, the other through his struggle with the world.
Astrology claims that a man’s ‘type’—his personality—depends basically on his birth sign, Leo or Cancer or whatever. In other words, human personality is like a plastic entity, moulded in a logical manner and in a logical order by the forces of the heavens. This is also the basis of A Vision, except that instead of all the heavens, Yeats is concerned only with the moon. He posits twenty-eight types of human personality—corresponding to the twenty-eight phases of the moon—ranging between total extravert and total introvert. (These latter are, of course, Jung’s terms, not Yeats’s.) The phases from one to fourteen show man expanding outwards, from negative to positive; from sixteen to twenty-eight, he contracts again. The difference seems to be that the men of the first fourteen phases are ‘acted upon’, while those of the sixteenth to the twenty-eighth phase are ‘actors’. (Yeats remarks at the end of Phase 16: ‘From this phase on we meet with those who do violence instead of suffering it.’)
Yeats sees man as being a balance of four basic forces or aspects. Here, again, we are startlingly close to Jung, who sees man in terms of four basic faculties: thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. Everyone belongs to one of these four ‘psychological types’—some people are primarily thinkers, some primarily feelers, etc.,—but we all need a certain balance of the four ‘faculties’ if we are to be healthy human beings. Jung saw great significance in this idea of a ‘quaternio’, which occurs again and again in religious and mythical systems. Yeats’s quaternio is of a different sort; for he is trying to classify men in terms of their purpose, their ‘fate’, their creative drives. So each of his phases is divided into four subheadings: Will, Mask, Creative Mind and Body of Fate. These mean, respectively, (1) a man’s purpose or basic aim, (2) the way he appears to the world, (3) his mode of self-expression, (4) his fate, what the ‘stars’ intend for him.
These are four interacting factors (Yeats has a drawing of two cones fitting into one another), continually altering their balance as the moon goes through its twenty-eight phases. Phase 1 is a dark and formless chaos, from which anything can emerge. Phase 2 is a type of person who is basically animal, a kind of crude energy symbolised by the nature god Pan. And the remaining phases up to fourteen might be regarded as a symbolic picture of the evolution of the human personality—the awakening of ambition, assertion of individuality, self-assertion and so on. (Here, we have something very like Janet’s psychological hierarchy, developing through nine levels).20 As examples of Phase 14, ‘The Obsessive Man’, he mentions Keats, Gorgione and ‘many beautiful women’. In other words, it is a kind of apotheosis of sensuality. And the kind of men who are given as examples of other earlier phases—Whitman, Dumas, Parnell, Baudelaire, Dowson—tend to be ‘primitives’. (This is not to say that there are no intellectuals—Yeats mentions Carlyle, Nietzsche and Spinoza; but he sees them, too, as primitives.) The remaining phases—from sixteen to twenty-eight—show what might be called the development of civilisation or spirit, and, as one might expect, we now find Shelley, Napoleon, Swedenborg and Luther among the examples.
As explained here, the system may sound rather arbitrary, but it is not so. Yeats is fascinated by the gradual change of balance between the four faculties, so that reading the book is like looking at a beautiful, complicated mobile with four colours that shade into one another in various ways as it turns in the air. Moreover, each of the ‘types’ has several possibilities. A man has no real choice over his destiny (‘Body of Fate’) or over his basic aim (his ‘Will’); but he does have a choice over his ‘Mask’—the face he presents to the world—and over his creative self-expression. So, for example, in Phase 7 we have a man whose basic drive is ‘Assertion of Individuality’. He cannot help this; it is a kind of itch, and if it were suppressed, he would become a vegetable. His ‘destiny’ or fate is adventure, the kind of adventure that turns you into a ‘somebody’. As examples of this type, Yeats mentions four writers: George Borrow, Alexandre Dumas, Thomas Carlyle and James Macpherson. Borrow is the highly assertive, controversial character who became famous with books like The Bible in Spain and The Romany Rye, representing himself as a swashbuckling character, most at home among gypsies and sporting bloods. Macpherson was the folklore collector who forged the work of an imaginary Scottish bard called Ossian and was finally denounced as a fraud. The only one of this four who achieved a balance of his natural powers was Dumas, that enormous, joyous, heroic character who liked to eat all day and make love all night. Yeats says that when such a man’s creative mind is true to itself, it expresses itself naturally in terms of heroic sentiments, like those we find in The Three Musketeers. When it is untrue to itself, it tends to lapse into dogmatic sentimentality, such as we find in Carlyle’s paean of praise to the Middle Ages, Past and Present. When the Mask (what Jung calls the Persona) is true to itself, it expresses itself in the form of altruism or generosity; when he is untrue to himself, such a man likes to present to the world a face of efficiency and practicality, and his admiration for the heroic becomes an admiration of power and ruthlessness. (Some critics have seen Carlyle’s philosophy as a forerunner of Nazism.)
Whether or not we find Yeats’s ‘phases’ convincing, we cannot deny their fascination. We seem to be watching complex changes in a balance of forces, and there is a feeling of revelation as Yeats points out that a particular balance is identical in Shakespeare, Balzac and Napoleon, or in Flaubert, Swedenborg and Darwin. The system appeals to the intuition rather than the intellect and is, in this sense, typical of the hermetic tradition. This probably explains the embarrassment of critics who were asked to review the original edition in 1925, an embarrassment that had not diminished notably when a new edition appeared in 1938. Even now, more than half a century after the first edition, A Vision remains one of the major unexplored works of our time.
I have devoted so much space to Yeats’s system of ‘psychological types’ because it is the only modern representative of the old hermetic tradition. His contemporaries were inclined to regard it as a perverse intellectual game; and Aleister Crowley, one of the few who were qualified to understand it, was too jealous of Yeats’s success to make the effort to understand it. (He was convinced that he was a far greater poet than Yeats.)
The one thing no one seems to have thought of asking is why Yeats called it A Vision. It was dictated to his wife over many dreary months and then painstakingly sifted and rearranged by Yeats. What was visionary about that?
The answer is that Yeats was expressing not his own ‘vision’, but the hermetic vision: the vision of a coherent, connected, meaningful universe, based on a mysterious yet demonstrable sense of order. In the Autobiography, he speaks of a conviction he developed at the age of twenty that ‘the world was now but a bundle of fragments’ and he blamed the scientists for this new chaotic universe. They had reduced the stars to lumps of dead matter and man to a collection of appetites. A Vision was more than an astrological system; it was a defiant assertion of the coherence of the universe.
It is important to remember that this was not merely a matter of poetic conviction, which might have been no more than wishful thinking. Yeats felt that his paranormal studies provided a certain basic evidence for the first principle of magic—‘that the universe of the physical scientist is only a part, and by no means the most important part, of total reality’.21 In his autobiography G. K. Chesterton says of Yeats:
He staggered the materialists by attacking their abstract materialism with a completely concrete mysticism; ‘Imagination!’ he would say with withering contempt; ‘There wasn’t much imagination when Farmer Hogan was dragged out of bed and thrashed like a sack of potatoes—that they did, they had ‘um out and thumped ‘um; and that’s not the sort of thing a man wants to imagine.’ But the concrete examples were not only a comedy; he used one argument which was sound, and I have never forgotten it. It is the fact that it is not abnormal men like artists, but normal men like peasants, who have borne witness a thousand times to such things; it is the farmers who see the fairies. It is the agricultural labourer who calls a spade a spade, who also calls a spirit a spirit; it is the woodcutter … who will say he saw a man hang on the gallows and afterwards hang around it as a ghost.22
It is unfortunate that Yeats’s ‘concrete mysticism’ convinced few people apart from Chesterton. A sceptic might believe him when he said that a farmer had seen a fairy, but not when he said that a farmer had been dragged out of bed and thumped by fairies. The irony is that we can now give Yeats the benefit of the doubt, since we know a little more about poltergeists and the odd forces that seem to hang around dragon paths (or ‘fairy tracks’, as they are called in Ireland). We know that these forces are more likely to hurl a man flat on his face or throw him out of bed than serenade him with the horns of elfland. Lethbridge would certainly have found nothing improbable in the idea that ‘ghouls’ might hang around a gallows; if gallows still existed on lonely hilltops, that would be the very place you might expect to find a ghoul.
From the biography of Yeats by Joseph Hone, we discover that Yeats was also aware of the mystery of the ‘hierarchy of selves’. When Maud Gonne—the woman with whom Yeats was in love—joined the Golden Dawn, she told Yeats of the apparition of a woman in grey that she used to see in her childhood. Yeats had occasionally speculated whether she might be under the influence of some spirit; ‘possession’ seemed a possible explanation for her sudden changes of mood. He spoke to Mathers about the apparition, and Mathers gave his opinion that the spirit could be made visible by means of the appropriate symbol. Mrs Mathers made the symbol ‘according to the rules of the order’. Presumably it was some kind of talisman, since Yeats himself could have made an ordinary tattwa symbol without troubling Mrs Mathers. The spirit then became visible—Hone does not specify to whom—and Maude Gonne discovered that it was a part of her own personality, seeking for reunion. The spirit provided the information that Miss Gonne had been a priestess of Tyre in a previous existence and had allowed a priest to persuade her to utter a false oracle. As a result, the personality of that life had split off and remained a half-living shadow. It seemed to confirm the evidence of a recurring dream that she had since childhood, in which she went into the desert to die alone.
Perhaps the most interesting part of this story is in its postscript. Before he joined the Golden Dawn, Yeats had been a member of the Theosophical Society, founded by the extraordinary Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Yeats told Hone that a number of ‘secret doctrines’ had been imparted to him during his initiation, and that one of these was that the soul is made up of many ‘personalities’; it was possible for these to become dissociated, whereupon each ‘must seek for a reunion that must always be refused’. No such idea is to be found in either of Madame Blavatsky’s major works, Isis Unveiled or The Secret Doctrine, although she states that crime can snap the thread ‘which links the spirit to the soul’, producing a state of alienation of the soul.23 So the doctrine of the multiplicity of personalities seems to have been regarded by Madame Blavatsky as one of the ‘secret doctrines’ that should never be expressed to non-initiates. It was his recollection of this doctrine that persuaded Yeats that Maude Gonne’s vision of her past life might be literally true, not merely the symbolic expression of some emotional problem.
Although it is never stated explicitly, the same idea forms the foundation of A Vision. The soul passes through many incarnations. In each life, it is subject to certain cosmic factors that determine its destiny. Yet the ultimate choice lies within itself. A man can choose whether his mask or creative drives are true or false, which means that he can also choose whether to stagnate or to evolve. It was not until he was near the end of his life that Yeats stated this doctrine fairly explicitly, in the long poem Under Ben Bulben: ‘many times man lives and dies’, and the ultimate aim of the process is ‘profane perfection of mankind’.
The same poem contains another phrase that is vital to the understanding of Yeats’s doctrine:
You that Mitchel’s prayer have heard,
‘Send war in our time, O Lord!’
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace…
Yeats also clearly recognised that our everyday consciousness is ‘partial’. (The italics are mine.) And the phrase must be linked with his image of the moon, which is also ‘partial’ for most of the month. Yeats is making the point that Nietzsche often made: in sudden moments of ecstatic intensity, man suddenly seems to become complete, to relax and breathe more deeply. It is as if the larger part of his being was in a kind of permanent eclipse, except for these rare moments. Like Christine Beauchamp and Doris Fischer, we are all ‘partial’ personalities. But how can we learn to establish contact with the occluded areas? This is the question that lies at the heart of all ‘occultism.’ It is also the question that lies at the heart of this investigation.