Abstract
‘Most of us who are writing books in Ireland to-day’, Yeats once observed characteristically, ‘have some kind of a spiritual philosophy; and some among us when we look backward upon our lives see that the coming of a young Brahmin into Ireland helped to give our vague thoughts a shape’.2 Those retrospective words were published on 14 April 1900.3 At the very hour almost Yeats was engaged in a bitter struggle for the preservation of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society to which he had belonged for more than ten years.
We Easterns are taught to state a principle carefully, but we are not taught to observe and to remember and to describe a fact. Our sense of what truthfulness is is quite different from yours. 1
mohini m. chatterji
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Notes
Allan Wade, A Bibliography of the Writings of W. B. Yeats (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968) p. 358. Hereafter cited as Bibliography. The article, as it appeared in The Speaker, was called ‘The Way of Wisdom’, a somewhat more descriptive title than ‘The Pathway’, which it became in 1908.
The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (New York: Macmillan, 1955) p. 211. Hereafter cited as Letters.
Ernest Boyd, Ireland’s Literary Renaissance (London, 1923) pp. 213–14. Boyd considers the foundation of the Dublin Lodge of the Theosophical Society in 1885 as important to the Renaissance as ‘the publication of Standish O’Grady’s History of Ireland, the two events being complementary to any complete understanding of the literature of the Revival’ (pp. 241–15).
Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York: Macmillan, 1948) p. 41. Hereafter cited as Ellmann.
Edward Maitland, Anna Kingsford: Her Life, Letters, Diary, and Work (London, 1913) 11, 185–7. Hereafter cited as Maitland, this twovolume monument to a strange and unusual woman illuminates the struggle between two factions of the Theosophical Society and many related groups and sects. First published in 1896 by John M. Watkins, a member of the Golden Dawn, the book was no doubt well known to Yeats, as were other books by Maitland and Mrs Kingsford.
See Denis Donoghue (ed.), W. B. Yeats Memoirs (London: Macmillan, 1972) p. 281. Appendix A is a complete transcription of ‘Occult Notes and Diary, Etc.’, now in the National Library of Ireland, MSS. 13570. The ‘Occult Notes’ are also in Ellmann (pp. 65–7) with slight differences.
Ellic Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical Order 1887–1923 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972) p. 55n.
See Howe, pp. 1–25, King, pp. 193–4, and Arthur Edward Waite, Shadows of Life and Thought (London: Selwyn and Blount, 1938) pp. 218–19, for further details about the Cypher MSS. and for conjectures about their origin.
The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach [New York: Macmillan, 1966] p. 965.)
See Francis King, Astral Projection, Ritual Magic and Alchemy (London: Neville Spearman, 1971) pp. 91–6, for the entire text and ‘Supplementary Notes’. This lecture is Flying Roll No. XVI. Students of the Golden Dawn will be grateful to King for publishing the Flying Rolls. Unfortunately, he included only twenty of the thirty-six in the ‘Catalogue of Flying Rolls’.
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© 1974 George Mills Harper
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Harper, G.M. (1974). A Shape for Vague Thoughts. In: Yeats’s Golden Dawn. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-01965-6_1
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