Abstract
Although Yeats was already planning A Vision when he composed ‘All Souls’ Night’ in one of his ‘moments of exaltation’,1 he had not yet thought of using it for an Epilogue to the book he was writing for his ‘old fellow students’ in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Nevertheless, he was certain, in the words of a rejected version of the Dedication ‘To Vestigia’, that ‘one always writes one’s deepest thought … for some definite person or persons’. Moreover, he went on to say, ‘I write my poetry too, more often then not, for people who are dead, or estranged.’ Although he confessed to being ‘alarmed at the thought of publishing so strange a book’, Yeats encouraged himself ‘with the certainty that they would have considered it important’.2 Despite Yeats’s faith, however, there is serious doubt that his strange book would have been convincing to any of the five ‘dead or estranged’ friends named or directly referred to in ‘All Souls’ Night’ and the Dedication, all of whom had been members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: Allan Bennett, Florence Farr Emery, MacGregor Mathers, Moina Mathers, and William Thomas Horton. But Yeats was aware that his old friends might not comprehend or approve the whole of his vision: ‘They would have understood’, he wrote, ‘that perhaps the little chapters signed by John Aherne are all that he or I can say for some years yet as to how it all came, and they and I would have spent many nights in some Paris cafe or London studio talking it over doctrine by doctrine.’3
I hold as Blake would have held also, that the intellect must do its utmost ‘before inspiration is possible.’ It clears the rubbish from the mouth of the sybil’s cave but it is not the sibyl.
Yeats to Horton, 5 May 1896
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Notes
George Mills Harper and Walter Kelly Hood, ed. A Critical Edition of Yeats’s ‘A Vision’ (1923), p. xii: ‘I have moments of exaltation, like that in which I wrote “All Souls’ Night,” but I have other moments when remembering my ignorance of philosophy I doubt if I can make another share my excitement.’ Hereafter cited in the notes as CVA, to distinguish it from VB, published in 1937.
(Several of them are now published in Letters to W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran, George Mills Harper, and William M. Murphy [London: Macmillan, 1977] hereafter cited as LWBY.
Cf. CVA, p. x. What little information I have been able to discover about Miss Locke is contained in the ‘Biographical Notice’ by F. S. C. published in Miss Locke’s book on The Hanbury Family (1916) after her death (see Appendix A herein).
Several years after his death, Aleister Crowley, himself a practising magician, wrote a bitter satire entitled Moonchild (1929) about his former colleagues in the Golden Dawn, including Yeats, Arthur Edward Waite, William Wynn Westcott, and the Matherses.
See Walter K. Hood, ‘Michael Robartes: Two Occult Manuscripts’, in Yeats and the Occult, ed. George Mills Harper (Toronto: Macmillan, 1975), p. 210. Hereafter cited as YO.
If Yeats’s memory is correct he may have moved from 2 Fountain Court to 18 Woburn Buildings as early as January 1896. (But see Denis Donoghue, ed. W. B. Yeats Memoirs [London: Macmillan, 1972], p. 88n.)
See George Mills Harper, Yeats’s Golden Dawn (London: Macmillan, 1974), PP. 33–4. Hereafter cited as YGD.
According to Ellic Howe, it was consecrated on 6 January 1894 ( The Magicians of the Golden Dawn [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972], p. 113).
Horton retained his interest in Egyptology. His letters to Henry Rider Haggard, in the collection at the University of Reading, suggest that he assisted Haggard with the research for Moon of Israel: A Tale of the Exodus (1918).
Horton and Haggard became acquainted by correspondence in February 1899, when Haggard wrote to praise ‘the grim imaginative quality’ of a drawing entitled ‘Hatred, Malice, and All Uncharitableness’, which appeared in Pick-Me-Up, Vol. 21, No. 540 (4 February 1899), 300.
The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (New York: Macmillan, 1955), p. 261.
Hereafter cited as Letters. An important symbol in the rituals of the Golden Dawn, the pentagram represents ‘the operation of the Eternal Spirit and the Four Elements under the divine Presidency of the letters of the Name Yeheshuah.…. These two Pentagrams are in general use for invokation or banishing, and their use is given to the Neophyte of the first Order of the Golden Dawn under the title of the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram’ (Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn [Saint Paul: Llewellyn Publications, 1971], Bk IV, 9–11).
Thomas Lake Harris (1823–1906) had an astonishing religious career: as a Universalist minister, as a follower of Andrew Jackson Davis the spiritualist, as a practising medium, as a Swedenborgian minister, as the organizer of numerous socialistic societies, and as the founder of The Brotherhood of the New Life. The ‘incredible history’ of Harris and his associate Laurence Oliphant has been recorded in detail by Herbert W. Schneider and George Lawton in A Prophet and A Pilgrim (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942).
According to Howe, Respiro’s article about Harris, which appeared in A. E. Waite’s The Unknown World (October 1894), ‘suggests that the writer was familiar with the G.D.’s “Rosicrucian” teachings’ (p. 120n).
The reference is to Edward Maitland’s New Gospel of Interpretation. Horton probably knew several of Maitland’s books including the monumental two-volume biography of Anna Kingsford: Her Life, Letters, Diary and Work (1896).
Horton was no doubt aware that she had been President, he Vice President of the Theosophical Society for a brief time in 1883 – 4, withdrawing to form the Hermetic Society in April 1884 (see Maitland, Anna Kingsford, Chapters XXV–XXVIII).
See Howe, p. no, for an account of her support of Mathers. James W. Flannery, in Miss Annie F. Horniman and the Abbey Theatre (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1970), suggests that Yeats is referring to her support of a season of uncommercial plays for Florence Farr in 1894.
Although the first bill included Yeat’s Land of Heart’s Desire, Miss Horniman insisted that Yeats did not know of her support until 1905 (p. 7).
Yeats’s three-part article on ‘William Blake and His Illustrations to the Divine Comedy’ was published in The Savoy for July, August, and September 1896.
See Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 116–45.
The significance of these visions in the context of Yeats’s effort to revive the Celtic Mysteries has received extended treatment by Lucy Shepard Kalogera in ‘Yeats’s Celtic Mysteries’ (unpublished dissertation, Florida State University, 1977).
The publication date of March 1898 recorded in Allan Wade’s A Bibliography of the Writings of W. B. Yeats, 3rd ed. (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968), p. 263, is too early. The date stamp on the copy in the British Library is 8 August 1898.
Smithers was editor of The Savoy, which had published both Rosa Alchemica in No. 2 (April 1896) and
The Tables of the Law (November 1896).
The following year Horton dedicated The Grig’s Book (London: Moffatt & Paige, 1900) to Lang.
Published by T. Fisher Unwin in May 1898, Evelyn Innes was dedicated ‘To Arthur Symons and W. B. Yeats Two Contemporary Writers with Whom I Am in Sympathy’. Yeats appears in the novel as Ulick Dean. Horton designed the cover for Unwin’s Popular Edition of 1901.
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© 1980 George Mills Harper
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Harper, G.M. (1980). Intellect, Inspiration, and the Sybil’s Cave. In: W. B. Yeats and W. T. Horton. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04859-5_1
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