Last month’s passage through the deep places of Yeats’s A Vision focused on the most abstruse and difficult part of the entire system, the relation between the four faculties and the four principles. The faculties are relatively easy to understand, since we encounter them every day; the principles, being the higher or deeper spiritual realities…
Tag: occultism
Notes on Magical Geography
As my regular readers know well, whenever there are five Wednesdays in a month, it’s up to my commentariat to nominate and vote on the topic for the fifth Wednesday post. Sometimes the results are entertaining, sometimes they startle me, but it’s only happened once before that, as the votes came in and one topic…
A Vision: The Completed Symbol 2
Our journey into the deep places of Yeats’s A Vision now leads us further into the realm of the Principles. To recap, the Faculties—Will, Mask, Creative Mind, and Body of Fate—define each individual incarnation. The Principles—Husk, Passionate Body, Spirit, and Celestial Body—are the foundations on which the Faculties are built; they belong to the Daimon…
A Vision: The Completed Symbol 1
In our journey through the neglected kingdom of Yeats’s A Vision we have now reached one of the points where many previous explorers decided to give up and go home. Not coincidentally, this is also where we move from the material Yeats put into the 1925 version to some of the new material he added…
A Vision: Examination of the Wheel, Concluded
The last six posts in this sequence have set out all but one of the twenty-eight phases of the Great Wheel, the grand mandala of Yeats’s system. The remaining phase is Phase 1, the beginning and end of the cycle. Now of course in a circle every point is at once the beginning and end,…
Situationism: The Creation of Situations
Some of my readers may be surprised that with everything else happening in the world, I’m returning to the ongoing discussion of Situationism, that bizarre mixed breed that came about when European artists who hadn’t lost their creative gonads ended up digging their way into a pen full of Marxists in heat. Still, there’s a…
A Vision: The Third Quarter
With this post we have left behind the halfway mark on our journey around the Great Wheel of the lunar phases, the primary symbol of Yeats’s symbolic system. The soul making this journey—your soul, dear reader, and mine, and everyone else’s, in the cosmology of A Vision—has completed the long journey from a purely collective…
War In Heaven?
As most of my readers know by now, when there are five Wednesdays in a month, the topic of the fifth Wednesday post here gets decided by the readership via a flurry of nominations and votes. Since I have the weirdest as well as the best commentariat on the internet, fifth Wednesday topics so far…
A Vision: The Moon is Full
With this post we continue our survey of the Great Wheel of the 28 lunar phases, the central symbolic mandala of Yeats’s A Vision. In last month’s episode we followed the arc of the evolving soul around the second quarter of the wheel, from the bitter conflict and unavoidable failure of the 8th phase to…
Situationism: The Art of Détournement
It’s been a while since we last talked about Situationism, that giddy fusion of radical politics and performance art that seized the imaginations of a certain fraction of the European avant-garde in the 1960s. (Readers who missed those discussions the first time around, or simply want to review what’s been covered, will find those earlier…