1925. Contents: a packet for Ezra Pound; stories of Michael Robartes and his friends: an extract from a record made by his pupils; phases of moon; great wheel; completed symbol; soul in judgment; great year of ancients; dove or swan; all soul's night, an epilogue. With many figures and illustrations.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
GEORGE MILLS HARPER is Professor of English at Florida State University. He is the author of The Neoplatonism of William Blake, Yeats's Golden Dawn, there monographs in the Dolmen Press's Yeats Paper and many articles in learned journals. He si the editor of Yeats and the Occult, co-editor (with Richard J. Finneran and William M. Murphy) of Letters to W. B. Yeats, co-editor (with Kathleen Raine) of Thomas Taylor the Platonist: Selected Writings, and a contributing editor to A Concordance to the Writings of William Blake. A former President of the College of English Association, he has lectured widely on Yeats in Europe and America. WALTER K. HOOD has been Instructor at the University of North Carolina, Assistant Professor at St. Louis University and is now Professor at Tennessee Technological University. Having written his honor's thesis, M.A. thesis, and Ph.D. dissertation (all at the University of North Carolina) on Yeats's thought and art and having lectured on and published several papers about A Vision, Professor Hood has devoted most of his academic life to the study of Yeats.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Esoteric Yeats,
By
This review is from: Critical Editions of Yeats a Vision (Hardcover)
Yeats's "A Vision" gives an esoteric and occult view of the nature of reality and is the product of years of collaboration between the poet, W. B. Yeats, and his wife, George, in automatic writing, followed by years of synthesis and research to work it into book form. The system presented here views everything as subject to a cycle of changes, "gyres", and the stages of the cycle are symbolised by the phases of the Moon. This cycle and its phases apply to human incarnations, the process of the soul's after-lives, and to the broad sweep of history. It is a difficult and coherent system, which has elements in common with other esoteric systems but is also different from them all.
The work exists in two versions: the 1925 version, "A Vision A", and the more final 1937 version, "A Vision B". Large blocks of the 1925 version remained unchanged in the 1937 one -- the descriptions of characters for each phase of the moon and the outline of history -- but the explanations of the processes and mechanisms involved were completely rewritten. If you are coming to "A Vision" for the first time, then you should probably go to the 1937 version first. Also, if your primary interest is the ideas, then the 1937 version is the more considered and mature treatment of the material. The 1925 version is, however, invaluable for students of Yeats, especially the later writings, since it represents a stage in his understanding of the material, which informs much of his poetry, as well as his plays and prose. Although it is generally less well organized than the 1937 version, some areas are dealt with more satisfactorily, including the relationship of human and Daimon. The fictional material, with which Yeats prefaces the exposition of the ideas, is also significantly different in the two versions. The Kessinger reprint sometimes gives the date "1925" on the cover, but the actual text "A Vision B" (1937 version, corrected, 1962). This confusion is the result of taking the 1925 and 1937 versions as conventional first and second editions. The following comments apply specifically to "A Critical Edition of 'A Vision' (1925)", edited by G. M. Harper and W. K. Hood, and will not apply to other editions. This edition is a facsimile of one of the 600 copies of this book which Yeats had printed privately in 1925, so it is not a Critical Edition in the normal sense. It does, however, include a very full introduction to the work and its genesis, as well as good notes. George Mills Harper has gone on to publish most of the preparatory material and automatic writing in "The Making of Yeats's 'Vision'" and "Yeats's Vision Papers", but the introduction here is still one of the best summaries of how the book came into being. The notes and index can be slightly thin at times, but are still very useful. Note: the description of the contents given above by Amazon applies only to the 1937 version, "A Vision B" (normally 305 pp.). For "A Vision A" (xxiii + 256 pp) or the "Critical Edition of 'A Vision' (1925)" (L + xxiii + 256 + 108 pp), the contents should be: [Editorial Introduction] A Vision: Dedication to Vestigia; Introduction by Owen Aherne; Book 1: What the Caliph Partly Learned; Book 2: What the Caliph Refused to Learn; Book 3: Dove or Swan; Book 4: The Gates of Pluto. [Notes; Bibliography; Index].
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Vision,
By
This review is from: A Vision (A Reissue with the Author's Final Revisions) (Paperback)
Readers of this book should be prepared to study. Yeats knowledge of mysticism is deep. He was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn and had experience in conjuring in the British Museums with Assyrian artifacts. This book is based on a form of astrology, but not of the modern day "what's your sign " superficiality. Again readers must be prepared to do additional study, in the Vedas, the Gita, and Buddhist classics (start with DT Suzuki). This book ranks with Freud for its magnitude . Yeats has not been given the credit he deserves.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
William Butler Yeats' A Vision Summarized,
By Bob Makransky (Guatemala) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Papermac;Vision Reissue (Papermacs) (Paperback)
One of the most remarkable channeled documents of the past century is Nobel Prize-winning poet William Butler Yeats' A Vision. Yeats explains how he obtained A Vision as follows: "On the afternoon of October 24th, 1917, four days after my marriage, my wife surprised me by attempting automatic writing. What came in disjointed sentences, in almost illegible writing, was so exciting, sometimes so profound, that I persuaded her to give an hour or two day after day to the unknown writer, and after some half dozen such hours offered to spend what remained of life explaining and piecing together those scattered sentences." Yeats spent the next twenty years on this project, and in the end produced a masterpiece which contains an all-encompassing system of symbolism which has geometrical, astrological, psychological, metaphysical, and historical components - a model of the entire universe: "all thought, all history and the difference between man and man." The problem with trying to read A Vision is that it is incomprehensible to the intellect. The reason for this is that it is a message from the spirit world, and as such it is couched in "spirit language", which is far less linear than human language. A Vision is more like a Bach fugue or a Van Gogh painting - or a poem, if you will - than it is a linear discourse. It means multidimensional things because it expresses feelings rather than concepts. Yeats' theory of reincarnation as described in A Vision represents a novel view of the subject: that reincarnation does not take place within a matrix of linear time. It's not as if e.g. you had a life in ancient Greece and then you died; then you had a life in ancient Rome and then you died; then you had a life in the Middle Ages and then you died; etc. Rather, all of your past and future lives are going on at once, in an eternal Now moment. The linearity of time is an illusion, a falsehood, which Yeats termed Deception (and which Eastern philosophers term maya or samsara). It is this Deception, the false appearance that there is such a thing as an objective reality out there which is unfolding in linear time, which animates the striving of all sentient beings and keeps the wheel of reincarnation, of life and death and rebirth, turning. The basic geometrical symbol in A Vision represents the unraveling of time as two interpenetrating, rotating, heliacal cones (which Yeats terms gyres): "Incarnations and judgment alike implied cones or gyres, one within the other, turning in opposite directions." In Yeats' symbolism one of the rotating gyres represents Concord, or unity; the other gyre represents Discord, or desire. "Without this continual Discord through Deception there would be no conscience, no activity; Deception is a technical term of my teachers and may be substituted for `desire'". What is being symbolized by the two gyres is the driving force behind reincarnation - the descent into matter (Discord) and the return to spirit (Concord). By "Deception" Yeats means striving. Striving is not striving after something; desire is not desire for something. Rather striving and desire are movements, motions, for their own sake. It isn't really the objects of their desire which sentient beings seek but rather the hunger, the state of desire itself. The objects of desire - thought forms, the phenomenal world - don't have any objective existence. This is what is meant by the statement that "reality is but a symbol"; and this is the Deception. Another way of saying this is that waking consciousness is but a more highly evolved form of dreaming, but it is no more real than dreaming. The belief that what we do when we are awake is somehow "real" - more real than what we do when we are dreaming - is what motivates all our striving and traps us in the revolving wheel of birth and death. In Yeats' symbolism the cone or gyre of Discord (which he also terms the "Antithetical tincture") is our imaginative, striving side, which separates man from man. The cone of Concord (also termed the "Primary tincture") is our detached, intellectual side, which brings us back to the mass where we began. That is to say, we need sobriety and detachment to truly perceive the nature of the universe. "The antithetical tincture is emotional and aesthetic whereas the primary tincture is reasonable and moral. Within these cones move what are called the Four Faculties: Will and Mask, Creative Mind and Body of Fate." The Four Faculties are actually four levels of human memory. It has been pointed out that all of our past and future lives are occurring at once in an eternal Now moment. By "all of our past and future lives" is meant the memories which go all the way back to the very first cell from which all life on earth is descended. All life on earth evolved from one single, primordial cell; and one way of looking at it is that all life on earth is therefore one single organism, which merely has different ramifications. Each of us individual sentient beings on this earth are like different fingers on the same hand. And each of us individuals has a body of memory that goes all the way back to the beginning: one-celled memory, multi-celled memory, animal memory, vertebrate memory, mammalian memory, and human memory. All of this memory presses upon and shapes the present moment. Memory is the weight of the universe on the shoulders of each individual sentient being - the record of every decision that's ever been made. Of course, some lines of memory are more important to a given individual than others; some have a more direct bearing upon a given moment or a given lifetime than others. But it must be borne in mind that the entirety is weighing upon each individual human, animal, plant, cell all the time. And each individual organism selects a piece of the whole to emphasize, and that piece is everything the organism considers this lifetime. This is what Yeats termed the Faculty of Will - the memories of this present lifetime. "The stage-manager, or Daimon, offers his actor an inherited scenario, the Body of Fate, and a Mask or role as unlike as possible to his natural ego or Will, and leaves him to improvise through his Creative Mind the dialogue and details of the plot." Daimon is Yeats' term for the person in his or her totality, "the ultimate self of man", or the Oversoul which is the sum of all of the person's lives in different realities. The human part of this totality, or memory inventory, can be arbitrarily divided into four categories, and these are the Four Faculties (excluded from this analysis is the part of memory which is above the human level - i.e. primate memory and mammal memory and vertebrate memory etc. all the way back). Will is the socially conditioned person, the robot which is wholly governed by routines and knee-jerk responses; which has given up personal feelings and choices to do what is expected by others and to submit to the daily grind. Will is the Daimon's level of approval and approbation, of reflection in the eyes of other people. The 28 lunar phase types refer specifically to Will: the socialized person, the one who has asked no questions but has bought into society's ready-made solutions willy-nilly. Will manifests through a conviction of rectitude; hence it is completely self-centered and self-important. Decisions made on the level of Will usually do not take into account other people's viewpoints, or much sense of responsibility for ultimate consequences. Body of Fate is the sum total of this present lifetime together with all of its probable realities. Probable realities are parallel lifetimes which branch off from this one at each point where a decision, large or small, is made. We believe that all we are is Will - a linear personal history, a series of events which began at birth and led up to where we are right now; and from here we will have a linear future. And there is one "me" who has had this personal history and who is going to have this personal future. In fact, there are infinite number of "me's" who had an infinite number of probable pasts, and there are an infinite number of "me's" who will have an infinite number of possible futures. The probable reality level of memory is Body of Fate. In everyday life Body of Fate is the person's wistful longings, ideals, and romance; his or her daydreams and fantasies. Body of Fate refers to openness to new experience, willingness to take into consideration hunches and intuitive guidance - echoes from other probable realities - and also other people's points of view. When Body of Fate predominates over Will people are willing to take risks and to fly with their impulses. Mask is the sum total of all of a person's past and future life memories in all realities, which includes all the probable realities in all of those lifetimes. Note that each Faculty subsumes the previous ones: Body of Fate includes Will (the sum total of one's probable realities includes this present life history), and Mask includes Body of Fate (the sum total of one's past and future lives includes all the probable reality branches in those lives). The memories of the Mask are what we access in past life regressions. In quotidian life Mask is the Daimon's sense of personal significance: whatever dreams, hopes, ambitions the person holds in his or her heart of hearts Where Body of Fate operates on a level of mind, Mask operates more on a level of feeling; where Body of Fate connects the person to other people in individual relationships, Mask connects the person to other people in group relationships. Mask is what you discover when you run a lot of past life regressions and come to know the feel of who "you" are in your totality; of what you keep coming back in human form to accomplish; the overall mood... Read more ›
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