The H.D. Book (22 page)

Yeats is often called a symbolist, but the symbol, for him, was a magic intermediate, having its efficacy in the route it made between the soul and the image, the objective. But, it was also . . . , it had . . . , it moved into the mind with . . . , intention and choice. It was also the subject; it presented itself to him. For Yeats, as for Blavatsky, the great images were not imagined in the sense of being thought up, but came to the imagination. There was a way, he tells us, in which men kept their bodies still and their minds awake and clear so that they became a mirror of the Real.

“I had no natural gift for this clear quiet,” he continues: “and I was seldom delighted by that sudden luminous definition of form which makes one understand almost in spite of oneself that one is not merely imagining.” It was to live in this as if it were more than imagined, as if it were a poetry that had its authors in eternity, as Blake said they were, and into which the poet entered in his art, projecting a like-poetry, a microcosmos of the Real in the medium of words, guided, like Freud
later was to be guided, “by the
feeling
of language.” The Universe was a great Work or Language, life itself its voice, and all that the poet felt, heard, saw, and sensed, in the world about him or in himself, was a language he must come to read, just as each art had its particular language of images, sounds, or movements in which meanings were evoked.

In an age when what we commonly call Science, the evocation of the use of the world, the presumption of mechanical imaginations in place of all other imaginations, defined its own realm as the sole Real and all other worlds as unreal, there were men in the arts too who attempted to define realistic claims, working purely in terms of semantic or cultural values, at war with unrealistic or animistic feelings of language. Turning to the pseudo-scientific or heretical concerns of the occultist, the evocation of a world in terms of a living language, Yeats was turning too from any purely literary or aesthetic interpretation of the role of poetry, to affirm the truth he had found in Shelley or in Blake as most real. He sought not only theosophy, god-knowledge, but theurgy, god-work; and there was magic too, daemonic experiment. Words were at once agents of personal feeling and composition in a poem and also bearers of knowledge felt, evokers of the real and casters of a spell.

•

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the ritual cult to which Yeats belonged, begun by Dr. Woodman, Dr. Wynn-Wescott and MacGregor Mathers, after the publication of Mathers’s
The Kabbalah Unveiled
in 1888, ten years after Blavatsky’s
Isis Unveiled
and the same year as
The Secret Doctrine,
gave rise not only to new formations in occultist circles but also to new formations in the literary world. There was a first splinter group—as such mutinies were called in Marxist movements of the 1930s—when between 1900 and 1901 Mathers and Aleister Crowley left the party or were ousted from the party in a furor of legal battles, theoretic arguments, and black magic wars. Crowley, obsessed with the terror of the void since the trauma of the Chogo Ri expedition of 1902, when he was the sole survivor of a group attempting to climb that mountain, devoted the rest of his life to finding a sufficient nightmare to fill the emptiness. “The Abramelin demons, that
Crowley had invoked at Boleskine, would seem to have formed a secret alliance with their cousins of the Hamalayan heights,” C. R. Cammell observes in his study of Crowley. After the Second World War (where certainly the void and terror opened in the death chambers of the Nazis or the radioactive holocaust let loose over Japan by the United States would seem a sufficient blackness), in the rise of a poetry of emptiness and black humor and in another poetry of spiritual rebellion, as in the works of Philip Lamantia or in the film-poetry of Kenneth Anger, the influence of Crowley began to appear as a force in the art of the new underground culture.

But we have here to do with a later division of the Order of the Golden Dawn into two distinct and even opposing groups among its members. Virginia Moore in her study of Yeats,
The Unicorn,
traces this history. The one, followed by Yeats and Algernon Blackwood, continued along the line of a pantheism in which all gods had reality in terms of the Anima Mundi below and the Great Mind or God above. The other, led by A. E. Waite, and including Arthur Machen, Charles Williams, and Evelyn Underhill, in 1903 broke with the parent body and formed a group which kept the Golden Dawn name but directed its study toward a Christian, even Catholic, mysticism. For this second group, the validity and verification of the esoteric tradition was determined by its devotion to the Christos—and outside the Christian reality, the esoteric was evil.

Algernon Blackwood, with Yeats and the elder Watkins, formed, Virginia Moore tells us, a Society of the Three Kings. In Blackwood’s novels we find that he believes in or is drawn toward the idea of a mystical theurgy in the worship of the elements where the protagonist is united with the regions of the stars and a way is opened into the elemental realm of Nature that is also the restored childhood world and consciousness of
The Education of Uncle Paul, The Centaur,
or of
A Prisoner in Fairyland.
Yeats, as
The Trembling of the Veil
and
Per Amica Silentia Lunae
testify, sought a magic that might open his mind to invasions of sensation and image, uniting his imagination with the passionate and daemonic imagination of the Anima Mundi. They may have been—those three Kings devoted, we are told, “to the study of Mysticism not Occultism”—three Magi or Magicians too, studying the
magic of the Child. Yeats in his
Autobiography,
like Blackwood in his novels, makes it clear that he seeks what he once knew in his childhood when he dwelt upon the thresholds of an enchantment or
faerie
in Nature, a closeness to the earth and to folk ways.

There was another movement after the death of Madame Blavatsky. This time not in the temple of a ritual cult but in the lecture hall of a theosophic school. G. R. S. Mead, who had been Blavatsky’s secretary, followed the way not of magic rite nor of mystic ritual but of gnosis, the teaching in the divine mysteries. In 1896 he published his translation from a Latin version of the Coptic text the
Pistis Sophia;
in 1900 his study of surviving Gnostic texts and traditions,
Fragments of a Faith Forgotten;
in 1906
Thrice-Greatest Hermes,
studies in Hellenistic theosophy and gnosis, with a translation of the Trismegistic literature; and then, the series of eleven texts:
Echoes from the Gnosis.
In the magazine
The Quest
edited by Mead, his purpose is clearly to establish all religions as one ground of man’s search for a life in the Divine World, to free the mind of man in his quest for the Divine from the inhibiting forces of dogma and church views, and at the same time, to revive the sense of the Divine World as the Real, the source of man’s vital life.

Along another path, at Oxford and especially Cambridge, following
The Golden Bough
of Frazer in 1890, both classicists and folklorists found themselves students of the mystery cults. The way led from Bergson’s
L’Evolution créatrice,
Jane Harrison tells us in her Preface to
Themis
in 1912: “I saw that Dionysus was an instinctive attempt to express what Professor Bergson calls
durée,
that life which is one, indivisible and yet ceaselessly changing.” From a second source, Durkheim’s
Représentations Individuelles et Représentations Collectives,
she had gathered that not only was the mystery-god an agency of “those instincts, emotions, desires which attend and express life” but that “these emotions, desires, instincts, in so far as they are religious, are at the outset rather of a group than of individual consciousness.”

The texts of the classicist or the folklorist began to take on contemporary meaning in the light of ideas of life forces and collective mind. “I was no longer engaged merely in enquiring into the sources of a fascinating legend,” Jessie Weston writes of her conversion from the folklorist view in the Preface to
From Ritual to Romance:
“but on the
identification of another field of activity for forces whose potency as agents of evolution we were only now beginning rightly to appreciate.” Tracing the roots of the Grail legend to “the mysterious border-land between Christianity and Paganism,” she tells us the path led from the Cumont to Mead where she found “not only the final link that completed the chain of evolution from Pagan Mystery to Christian Ceremonial, but also proof of that wider significance I was beginning to apprehend. The problem involved was not one of Folk-lore, not even one of Literature, but of Comparative Religion in its widest sense.”

In the Quest Society, as in the person of its leader, G. R. S. Mead, the current of
The Golden Bough
and the current of
The Secret Doctrine
meet. In the pages of Mead’s journal,
The Quest,
we find the new philosophy of Bergson along with Jessie Weston’s Grail essays, Eisler’s studies in Orphic cult and the Fisher King, Pound’s “Psychology and Troubadours,” along with essays on the Progressive Buddhism of Daisetz T. Suzuki. And there was not only the study of the
mythos,
the lore, but there was, so the testimony goes, back of these essays a revival of the
dromena,
of the actual rites. “I know, I mean, one man who understands Persephone and Demeter,” Pound says, “and another who has, I should say, met Artemis. These things are for them
real.
” The mysterious border-land between Christianity and Paganism that Jessie Weston sought knowledge of lay not only in the past but in the present London of 1909: “No inconsiderable part of the information at my disposal,” she writes, “depended upon personal testimony, the testimony of those who knew of the continued existence of such a ritual, and had actually been initiated into its mysteries.”

•

My grandmother was an elder in a provincial expression of this Hermetic movement, far from its center in London. Close to the woodlore of her origins in frontier life, she had some natural witchcraft perhaps. But then it may be too that all Grandmothers, as in fairytales, are Wise Women or Priestesses of Mother Nature. I was but a boy when she died, and with her death, my family’s tie with the old wisdom-way was broken. There was no cult life for them after her death.

There is only what I remember out of childhood: the colored lithographs
of Egyptian temples and the images upon the table, the voices talking of “Logos” and “Nous,” the old women looking wisely into the Astral Light and telling what they saw there.

My father and mother had been initiates, but in their own lives the tenor of the initiation was lost. From the region of San Francisco, they moved to Bakersfield in 1929, obedient to the directions of the stars in the Zodiac, as now Zen converts are obedient to the
I Ching
—Fate and Chance. They were isolated from their Brotherhood, their studies changed to studies that were respected by the community into which they had moved. By the time I was adolescent, my father was involved in the study of botany and local historical sites. After his death, Mother was relieved, I think, that this way of studying things might be dismissed. New friends did not share her belief—that was part of it—but then, though her belief may have lasted, her interest did not last.

In my mind it has lasted. The lure is the lure of those voices weaving as I began to understand words a net of themes in which knots of meaning that refused any easy use appeared, glimpses from the adult world of words beyond them, as words were just beyond me, such a tapestry as Penelope is said to have woven that was never done but begun again each day, or as Helen wove, in which were all the scenes of the Trojan War. What was the hidden meaning of such a “Troy,” of “War”? they would ask. It was not a dogma nor was it a magic that I understood for myself in the Theosophic world about me, but I understood that the meanings of life would always be, as they were in childhood, hidden away, in a mystery, exciting question after question, a lasting fascination.

The quest for meanings was a vital need in life that one recognized in romance where the hero must learn the language of birds, overhear the conversation of trees, call up even shadows to populate his consciousness. By associations, by metaphor, by likeness of the part, by fitting as part of a larger figure, by interlinking of members, by share, by equation, by correspondence, by reason, by contrast, by opposition, by pun or rhyme, by melodic coherence—what might otherwise have seemed disparate things of the world as Chaos were brought into a moving, changing, eternal, interweaving fabric of the world as Creation. It was the multiplicity of meanings at play that I loved in the talk of my
parents in the 1920s. Two phases of the psyche’s development in childhood—the endless questioning and the timeless play—found their reflection or continuation in the adult world above and beyond.

We shall lose it all if it be not those voices talking over the evening fire. But the voices are gone. The waves throwing themselves down in ranks upon the shore are what I hear.

•

There had been catastrophe. There would be catastrophe. The time in which a man lived was a whirl or drift in a great sea that might rise out of itself into a roaring end of things. In the early years of the Depression, ’30 or ’31, when I was eleven or twelve, I would lie awake before going off to sleep at the summer cottage at Morro Beach, letting the crash of the surf take over and grow enormous in my mind which dwelt at times like this upon the last days of Atlantis, imagining again the falling of towers, the ruin of cities, the outcry of a populace swept under by the raging element. When would the long-awaited tidal wave, the advancing wall of water, sweep all before it? Even so the grownups talked of Atlantis and of America, as if it were a New Atlantis. The Atlanteans, even as we might, in their science had come to know too much, the grownups said. They had found some key to the universe and had unlocked forbidden, destroying, powers.