A Teacher
W.B. Yeats
Irish poet who wove ceremonial magic into a national imagination.
The transmission
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, one of the foremost figures of twentieth-century literature and winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature. He joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1890 and remained an active initiate for decades, drawing its symbolism into his poetry and his system of esoteric thought.
His occult studies shaped a body of work that fused Irish myth, mysticism, and modernist craft.
What they gave
He produced a major body of symbolist poetry and drama and, in ‘A Vision’, set out an idiosyncratic occult cosmology of cycles and gyres.
In their words
That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself. That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.
The line they stand in
Initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, he absorbed its ritual symbolism alongside Irish folklore and Theosophical and Rosicrucian currents of the occult revival.