The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  But he had now been introduced to a system—and to other people who like him were opposed to scientific materialism and who accepted that there was a secret and ancient wisdom to be had. He hoped that he could bring into this wisdom all the fairy tales and folklore he had heard in his childhood—for he regarded Ireland as a mystical land. In addition to Madame Blavatsky’s doctrines, Yeats subscribed to those of Jacob Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg, and their concepts of cyclical history. Above all, he was taken with the inherent secrecy of the movement and its idea that reality could not be “facilely explained” as the perceptions of five senses; he felt sure that scientific rationalism had ignored or “superficially dismissed” many important matters.

  Some months before he left the Theosophists he had joined the Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn, a smaller organization with essentially similar beliefs, though its members paid more attention to the European tradition of Kabbalistic magic than to the wisdom of the East. The aim of many members of the Golden Dawn was to show their power over the material universe.

  France was especially susceptible to cults, where one sect gave degrees in Kabbalah. The Golden Dawn was run by a triumvirate of people, one of whom was married to the sister of Henri Bergson. Despite several factional disputes, Yeats joined the order in 1890 because the leaders’ magical feats impressed him, some of which he was able to execute for himself. On one occasion, when he placed a death symbol on a fellow member’s forehead, that individual, without knowing what the symbol was, immediately reported seeing an image of a hearse. Yeats later said that this kind of influence stayed with him until he was at least forty.

  Some of his friends feared that he was veering “far from life.”

  In his first collected poems he stressed his intense concern with—and belief in—the occult, saying in a letter to Florence Farr (actress, mistress of George Bernard Shaw and a fellow member of the Golden Dawn) in 1901, “All that we do with an intensity has an origin in the hidden world.”5 He loved the rituals of the Golden Dawn and its central myth, the mystical death and resurrection of the adept. It was, as Ellmann says, a strange mixture of paganism and Christianity, and Yeats, dissatisfied with himself, as he arguably was throughout his life, was eager to be born anew.

  THE CASTLE OF THE HEROES

  Alongside these activities went Yeats’s involvement in nationalism. He was a romantic, largely ignorant—as many romantics were—of economics, history, politics and sociology; but he yearned for a heroic life, regarded Ireland as a “mystical land,” and saw his opportunity to help create an Irish literature that would define both what the country was and what it wanted to be, while serving as the best kind of propaganda. But it proved more difficult than he had thought, because Irish nationalism was bred of seven hundred years of hatred of the occupying authority, and such well-ingrained attitudes were, as Ellmann nicely puts it, “difficult to bridle.”

  Yeats was in particular concerned that “delicate qualities of mind” might be destroyed in a mob movement. There were many battles to be fought, but he gradually came to see that his own role was to set standards, to keep the movement intellectually respectable, while all the time exalting patriotism and heroism. He even argued at times that there were “truths of passion that were intellectual falsehoods.”

  His idea of the Ireland of the future was to re-create the Ireland of the past. “Ireland . . . will be a country where not only will the wealth be well distributed but where there will be an imaginative culture and power to understand imaginative and spiritual things distributed among the people. We wish to preserve an ancient ideal of life. Wherever its customs prevail, there you will find the folk song, the folk tale, the proverb and the charming manners that come from ancient culture. . . . In Ireland alone among the nations that I know [Britain, America, France] you will find, away on the Western seaboard, under broken roofs, a race of gentlemen who keep alive the ideals of a great time when men sang the heroic life with drawn swords in their hands. . . . We must so live that we will make that old noble kind of life powerful among our people.”

  What Yeats did was to mold both occultism and nationalism into his art. His father thought his interest in the occult was absurd and his patriotism a waste of energies that would have been better spent on his poetry; and certainly, as Ellmann observes, most of what Yeats wrote at that time was “ostentatiously Irish and occult.” He even made speeches declaring his belief in fairies, though when pressed drew back and described them as “dramatizations of our moods.” He considered combining Druidism with Christianity, as the Golden Dawn had comprised Rosicrucianism and Christianity, convinced that “all lovely and loving places were crowded with invisible beings, and that it would be possible to communicate with them.”6

  “The vague dream of an Irish cult slowly possessed Yeats’s mind,” and he thought of new forms of worship. It was against this background that he found an island with an unoccupied castle in Lough Key in the west of Ireland, and had the idea to turn it into the headquarters of a new cult through which the truths of the spirit might be disseminated to the materialistic nations. The doctrines would be the same as those of Theosophy and the Golden Dawn but associated specifically with Ireland. They would “unite the radical truths of Christianity to those of a more ancient world.” To the “Castle of the Heroes” would come the finest men and women of Ireland for spiritual inspiration and teaching, and they would return, fortified by the supernatural powers which the Irish mystical order had consecrated, to act, in the words of Florence Farr, as living links “between the supernal and terrestrial natures.”7

  Yeats spent a great deal of time researching and developing a special rite for this new order, eventually deciding that the candidates must pass through the “initiations of the cauldron, the stone, the sword and the spear,” symbolizing the four elements and their spiritual equivalents.8 Underneath it all, he was arguing that Irish life must have a basis in faith such as existing churches could not provide.

  It was not dissimilar to his plan for a mystical theatre. The story of the founding of the Abbey is well-known: a group of playwrights and actors wanted to establish a national theatre for the small nation that was Ireland, and they were phenomenally successful, in that the plays they produced appeared all over the world. Yeats’s goal was to show that Ireland was a holy land and one full of holy symbols, “not in the orthodox clergyman’s sense but in the poet’s sense, which was also the mystic’s sense; here alone in a degenerate Europe would spiritual realities be understood.”9 Many of his early plays, such as Countess Cathleen: A Miracle Play (1899), The Hour-Glass: A Morality and Where There Is Nothing (both 1902), followed these ideas of fusing the occult and national interests.

  He began to change again in the early years of the twentieth century, when his letters to friends begin to reflect his poetry and plays, when the language becomes less elaborate, more “homely,” more the idiom of common speech. “All art is in the last analysis an endeavor to condense as out of the flying vapor of the world an image of human perfection, and for its own and not for art’s sake.”10 Here he had recourse to his famous notion of the mask: that the face we present to the world is designed to conceal as much as to reveal. He still maintained his obsession with spiritual struggle, that this was the way, eventually, to discover the meaning of life; and he was still conscious of the divisions within himself, as within people generally, getting in the way of any sense of unity—a sense that he badly wanted to achieve, that he thought was the very point of life.

  In 1909, and especially from 1911, he began to take a serious interest in spiritualism, attending séances in an attempt, as he put it, to reunite the “mind & soul & body.” Ellmann accepts that Yeats was more credulous than most, his investigations leading him to research alleged miracles; whether “automatic [or ‘free’] writers” could transcend the boundaries of their own minds and knowledge; the nature of spirits and of the afterlife.11 (And he was not above “less form
al goals” such as the answer to the question “Am I to marry Maud Gonne?”) There are countless examples of Yeats’s collaboration, or attempted collaboration, with automatic writers, but despite this, Ellmann says, he did not see himself as “particularly superstitious.” Rather, “Unable to give full consent to the doctrines of psychical research, Yeats more and more inclined to the use of myth and metaphor which somersaulted over the question of literal belief.”12

  “We sing amid our uncertainty,” Yeats had written in Per Amica Silentia Lunae, but Ellmann indicts him for at times in his poetry pretending to belief, for using artifice to evade direct questions, suggesting that Yeats was locked in “an anxious struggle to escape from skepticism to direct belief.”13 Yeats was, in other words, caught—as many were caught: he hated materialism but couldn’t totally convince himself that there was another realm.

  This attitude was reinforced by the behavior and understanding of his father, who corresponded with the poet on many aesthetic issues, and at the same time made it clear, through his use of psychological terms, where he thought the future lay. J. B. Yeats was in some ways the antithesis of his son and, moreover, he seemed to be doing a better job of it—he was certainly more at peace with himself. Yeats wrote to his father at this time (1914–15) that he was trying to arrange his thought “into a religious system,” and in his diary noted that “in the new Ireland a counter-religion would carry more weight than mere anti-clericalism.” At this time, too, he discovered (through Ezra Pound, who was the literary executor of Ernest Fenollosa, a scholar who had spent many years in Japan studying the Noh drama) that Japanese plays were full of spirits and masks and that their core drama was usually about the difference between mortality and the spirit.

  Yeats thus threw himself into the development of a new form of drama, adapting Japanese ideas to the European context. The first play in this new form was At the Hawk’s Well, terse, vivid, about the search for wisdom (the water in the well confers wisdom, but when the hero finally reaches it, the well has dried up). The play seemed to embody Yeats’s deepest fears for himself.

  EXALTED YEATSISM

  By this time he had met Georgie Hyde-Lees, a friend of Ezra Pound. She was interested in psychical research and in the Rudolf Steiner Theosophists, and Yeats sponsored her for membership of the Golden Dawn. Then, after a short engagement, they were married in October 1917. And it was Georgie who amazed her husband by her abilities with “automatic writing.” He gave up his obsession with séances, and he even gave up poetry for a time, until a message came from the automatic writing (a little too practical, perhaps): “We have come to give you metaphors for poetry.”14

  Mrs. Yeats was blessed with a strong constitution and would work for hours to satisfy her husband’s demands, all her effort contributing to Yeats’s strange book A Vision, in which he classified human personality into twenty-eight types, or phases, each phase being linked to one of twenty-eight phases of the moon, and each constituting one of the spokes of a Great Wheel. According to this system, any human “soul” (he didn’t really like that word, but found no alternative) passes through all twenty-eight phases. Later he paid more attention to the Four Faculties, which the “soul” contains in varying proportions. These faculties were Will, Mask, Creative Mind and Body of Fate, the first two and the last two seen as pairs of contraries. Yeats had all sorts of geometric ideas about the shape of history and of character, and these, together with the twenty-eight phases and the Four Faculties—much of this based on research carried out through his wife’s automatic writing—composed what Ellmann calls “esoteric Yeatsism,” the development of which, he says, exalted the poet as never before.15

  Yeats realized that his system brought with it problems. “[H]e saw clearly that by removing God from the universe and turning all life into cycles, he had deprived his system of any teleological basis for conduct except that, if one lived a harmonious life, one might expect more harmonious future lives. . . . He could not define good and evil except in terms of complete or incomplete self-expression.” “During the period said to commence in 1927 [as he had established in A Vision] . . . must arise a form of philosophy, which . . . will be concrete in expression, establish itself by immediate experience, seek no general agreement, make little of God or any exterior unity, and it will call that good which a man can contemplate himself as doing always [echoes of Nietzsche’s ‘external recurrence’]. . . . Men will no longer separate the idea of God from that of human genius, human productivity in all its forms.”16

  Later, Yeats emerged into what Ellmann calls a “cantankerous acceptance of life” as a framework by which to live. This was the moment when in his poetry he acknowledged that life varied from “The unfinished man and his pain” to “The finished man among his enemies.”

  He had not given up his nationalism. He now wanted to fuse life, work and country “into one indissoluble whole.”17 Later still, he discovered various Indian gurus (a final aspect of his occult search), but in his poem of this time, “Byzantium,” he extols the human imagination in a mighty imaginative work that doesn’t evade the difficulties:

  A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains

  All that man is,

  All mere complexities,

  The fury and the mire of human veins.

  Yeats’s significance, for us, is well put by Ellmann: “The war on God is the ultimate heroism, and like all heroism in Yeats ends in defeat.” But, in addition, in Yeats’s case there was also the war with his father, as a result of which “He went into manhood without religion, ethics or politics, but held together by a feeling of revolt against his father and his times.” That revolt meant that it was some time before he could take on board his father’s almost throwaway remark that “the poet’s form of knowledge was different from that of a priest or scientist.”18

  Yeats’s finest achievement might be said to be in his nationalism. Passionate nationalism was good, he felt, maybe even necessary, but not if it degenerated into mere impotent Anglophobia. Yeats lived, as Dean Inge said in another context, “between skepticism and superstition.” He never gave up hope of bringing together myth and fact into a new religion, or as he called it, “a sacred drama”; but it is no more than the truth to say that, in old age, “the answers came no more easily to him than when young.” The mood of his last poem, “The Black Tower,” is one of heroic despair.19 And as he wrote in a letter two years before his death, “There was no dominant opinion I could accept.”20

  And so this is Yeats’s significance for us. He hated the nineteenth-century material world, the world of particle physics, evolution and the deconstruction of the Bible; but try as he might, he could find no other realm, nowhere else to go; the supernatural world refused steadfastly to reveal itself to him, whatever occult practice he turned to. And W. H. Auden was harsh on him. “How on earth, we may wonder, could a man of Yeats’s gifts take such nonsense seriously?” T. S. Eliot was hardly kinder when he complained that Yeats’s supernatural world was “the wrong supernatural world. . . . It was not a world of spiritual significance . . . but a highly sophisticated lower mythology summoned, like a physician, to supply a fading pulse of poetry with some transient stimulant so that the dying patient may utter his last words.”

  Because his father had steered him toward psychology, he looked elsewhere for insight. He tried magnificently, heroically, to create another world with his poetry, and at times, as with his nationalist poems, he succeeded gloriously. But in Yeats’s main aim—to explore, describe and communicate that other, non-materialistic realm—he failed, and his attempts to do so read, as Auden said, absurdly to us. A Vision spends a significant proportion of its pages “preparing readers to encounter its strange explanation of the universe through geometric symbolism.”21

  Unlike, say, Wallace Stevens, Yeats’s own imagination was never enough; the real action was always going on somewhere else, somewhere he never found. He never escaped “the fury and the mire of
[mere] human veins.”

  AMERICA’S SHADOW CULTURE

  While none of the above is unfair to Yeats, he was far from being the only individual to adopt these beliefs that seemed so absurd to Auden. In fact, and so far as the United States is concerned, the Harvard historian of psychiatry Eugene Taylor has identified an entire culture, what he terms a “shadow culture,” of more than two hundred years of alternative religions and “pop-psych” movements. Standing outside mainstream psychiatry and the mainstream churches, these movements comprised a variety of attempts to live in the post-Christian world, both before and after Nietzsche. Taylor calls it both a “visionary” tradition and a “crank literature,” a “folk psychology” and a “psychospiritual tradition,” focusing as it does on an “experiential interpretation of higher consciousness.”22 His survey is a clear account of an otherwise woolly world.

  This shadow culture, Taylor said, comprised a vast unorganized array of discrete individuals “who live and think differently from the mainstream but who participate in its daily activities.”23 He traced this tradition back to the First Great Awakening in America in the first half of the eighteenth century, when an evangelical wave swept through the northeast and 250 new, emotionalist churches were established outside the Calvinist faith. Such groups as that of Conrad Beissel and the Ephrata Mystics, the Shakers and other visionary communities, the Swedenborgians, with their concept of “correspondence,” that God speaks to man through Nature; and the Transcendentalists, who also believed that understanding could come through the contemplation of Nature—all of these shared the view that intuition was a higher faculty than reason.