The magic of WB Yeats
QUESTION What was the extent of WB Yeats’ s involvement with the occult? How did he come to have an interest in it?
THE great poet, WB Yeats, had a keen interest in the occult all his adult life, so much so that he once said that the study of magic was the most important pursuit of his life. He had been encouraged to believe in the occult as a young man because of his father’ s religious scepticism.
When he was at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, Yeats was introduced to the occult, and he was instantly fascinated by all its practices.
That enthusiasm remained with him all his life. Indeed, much later in adult life, he wrote that the study of magic was the most important pursuit of his life. ‘The mystical life is at the centre of all I do and all that I think and all that I write,’ he wrote.
His father, John Butler Yeats’s views on conventional religion drove WB Yeats to find an alternative spiritual life, so he started to devise one, which came in the shape of worshipping the occult.
At the art school, he met up with George Russell – better known as AE – who went on to become a poet, dramatist and painter, a leading figure in the field of Irish literature.
Russell inspired WB Yeats in the latter’s quest to find out more about the occult and about mysticism. Russell gave Yeats a book about Buddhism, which accelerated this process, and for the rest of his life, Yeats became obsessed with the notion of reincarnation, talking with the dead, supernatural beliefs and Oriental mysticism.
When Yeats was 20, in 1885, he became a founding member of the Dublin Lodge of the Hermetic Society, together with his friend, Russell. Two years after that, in 1887, the Yeats family moved to London and there, WB paid a visit to Madame Helena Blavatsky, the most famous occulist of her time, and the founder of the Theosophical Society, which Yeats joined.
Eventually, Yeats was thrown out of this organisation because his experiments with magic were too much for the other members.
Then in March, 1890, he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in London, a very secretive organisation whose members practised ritual magic. Other members include the great love of Yeats’s life, Maud Gonne, and Bram Stoker, the Dracula novelist.
At one point, Yeats and Maud Gonne even went through a spiritual marriage through the good offices of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a counterpoint to not being able to organise a physical marriage. Much later on, in 1914, George Hyde-Lees, the future wife of WB Yeats, joined the same order.
Yeats put his beliefs in the occult to work after he had been having an affair with an actress called Mabel Dickinson, who told him that she was pregnant. Yeats sought the advice of the spirit world, through a medium, and the reply came back that he had been deceived and that he should not take the action he had decided upon.
Yeats’s belief in the supernatural and the occult had been fully vindicated and he remained a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn for the next three decades.
Four days after he had married George Hyde-Lees, his new bride astonished him by becoming the voice of a messenger from the other world. Yeats was told that the moment of sexual union was a gateway to knowledge of the other world and Yeats was hooked. He began a lengthy experiment with automatic writing, in which the hand and pen of his wife were used as unconscious instruments for the spirit world to send messages.
Yeats and his wife held more than 400 sessions of automatic writing, producing nearly 4,000 handwritten pages, from which Yeats took many theories about life, creating a complex spiritual system. He published all these theories in 1925, substantially revising them 12 years later in 1937. Certain symbolic patterns, such as gyres and moon phases, provided an important backdrop to the poems and plays he wrote in the later years of his literary career.
Altogether, such issues as the journey of the soul, the passage of time and the guiding hand of fate, all derived from Yeats’ lifelong obsessions with the occult, and these had a profound influence on his literary work. This influence can be seen at its most explicit in The Second Coming as well as in poems like Sailing To Byzantium.
Outwardly, WB Yeats was a towering figure of the literary establishment, winner of 1923 Nobel prize for literature and a Senator from 1922, for six years, but inside, much of his thoughts, actions and writing were driven by his lifelong obsession with the occult.
QUESTION What is the oldest martial art?
THE term martial art refers to all of the various systems of training that have a system or ritual.
Wrestling and boxing might be considered the oldest martial arts, as they date back to the beginnings of civilisation.
However, we generally link the term to more stylised forms, often from the Far East, such as kungfu, karate, judo and jiu-jitsu.
Malla-yuddha is an ancient form of wrestling that originated in South Asia and dates back to at least 3000BC. It is divided into four styles, each named after a Hindu god: Hanumanti – technical superiority; Jambuvanti – locks and holds to force submission; Jarasandhi – breaking the limbs and joints; and Bhimaseni – pure strength.
It is still practised by small communities in South Asia.
Jiao di (which means horn clashing) was an ancient form of Chinese wrestling, the forebear of today’s shuai jiao.
Its first literary appearance is in the Shiji (Records Of the Grand Historian), written around 94BC, but legend holds that it began during the reign of the Yellow Emperor (2698-2598 BC).
Pankration is a martial art from Greece that combined boxing with wrestling, but also allowed kicking.
According to Greek mythology, it was first used by Heracles (Hercules) to fight the Nemean Lion, and Theseus, who used it to overpower the Minotaur.
Perhaps the first true marital art form was Kalaripayattu. Originating in Kerala, southern India, in the third century BC, it includes strikes, kicks, grappling and weaponry, as well as more peaceful stretching, yoga moves and healing techniques.
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