Neither the living nor the dead, but all things mingled…

…and he was wondering at the strangeness of it all, when suddenly, in place of the hum and murmur of the summer, an infinite silence seemed to fall on all things, and the wood was hushed, and for a moment of time he stood face to face there with a presence, that was neither man nor beast, neither the living nor the dead, but all things mingled, the form of all things but devoid of all form. And in that moment, the sacrament of body and soul was dissolved, and a voice seemed to cry ‘Let us go hence,’ and then the darkness beyond the stars, the darkness of everlasting. 

Arthur Machen – The Great God Pan 

the Great God Pan

We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form.

Arthur Machen
The Great God Pan

hidden horror and brooding fright

Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen; author of some dozen tales long and short, in which the elements of hidden horror and brooding fright attain an almost incomparable substance and realistic acuteness…His powerful horror-material of the ’nineties and earlier nineteen-hundreds stands alone in its class, and marks a distinct epoch in the history of this literary form.

H P Lovecraft
Supernatural Horror in Literature

the Great God Pan

We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form.

Arthur Machen
The Great God Pan

the essence of the world

Strangeness which is the essence of beauty is the essence of truth, and the essence of the world. I have often felt that; when the ascent of a long hill brought me to the summit of an undiscovered height in London; and I looked down on a new land.

Arthur Machen
The London Adventure

Interview with a book collector

awful, most secret forces

It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form.

Arthur Machen
The Great God Pan

the souls of men must wither and die…

We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form.

Arthur Machen
The Great God Pan

bits of nightmare…

We both wondered whether these contradictions that one can’t avoid if one begins to think of time and space may not really be proofs that the whole of life is a dream, and the moon and stars bits of nightmare.

Arthur Machen
The Terror

Yeats and occult guidance

The path to conventional Christianity had been cut off for Yeats by his father’s religious scepticism, but his need to believe in something and a hunger for the spiritual life led him to seek and devise an alternative system of beliefs, according to official Yeats biographer Roy Foster.

He spent a lifetime seeking contact with the spirit world through occult researches and practices that informed much of what he did and wrote. As Foster points out, his involvement in the occult was intimately bound up in his complex relationships with a series of women who shared these beliefs and almost all the women who inspired his poems were involved in the occult.

His occultism fits into an Irish Protestant literary tradition that includes Sheridan Le Fanu, Charles Maturin, Bram Stoker and Elizabeth Bowen.

It was while studying at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin that Yeats met the poet, dramatist, and painter George Russell who inspired his interest in mysticism, giving him a copy of A.P. Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism.

Reincarnation, communication with the dead, mediums, supernatural systems and Oriental mysticism fascinated Yeats through his life. In 1885, he became a founding member of the Dublin Lodge of the Hermetic Society with Russell.

When the Yeats family moved back to London in 1887, the young poet paid a visit to Madame Helena Blavatsky, the famous occultist and founder of the Theosophical Society which he joined and was later expelled from.

In March 1890, still seeking deeper answers, he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in London, a secret and rather shady society that practised ritual magic. Other members included his great love Maud Gonne, the actress Florence Farr, Welsh author Arthur Machen and English authors Evelyn Underhill and Aleister Crowley.

At one point, Yeats and Gonne conducted a spiritual marriage through the Golden Dawn to channel his frustrations at the lack of a physical one. His future wife, Bertha Georgie Hyde-Lees joined the order in 1914.

At one point Yeats sought occult guidance for a crisis in his private life. He had been seeing the actress Mabel Dickinson who wrote to tell him she was pregnant. He asked for the advice of the spirit world through a medium and a message came through to say he had been deceived and “should not take the action I had all but decided on”.

Dickinson, as it turned out, was not pregnant and his faith in the supernatural had, in his eyes, been vindicated. Yeats remained an active member of the Golden Dawn for over 30 years becoming involved in the order’s power struggles, both with Farr and McGregor Mathers.

After the organisation ceased and splintered into various offshoots, Yeats remained with the Stella Matutina until 1921. Influence of the occult on Yeats’s poetry is infused with a sense of the otherworldly, the spiritual and the unknown.

Mysticism figures prominently in his discussion of the reincarnation of the soul, as well as in his philosophical model of the conical gyres used to explain the journey of the soul, the passage of time, and the guiding hand of fate.

Mysticism and the occult occur again and again in his poetry, most explicitly in ‘The Second Coming’ but also in poems such as ‘Sailing to Byzantium’.

In his book The Muses of WB Yeats, Joseph Hassett points out that Yeats came to the marriage with Hyde-Lees partly as a way of escaping the emotional turmoil of his relationship with Maud Gonne, but he feared that domesticity would cost him his poetic inspiration. However four days into their honeymoon, his new bride astonished him by suddenly assuming the voice of a messenger from the other world, with secrets to impart.

To his delight, Georgie’s ‘instructors’ revealed to him that the moment of sexual union was a portal to knowledge of the spiritual world – a knowledge that carried with it a metaphorical language rooted in a belief system of stunning power and richness.
This was the beginning of what would be a lengthy experiment with the psychic phenomenon called ‘automatic writing’, in which Georgie’s hand and pen served as unconscious instruments for the spirit world to send information.

Yeats and his wife held more than four hundred sessions of automatic writing, producing nearly 4,000 pages that he avidly and patiently studied and organised. From these sessions, Yeats formulated theories about life and history.

He created a complex system of spirituality, using the image of interlocking gyres (similar to spiral cones) to map out the development and reincarnation of the soul. Yeats believed that history was determined by fate and that fate revealed its plan in moments when the human and divine interact.

He published his intricate theories of personality and history in A Vision in 1925 (which he substantially revised in 1937), and some of the symbolic patterns (gyres, moon phases) with which he organised these theories provide important background to many of the poems and plays he wrote during the second half of his career.

Michelle McDonagh
Magic, myth and secrecy – WB Yeats and the occult