3 - Background: Antecedents and Assumptions

Summary

Overview

Understanding the backgrounds from which both Yeatses came and the occult frame of mind that they shared helps in approaching A Vision. Husband and wife were both influenced by Theosophy and the Rosicrucian Cabala of the Order of the Golden Dawn and its successor the Stella Matutina. Importantly, these occult systems share, first, belief in a supernatural dimension outside the accepted supernatural of conventional religion and, secondly, organized symbol systems that work through correspondence and analogy.

Unable to accept either Christian belief or the “scientism” of his day, Yeats searched in the works of poets such as Shelley and Blake, and of theosophists such as Boehme and Swedenborg; in the esoteric teachings of Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, and of the Golden Dawn's Cabala and Rosicrucianism; in Indian religion and thought, and in Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy; in traditional Irish folklore, and in spiritualism. Born some thirty years after her husband, George Yeats felt similar attractions, reading about early Christianity and Neoplatonic philosophy, translating Renaissance Hermetic texts, and studying astrology, as well as joining the Anthroposophical Society (briefly) and, most significantly, the Stella Matutina, with W. B. Yeats as her sponsor.

Though these influences cover a huge range and there is much variation, the Yeatses were both familiar with a group of ideas and brought them to their project. Therefore, the automatic script launches into many areas with a host of assumptions, as the script is almost a form a private conversation set down on paper. Many such topics as the nature of spirits, of immortality, of reincarnation, or of astrology, enter the automatic script without question.

Concepts and ideas that the Yeatses took almost for granted include the existence of:

• non-physical aspects of the universe that interpenetrate the material world and what is perceived by the senses;

• a “soul” in the human being that survives death;

• that soul viewed as an immortal fragment of the divine that becomes incarnate in material form;

• that soul's reincarnation through successive lives to gain experience and perfect itself, returning eventually to its source in the divine;

• soul experience, which brings certain biases and aptitudes from previous existence to its new life and particular purposes or aptitudes in this life;