OCCULTISM AND MYTHOLOGY IN TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

AN EXAMINATION OF THE MODERNIST POETRY OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

CHRISTINA FERRARI

If we cannot expunge the occult from the history of Modernism then the sensible thing is to learn more about it, so that we can recognize it in a literary setting and have a clearer sense of what it is.

---Leon Surette

The “Occult” is an umbrella term which covers a wide range of hidden, secret or unknown knowledge.

It comes from the Latin “occulo” which means “to hide.”

Mystical and religious philosophies regarded as occult today were fairly mainstream from ancient times until the 17th century, when the Age of Reason and scientific rationalism, drove such beliefs underground.

With the rise of science, nature was explained and there was no need for mystical or religious rituals to make sense of the world.

The Occult includes :• Ghosts• UFO’s• Astrology• Mythology• Superstition• Magic• Mediums• Psychics• The Paranormal• Supernatural creatures—vampires, zombies,

werewolves, monsters, dragons.

AT FIRST GLANCE THE PAIRING OF OCCULT AND MODERNIST LITERATURE SEEMS INCONGRUOUS.

THE ONE DENOTES OBSCURE MYSTICAL PRACTICES OF A DUBIOUS NATURE, THE OTHER THE STABILITY OF REASON AND LOGIC; YET SIMMERING BELOW THE SURFACE OF SOME MAINSTREAM MODERNIST LITERATURE LURKS THE SPECTER OF ANCIENT MYTH, AND ESOTERIC SYMBOLISM.

In the early twentieth-century, the cultural aesthetic began to reflect feelings of isolation and alienation. Modernists frequently chose stark, confrontational expression.

Writing became utilitarian and realistic.

Imaginative flights of fancy and maximalist imagery were replaced by minimal imagery.

Supernaturalism and mythology, which had proved a fertile ground for the literary imagination, were discredited and disparaged as superstitious absurdity.

YOU MIGHT BE SURPRISED TO LEARN JUST HOW MANY WRITERS HAVE BEEN INFLUENCED BY OCCULT IDEAS.

Few of these writers were practicing occultists, most simply borrowed ideas and images to enrich their storytelling.

• Honoré de Balzac • Geoffrey Chaucer• Ben Jonson• Charles Baudelaire • William Blake • Jorge Luis Borges• Elizabeth Browning • Robert Browning • Thomas Carlyle • Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Fyodor Dostoevsky • Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Charles Dickens• E.T. A. Hoffmann• Mark Twain• Virginia Woolf• Lord Byron• Anton Chekov• Ruben Dario• Leo Tolstoy• Joseph Conrad• Arthur Conan Doyle• Gustave Flaubert• Alexandre Dumas• Nikolay Gogol• Washington Irving• Rudyard Kipling• Heinrich Von Kleist

• John Donne• Dante• Dante Gabriel Rossetti• John Milton• George Herbert• Nathaniel Hawthorne• Marcel Proust• Ted Hughes• Sylvia Plath• James Joyce• T.S Eliot• Edgar Allen Poe• Ezra Pound• H.P Lovecraft• Henry Miller• Umberto Eco• Aldous Huxley• Stephen King

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe• Henry James • Henry Vaughan• Edmund Spenser• William Shakespeare• Mary Shelley• Alfred Lord Tennyson • Walt Whitman • James Joyce• Hilda Doolittle• Robert Merrill• Robert Duncan• William Butler Yeats • Victor Hugo• Thomas Mann• J.K. Rowling

This incomplete list demonstrates the pervasiveness of occult themes in literature, even in the modern age!

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

WAS A MODERNIST AUTHOR WHO UTILIZED MYTHOLOGY AND OCCULT THEMES.

W. B. YEATS 1865-1939

Yeats was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, a Rosicrucian and an alchemist.

He was a practitioner of occultism and his poetry was inspired by his beliefs.

Click Here for more information on Yeats.

Yeats turned towards mythology and superstition as a reaction

against “the barren intellectual age,” which had dried up

imagination and had “cut off the passionate depths of the

unconscious” (Gorski 22).

He found in the past a tradition of creativity that provided an antidote to the sterility of the present.

His fin-de-siècle fiction, The Rosa Alchemica is part of trilogy chronicling Ireland’s history during the Christian era. The text is a part of the secret history of occult tradition, much like Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Yeats chose not to set the story in modern day Ireland like Joyce’s Dubliners, choosing to explore the spiritual orientation of Ireland instead.

CLICK HERE to read Rosa online

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,The holy tree is growing there;From joy the holy branches start,And all the trembling flowers they bear.

The changing colours of its fruitHave dowered the stars with merry light;The surety of its hidden rootHas planted quiet in the night;The shaking of its leafy headHas given the waves their melody,And made my lips and music wed,Murmuring a wizard song for thee

“THE TWO TREES” BY W.B. YEATS

There the Loves a circle go,The flaming circle of our days, Gyring, spiring to and froIn those great ignorant leafy ways;Remembering all that shaken hairAnd how the winged sandals dart, Thine eyes grow full of tender care:Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

Gaze no more in the bitter glassThe demons, with their subtle guile,Lift up before us when they pass, Or only gaze a little while;

For there a fatal image growsThat the stormy night receives,Roots half hidden under snows, Broken boughs and blackened leaves. For all things turn to barrennessIn the dim glass the demons hold, The glass of outer weariness, Made when God slept in times of old. There, through the broken branches, goThe ravens of unresting thought;Flying, crying, to and fro,

Cruel claw and hungry throat, Or else they stand and sniff the wind, And shake their ragged wings alas!Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

• The “bitter glass” raised by demons reflects man’s guilt over the original sin and keep humanity shackled in a state of purgatory.

• The narrator urges, “Gaze no more in the bitter glass,” and therefore be released from condemnation fostered upon prelapsarian consciousness.

• The poem suggests that happiness can be found by returning to a mythic time when trees were laden with fruit which “dowered the stars with merry light” and which inspired the narrator who began “Murmuring a wizard song for thee” (Yeats 1277).

Yeats, views were shaped by the modern world and his response to the post-war world.

His views were extreme.

Yeats tried to impart the teachings of the secret societies he belonged to, but this

is mostly glossed over today.

Modernist writers such as W.B. Yeats reimagined modern literature by replacing stylistic sterility with metaphysical imagery of the occult past to escape from “the preponderant void” (Duncan 39).

Supernaturalism and mythology are rich sources of artistic inspiration that continue to influence writers, regardless of the social milieu.

Modernist writers, despite living in age which shunned superstition as anachronistic vestiges of unenlightened thought, frequently turned to ghosts and pagan gods as sources of inspiration.

Texts cited

Gorski, William T. Yeats and Alchemy. Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1996. Print.

Surette, Leon. The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1993. Print.

Yeats, W. B. The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Collier, 1989. Kindle.