ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
February 28
“The Death and Afterlife of W.B. Yeats”
On the afternoon of January 28th,
1939, in a modest upstairs room at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour in
Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the French Riviera, William Butler Yeats died. He was
seventy-three. His wife George and his companion Edith Shackleton Heald were at
his bedside. Outside, a particularly cold Mediterranean winter had been
aggravating the cardiac and renal conditions that had been closing in on him
for months.
He had known it was coming. In the
weeks before, working with the fierce concentration of a man determined to
finish what he had started, he composed some of his finest late poems in that
small room above the sea. Among them was “Under Ben Bulben”—which
contained not only his own epitaph but precise instructions for his burial,
written with the cool authority of a lifelong student of what lies on the other
side of death. "Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by."
It is one of the most celebrated self-composed epitaphs in all of literature.
What Yeats could not have anticipated is that it would eventually be carved
above a grave that very probably does not contain him.
But that magnificent and melancholy
scandal belongs to the end of this story. First, the man himself—the most
consequential occultist in the history of English literature, and the most
persistently underestimated.
The
Magician Behind the Poet
The received account of Yeats
arranges his life tidily: the great Irish poet, the Nobel laureate of 1923, the
founder of the Abbey Theatre, the Senator of the Irish Free State. The
occultism tends to get filed as a colorful eccentricity—the kind of thing
brilliant men got up to in the 1890s before they came to their senses. Ezra
Pound, who knew him well and was not himself a stranger to the irrational,
dismissed it memorably as
“Bughouse.” — Ezra Pound on Yeats’s occult
practice. Pound was wrong. The magic was not incidental to the poetry. It was
the poetry’s foundation.
Yeats himself was unambiguous on
the point. In his essay Magic (1901), he wrote without equivocation: “I
believe in practice and in a philosophy that we have agreed to call magic.”
He was not being provocative. He was being accurate. The gyres, the cones, the
Great Wheel, the cycles of history that structure his late masterpieces are not
metaphors borrowed from occult tradition for poetic effect. They are the
literal cosmological system he and his wife George constructed through years of
careful experiment, and published in its full systematic form as A Vision
in 1925. That system underpins everything from “The Second Coming” to “Leda
and the Swan” to “Byzantium.” To read Yeats without the occult
framework is, as one scholar put it, to read him with the lights off.
His occult biography began in earnest by 1885, when the twenty-year-old Yeats was involved in founding the Dublin Hermetic Order. The following year he attended his first séance. He joined the Theosophical Society, studied under the influence of Blavatsky, and began the systematic investigation of Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, Hinduism, and ceremonial magic that would occupy him for the remaining fifty-four years of his life. He was not browsing a hobby. He was building a cosmology.
The Golden Dawn
Years
On March 7th, 1890, at the
Isis-Urania Temple in London, Yeats was initiated as a neophyte into the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. He took the magical motto Daemon est Deus
Inversus—“The Devil is God inverted”—abbreviated to DEDI, which is
also Latin for “I gave.” Whether the double meaning was intentional is
unknown. With Yeats, it usually was.
The Golden Dawn at its
late-Victorian peak was the most intellectually serious occult organization in
the English-speaking world: a structured initiatory system drawing on Hermetic
Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, astrology, Tarot, and Egyptian symbolism. Its
membership included at various points the actress Florence Farr, the Irish
nationalist Maud Gonne—Yeats’s great unrequited love, who had refused
his proposal of marriage in 1891, prompting him to write later that from that
point “the troubling of my life began”—and, most notoriously, Aleister
Crowley. Yeats brought in his uncle George Pollexfen, Gonne, and Farr as active
recruits, and was eventually appointed Instructor of Mystical Philosophy for
the Isis-Urania neophytes.
His relationship with Crowley
produced one of the more surreal episodes in literary history: the “Battle
of Blythe Road.” When Crowley arrived at the Golden Dawn’s Blythe Road
premises—sent by the founder MacGregor Mathers during the 1900 schism, dressed
in full Scottish Highland regalia and wearing a black ceremonial mask—to
repossess the Order’s paraphernalia, it was Yeats who physically turned him
away, called the police, and led the committee that expelled Mathers and
Crowley from the Order entirely. The two men’s mutual contempt lasted the rest
of their lives. Crowley, characteristically, responded by initiating a
long-distance magical duel. It came to nothing.
Yeats remained with the Golden Dawn’s successor organization, the Stella Matutina, until 1921—thirty-one years of sustained ceremonial practice from his first initiation. He was, by any measure, not a casual member but one of the Order’s most senior and committed practitioners.
The
Ghost Club & the Automatic Hand
Parallel to his Golden Dawn work,
Yeats pursued spiritualism with equal seriousness. In 1911 he joined The Ghost Club—the oldest paranormal research organization in the world,
founded in London in 1862 — and attended its investigations regularly. In 1912,
during séances, a spirit identifying itself as Leo Africanus—the
sixteenth-century Moorish geographer—began communicating, claiming to be
Yeats’s Daemon, his anti-self: the shadow personality that completes and
opposes the conscious ego. Yeats conducted an extended written dialogue with
this entity, preserved in his manuscripts. In 1913, he delivered a lecture
before the Dublin Society for Psychical Research declaring, without
equivocation, that he had no doubt of the reality of psychic phenomena. He did
not subsequently retract it.
Then, in October 1917, came Georgie
Hyde-Lees—twenty-five years old to his fifty-two—whom he married in some
anxiety, still raw from having just proposed unsuccessfully to Maud Gonne’s
daughter Iseult. Four days into the honeymoon, sensing her husband’s distress,
George began to write automatically.
“What came in disjointed sentences, in
almost illegible writing, was so exciting, sometimes so profound, that I
persuaded her to give an hour or two day after day to the unknown writer.” — W.B.
Yeats, introduction to A Vision
Over the following years, in sessions lasting hours, George—entering a trance state—channeled through automatic writing and later automatic speech an exhaustive cosmological system. The communicating entities called themselves the Instructors. They delivered, in elaborate geometric symbolism—phases, cones, gyres, the Great Wheel of twenty-eight lunar phases—an entire alternative metaphysics of human existence. Yeats spent years organizing, annotating, and preparing this material for publication as A Vision (first published privately 1925, revised for general publication 1937). He wrote to his publisher: “I dare say I delude myself in thinking this book my book of books.” He did not delude himself. It is the key to the entire late period and the indispensable guide to understanding “The Second Coming”—a poem whose famous lines are not a figure of speech but a precise description of the gyre system completing its two-thousand-year cycle.
The Last Fire
In April 1934, at sixty-eight,
Yeats underwent a Steinach operation—a procedure fashionable in certain
Viennese circles, involving a partial vasectomy designed to redirect biological
energy toward increased hormonal production. By his own account and that of
witnesses, the results were remarkable. Creative output surged. He took lovers
among women considerably younger: the poet and actress Margot Ruddock, the
journalist Ethel Mannin, and finally Edith Shackleton Heald, who would be at
his deathbed five years later. George, whose patience was of a quality that
belongs in the same category as sainthood, wrote to him: “When you are dead,
people will talk about your love affairs, but I shall say nothing, for I will
remember how proud you were.”
From 1935 to 1936 he travelled to
Majorca with the Indian scholar Shri Purohit Swami, where together they
translated the principal Upanishads from Sanskrit into English—the final
expression of the cross-cultural spiritual synthesis that had occupied him
since the 1880s. The late poems of these final years—“Lapis Lazuli,”
“Byzantium,” “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”—are among the most
concentrated achievements in the English language. He had forecast the coming
catastrophe in “The Second Coming” in 1919, from within the gyre system
of A Vision: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold … And what
rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be
born?” It was not a metaphor. It was a forecast.
In the winter of 1938 he left Ireland for the last time. W.H. Auden, who wrote his elegy within days of the news, was accurate about the date: the day of his death was a dark cold day. Yeats himself had already written the last word, in that hotel room above the Mediterranean, telling the approaching horseman to pass by without ceremony.
The Unknown Grave
Here is where the story takes the
turn that Yeats—lifelong student of the soul’s persistence after death,
architect of a cosmological system built on the continuity of identity across
incarnations—would, one suspects, have found not troubling but entirely
appropriate.
He was buried at Roquebrune two
days after his death, as instructed. His express wish to George had been
precise: “If I die, bury me up there, and then in a year’s time, when the
newspapers have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo.” The year
passed. Then September 1939 arrived with the Second World War, and the
repatriation of a poet’s remains from occupied France became, understandably, a
matter for later.
By 1946, the section of the
Roquebrune cemetery where Yeats had been buried was cleared and his bones
transferred to the communal ossuary—where, as one account describes it with
appalling precision, bones were sorted by type: skulls with skulls, tibiae
with tibiae, femurs with femurs. In June 1947, Edith Shackleton Heald and
her companion the painter known as Gluck visited the tomb and learned from the
local curate what had occurred. According to the biographer Diana Souhami,
Heald crouched on the floor of their Monte Carlo hotel sobbing, saying: “I
would know his bones anywhere.” Gluck concluded that “these remains
would be almost impossible to find, and if found, identity would be open to
doubt.”
In early 1948, the French diplomat Bernard
Cailloux was dispatched to Roquebrune to locate the remains. His report was
unsparing: “It was impossible to return the full and authentic remains of Mr
Yeats.” He proposed that the local pathologist, Dr. Rebouillat, be tasked
with reconstituting “a skeleton presenting all the characteristics of the
deceased.” At best, he wrote, one might recover “an iron corset, a
skull, and perhaps a Bible.”
The corset was the crux. Yeats had
worn a leather truss for a hernia. His immediate neighbor in the cemetery, Alfred
Hollis—an Englishman who died two weeks after Yeats—had worn a steel corset
for spinal tuberculosis. Rebouillat based his reconstitution of “Yeats’s
skeleton” on the presence of a thoracic corset. Hollis’s family
subsequently claimed it was their man, not the Irish Nobel laureate, who was
placed in the coffin bound for Sligo.
The French ambassador in Dublin,
Ostrorog, was under no illusions and wrote to Paris with striking candor: “Certain
precautions must be taken on our side to avoid any indiscretion … so that no
administrative difficulties arise giving cause for suspicion; so that no
inopportune explanation is given to the Irish present at the ceremony.”
These documents, discovered in a diplomat’s family chateau and published by The
Irish Times in 2015, confirmed what the poet’s friends had long suspected
and what the French authorities had known all along.
On September 17th, 1948, the Irish Navy corvette Macha landed the casket at Galway. Crowds lined the roads to Sligo. The reburial at Drumcliff churchyard under bare Ben Bulben’s head was a full state ceremony with military honors. The poet Louis MacNeice, standing at the graveside, observed that the shiny new coffin transported by the Naval Service was more likely to contain “a Frenchman with a club foot.” He was probably right. Up to 80,000 pilgrims visit the grave each year. DNA testing has never been performed. The Yeats family has declined to request it.
What the Occultist
Knew
The fine irony of the whole affair
is that Yeats spent his adult life building a philosophical system around one
central question: what persists after the body ends? The gyres of A Vision
posit a cosmos in which souls cycle through incarnations, the anti-self pursues
the self across multiple lives, and identity is simultaneously individual and
universal. He had been told by the Instructors—those entities who dictated his
life’s philosophical work through George’s trance—that death is not an ending
but a turn of the gyre.
It is difficult to imagine he would
be troubled by the question of which bones lie under Ben Bulben. He had
subjected the body to a half-vasectomy at sixty-eight in pursuit of creative
energy. He had written his own epitaph before dying and arranged his burial
with the calm efficiency of a man who had long since decided that the physical
remains were a secondary concern compared to what the work would continue to do
in the world.
The work continues to do exactly
that. “The Second Coming” is invoked at every civilizational crisis with
such regularity that it has become the unofficial anthem of modernity’s unease.
“Sailing to Byzantium,” “Among School Children,” “The Wild Swans at Coole”—these
poems have outlasted the Nobel committee, the Abbey Theatre, the Irish Free
State, and every generation of critics who dismissed the occultism as bughouse.
The daemon was not God inverted. The daemon was God, seen clearly, from the
turning side of the gyre. Cast a cold eye. The horseman has not passed by. He
is still, eighty-six years on, standing at the grave, reading the stone, and
beginning to suspect that the bones are not the point.
FURTHER
READING
R.F. Foster’s two-volume W.B. Yeats: A Life (1997, 2003) is the definitive modern biography and outstanding on both the occult practice and the final years. For A Vision specifically, Neil Mann’s scholarship at yeatsvision.com is the most rigorous guide available online. For the burial scandal, Lara Marlowe’s 2015 reporting in The Irish Times on the French diplomatic documents is the primary source. The French novel The Scattered by Maylis Besserie (2023, translated by Catriona Seth) — directly inspired by those documents — imagines the story from the French side and is genuinely haunting.
— The Modern Occultist
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