ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
June 13
The Poet and the Witch: The Births of W.B. Yeats & Gerald Gardner
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On this date, nineteen years apart, two of the most important figures in the history of modern Western occultism were born: William Butler Yeats in 1865, in Sandymount, Dublin; and Gerald Brosseau Gardner in 1884, in Blundellsands, Lancashire. One would become the greatest poet in the English language since John Keats, a Nobel laureate, and a dedicated practitioner of ceremonial magic who spent over twenty-five years in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; the other, a retired colonial civil servant who, in his sixties, created the tradition that would become modern Wicca.
Although they never knew each other personally, Yeats and Gardner stand linked not only by the shared stars under which they were born, but in their dual passions for shining that starlight on different systems of occult philosophy…
Yeats: Poetry As Magic
Irish national poet, playwright, and Nobel Prize winner William Butler Yeats may be regarded as one of the century’s most important poetic voices, yet he is rarely also identified with a title he certainly earned—perhaps literary history’s first “celebrity” occultist. Aside from his prolific and celebrated contributions to the English language, Yeats was just as dedicated to his lifelong fascination with ceremonial magic. And, as such, his biographers have been scratching their heads about this for decades.
What’s absolutely fundamental to understanding Yeats the poet is also understanding Yeats the magician. In the poet’s eyes, his magical workings and literary work were one and the same—whether publicly recognized or not. “I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic in what I must call the evocation of spirits,” he once wrote. “Though I do not know what they are.” Although the subject of magic itself was never present in Yeats’ writing, he largely considered the very act of crafting words into poetry a sort of alchemy, and regarded his public career as an extension of his esoteric practices; each poem a kind of spell, each line an invocation.
He was enamored with Madame Blavatsky enough in 1886 to join her Theosophical Society yet, within only four years, he was initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. One of its most famous members, Yeats was ultimately ranked among their senior adepts, adopting the magical motto, Daemon est Deus Inversus—“The Demon is God Inverted.” Additionally, he attempted to revive a magical order he called “the Castle of Heroes,” whose framework drew from Celtic myth rather than the Golden Dawn’s Egyptian and Kabbalistic symbolism.
Through his experiments with automatic writing, Yeats and his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, designed a near-complete cosmological system: a vision of history organized around interlocking gyres—spinning cone-shaped vortices—through which civilization moved in twenty-eight-phase cycles, along with a mystical, symbolic vocabulary that comprise influence a number of Yeats’ later poems. Published in 1925 (and later revised in 1937), A Vision was, perhaps one of the writer’s most ambitious, and overtly esoteric, works: part cosmology, part historical prophecy, the transgressive work divided critics; for his part, Yeats remained adamant that the new style had been “received,” rather than invented within his own imagination, that those who’d communicated the words to him had been autonomous intelligences merely using his wife’s hand to provide him with “new metaphors” for poetry.
Gardner: Author of Modern Wicca
Born in Lancashire, Gardner spent most of his adult life in the British colonies, giving him an early interest in the theological and spiritual systems of other cultures. First in Ceylon, then Malaya, he worked as a civil servant and tea and rubber planter; all the while his esoteric interests developed and evolving, beginning with Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism. By the time he returned to England in the late 1930s, he was already dabbling in modern ceremonial magic and was initiated into the Ordo Templi Orientis, where he knew Aleister Crowley personally.
Gardner eventually settled in the New Forest area of Hampshire, where, he claimed, he encountered a surviving coven of witches who initiated him into an ancient tradition of folk magic and paganism. (Gardner’s account of the New Forest cover has been a source of debate for decades, although Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon (1999)—perhaps the most academic treatment of modern Wicca’s origins—concluded that Gardner was probably telling a version of the truth: that there was, likely, a genuine group of practitioners in the New Forest, but that the “ancient tradition” they claimed as lineage was itself a relatively exaggerated. In Hutton’s view, however, that distinction doesn’t necessarily diminish anything Gardner built, just reframes his timeline.)
The Book of Shadows that Gardner compiled, initially attributed to ancient sources but subsequently acknowledged as an original work, eventually became the coven’s liturgical text. His collaboration with Doreen Valiente, who was initiated in 1953 and served as High Priestess of the Bricket Wood coven, proved to be a major turning point for modern witchcraft. She immediately recognized that portions of Gardner’s Book of Shadows were taken directly from Crowley and, along with Gardner, rewrote those sections; The Charge of the Goddess—the central liturgical text of modern Wicca, which begins “Listen to the words of the Great Mother, who was of old also called among men Artemis, Astarte, Athene, Dione, Melusine, Aphrodite, Cerridwen, Dana, Arianrhod, Isis, Bride, and by many other names”—is primarily Valiente’s work.
Valiente later described Gardner as a man “utterly without malice,” and genuinely devoted to the tradition they were building; he was known to be generous with his knowledge, and possessed “some real, but not exceptional, magical powers.”
Gardner died at the age of
seventy-nine in 1964 while sailing in the Mediterranean in 1964, returning from
the Lebanese home where he’d spent his later years.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)
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