"W.B. Yeats and the Séance Before Samhain" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "The Magical Writings Of W.B. Yeats: The Original ‘A Vision’ And Other Essays On Occultism"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
October 30
W.B. Yeats and the Séance Before Samhain
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On October 30, 1912, William Butler
Yeats sat in a darkened room with a medium named Alfred Vout Peters, took
careful notes on what came through, and filed the results away with the same
seriousness he brought to drafting a poem. The notes survive today, eleven
typescript and handwritten pages in a folder at the National Library of
Ireland, catalogued as part of a collection of Yeats’s occult papers that fills
twenty-three boxes. The man who wrote “The Second Coming” spent decades of his
life taking séances exactly this seriously, and it’s worth understanding just
how deep that commitment actually ran.
Yeats’s occult life wasn't a youthful
detour he outgrew once the poetry career took off. It ran the length of his
adult life, parallel to it, feeding it…
Yeats co-founded the Dublin Hermetic Society in 1885, while still in his early twenties, and was admitted to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1890, taking the magical motto Daemon est Deus Inversus, “the Devil is God inverted.” He rose within the Order to the grade of Adeptus Major, recruited actively for its Isis-Urania Temple, brought in figures including Maud Gonne and his own uncle, and found himself tangled directly in the Order’s messiest internal politics, present when Mathers dispatched Aleister Crowley to seize Golden Dawn property during the episode now remembered as the Battle of Blythe Road. When the Order splintered afterward, Yeats stayed with one of its successor branches, Stella Matutina, until 1921.
The October 30 séance with Vout
Peters sits within a particularly active stretch of that practice. Scholarly
research into Yeats’s unpublished spiritualist papers has documented a run of
sittings that October, Peters among several mediums Yeats consulted that
autumn, and it was around this same period that a spirit-control calling itself
“Leo Africanus” began appearing in Yeats’s séances, claiming to be the poet’s
own Daemon, or anti-self, present with him since childhood. Yeats took the
claim seriously enough to let it shape his thinking directly: the resulting
ideas worked their way into Per Amica Silentia Lunae,
his 1917 prose meditation on the self and the anti-self, poetry’s relationship
to its own opposite, material he would later fold into his larger esoteric
system entirely.
That larger system arrived five years
after his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees,
whom he married in October 1917, discovered she could produce automatic writing
almost immediately after the wedding. Yeats, astonished, began sitting with her
for session after session, eventually logging thousands of pages of what he
called the Communicators' answers to his questions, material he spent years
organizing into A Vision, first
published in 1925 and substantially revised in 1937. It remains his single most
sustained work of esoteric writing, built out of a system of lunar phases,
historical cycles, and personality types that he treated with the same
structural seriousness Golden Dawn ritual had once given him, now generated
through his own marriage rather than a lodge room.
There’s one more ambition worth
naming, since it never fully came to pass and says something about how far
Yeats wanted to take all of this. Around the turn of the century, he began
drafting plans for his own magical order, which he called the Castle of Heroes,
intended to fuse ceremonial ritual with specifically Irish and Celtic
mythology, a genuinely original attempt to build a national mystery tradition
rather than simply import English or Egyptian-flavored ceremonial magic
wholesale. The project collapsed amid the Golden Dawn’s internal fighting
before it ever became a functioning order, but the draft materials survive, and
they show Yeats trying to do for Irish myth what Mathers and Westcott had done
for Hermetic and Rosicrucian material: build it into something initiates could actually
practice.
A Nobel laureate, a senator of the
Irish Free State, one of the twentieth century’s most influential poets in the
English language, spent real, documented hours of his adult life taking notes
on what a medium named Vout Peters said while in trance, then built an entire
philosophical system out of automatic writing sessions with his own wife. Yes,
if anything, reading “The Second Coming” or “Sailing to Byzantium” with this
context in view makes their strange, confident cosmic imagery considerably less
mysterious: Yeats wasn’t reaching for metaphor when he wrote about gyres and
widening circles. Rather, he was describing, as literally as he knew how, a
system he’d spent decades building through exactly the kind of work Modern
Occultist spends every week taking seriously…
The Magical
Writings Of W.B. Yeats: The Original ‘A Vision’ And Other Essays On Occultism
By
W.B. Yeats | Edited by John Michael Greer | Aeon Books
The Magical Writings of W.B. Yeats:
The Original ‘A Vision’ and Other Essays on Occultism, published by Aeon Books in May 2026
and edited with a new introduction by John Michael Greer, brings together six
of Yeats’s occult essays alongside the complete text of the original 1925
edition of A Vision itself. The selection reads like a guided tour
through everything this post has touched on: Magic lays out his general occult
philosophy, Witches and Wizards and Irish Folk-Lore connects directly to
the Castle of Heroes project and his attempt to fuse Celtic myth with
ceremonial practice, Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places engages the
spiritualist territory of the Vout Peters séance directly, and Per Amica
Silentia Lunae is the very essay this post traced back to the Leo Africanus
sittings of October 1912.
Greer, an initiate in Freemasonry,
the Golden Dawn, the Martinist Order, and three Druid traditions himself,
brings exactly the kind of practitioner's eye to this material that a purely
academic literary editor wouldn't, treating Yeats's occult writing as genuinely
operative material worth a working magician's attention rather than as
biographical curiosity explaining the poems. Most previous collections of Yeats’s
prose treat the occultism as backstory. Greer’s introduction and annotations
treat it as the main event, exactly the corrective this post has tried to make
in miniature.
This is a deluxe hardback edition
limited to five hundred copies, priced accordingly, and readers wanting Yeats’s
poetry itself should look to any standard collected edition instead, since this
volume is prose and ritual material only. But for readers who finished today's
post wanting Yeats’s occultism in his own words, rather than filtered through a
biographer's summary, this collection is, as of this year, the single best
place to find it.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" 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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