The Golden Dawn's Impact on W.B. Yeats's Works

W.B Yeats: The Golden Dawn's Influence on an Irishman.

He is a poet, Theosophist, political militant, symbolist and last but not least a pupil of philosophy. "He believes, but he does not believe", Edmund Wilson admits, "the impossible of believing is the impossibility which he accepts most reluctantly, but still it is there with the other impossibilities of this world which is too full of weeping for a child to understand" (Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930). William Butler Yeats reinvented literature and revived all what has been thrown behind. He was a great influence back in his time and had a great impact on the Irish Independence as Oliver St. John declares: "If it had not been for W.B Yeats, there would be no Irish Free State". On March 7, 1890, Yeats joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and despite his father's disapproval of practicing magic; he remained loyal to the occult and defended the order. One of his letters to O'Leary reveals this loyalty: "The mystical life is the centre of all that I do . . . It holds to my work the same relation that the philosophy of Goldwin held to the work of Shelly . . . I have always considered myself to be a greater renaissance – the revolt of the soul against the intellect – now beginning in the world". The Golden Dawn intended to be devoted to the evolution of humanity; philosophical, spiritual and psychic evolution. It wasn't a spell-casting kind of magic but rather a magic that focused on lifting an individual's awareness of him or herself. Yeats makes many references to the occult throughout his writings and most of his works reveal how much of an influence The Golden Dawn was on his life.

Being part of this occult, Yeats was determined to find his own identity as an Irishman. His poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus" shows a lot of references to classic pagan and Celtic myths. These references appear to be means of creating a reality for his nationalistic intentions. He makes reference to astral projection and that is very evident in the initial lines of the poem:

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread

The action of touching wood, for luck or hope, origins from early beliefs of communing with tree spirits. In magical circles, the energy of the Hazel Moon is believed to be good for contacting spirits but it is more renowned for enhancing shape shifting or astral projection rituals. To the Celts, the months of the year were familiar to the lunar cycle. The thirteen cycles of the year were measured from one full moon to the next, each succession being named after a sacred tree. For a magician interested