Udupi - Notes on the Symbolism of the Number 108

Vast and variegated, the great lands of Hindoostan are a rich patchwork of local traditions even though, together, they accumulate into a single edifice of belief and practice that may reasonably be designated by the term ‘Hindooism’, especially as seen from the outside (things being less clear when standing in its midst.) From north to south, east to west, local traditions, flavours and colourings vary, yet somehow they converge into a single stream, a unified tradition. Do not expect consistency or system, though. There is no Pope of the Hindoos to bring the swarming variations into a coherent orthodoxy. Very wisely, the Hindoo cherishes variation and tolerates a very wide range of religious expression. This fact has become very noticeable to the present writer in his current sojourn across the Indian sub-continent. Any expectation of consistency or system is foiled at every turn. Just when he thinks he has a handle on some aspect of Hindoo religious life, he moves on to a new town, a new location, and there different traditions and ways prevail, even though they are in some way entirely apiece with the whole. Reflecting on Hindooism is an object lesson on the problem of the one and the many.

The western coast of India is very different to the north and one encounters there, sure enough, a different assembly of myths and legends and accompanying practices. The author arrived in the temple town of Udupi several days ago and since then has been observing the local religious life, especially as it is centred on the great Krishna temple complex that makes the town a centre of pilgrimage. A full description of the rites and mysteries of this temple will have to be postponed until a later post: they are very complex and very profound and would require a long and detailed exposition.

Instead, the purpose of this current post is simply to record an observation concerning the symbolic powers of the celebrated number one hundred and eight (108). The meaning of the number – or at least something of its essential symbolism – has become obvious to this writer since arriving in Udupi and becoming immersed in the local traditions of the place. A group of connections have come together. A particular order of symbolism has become plain. The purpose of this post is just to make note of that symbolism. How it fits into the greater symbolism evident in Udupi and its surrounds is another matter and must wait for another time.

* * *

The author has long observed the special character of the number 108 in certain religious contexts. It is an important number with symbolic import. Most notably, there is the fact that the rosary beads – or japa beads (japa mala) – commonly employed by both Hindoos and Boodhists consist of 108 stones or seeds or peas strung on a string which are then counted with the fingers. Thus, in any cycle of prayer the Hindoo or Boodhist makes 108 utterances or mantras of some sacred name or phrase. The author, indeed, has purchased a set of the said beads at the store in the Udupi temple where they hang on wracks in great profusion. Everywhere about, one can see Hindoos fingering their beads and muttering their mantras – one of the most common and easiest forms of devotion. There are no Boodhists to be seen in Udupi but elsewhere they use the rosary of 108 beads as well. (The Mahometan tesbe is different since it consists of 99 beads – a decimal rosary, as it were – being based on the literal – and quite mistaken – reading of a certain hadeeth in which the Prophet declares that God has ninety-nine names. This is just an instance of semitic hyperbole and it means that God has a large or indefinite number of names, but Mahometans, stupidly, draw up a litany of ninety-nine names, even though there are clearly more than that number given in the Holy Koran.)

Nor, however, is 108 only a preferred number in oriental symbolism. The author, being a student of the Greeks, knows also that in Homeric myth the number of suitors of Penelope is very specifically 108. And it is found in many other contexts besides. It is a auspicious number which occurs in certain symbolically significant contexts in traditions east and west.

But why 108? Why this particular number? What particular symbolism is attached to this number? What are its traditional powers?

The answer to this presents itself in Udupi. The name of the town is said to come from two roots signifying the idea “Lord + Stars” = “Lord of the Stars”. A local myth relates that, once upon a time, the “twenty-seven stars” were dimmed by decree of a certain king. Thereupon, the “Lord of the Stars” – that is, the Moon – appealed to Lord Shiva to restore their brightness, and Lord Shiva looked favourably upon this request and did so. Consequently, Shiva came to be worshipped locally and the place became known as Udupi – the land of the Lord of Stars, which is to say a land of the Moon. Shiva, of course, is himself a lunar deity and wears the lunar crescent as a crown. It is one of his chief emblems. He is essentially a time god, and the Moon, in this context, is the marker of time. Thus, in the Udupi temple complex the oldest temple, called ‘Chandramauleshvara’ belongs to the Moon-crowned Shiva (Chandra = Moon). The restoration of the twenty-seven stars for the Lord of the Stars is celebrated in this temple in this town.

Moreover, a second myth told in this same region concerns the axe-wielding avatar Parashurama who, it is said, severed the land from the sea. The whole coast of western India – Goa, Konkan, Karnataka, Kerela – is collectively known as the Land of Parashurama. He split the land from the sea with his axe, and then – it is said – he established 108 statues of Shiva throughout the land. Indeed, these 108 statues or linga – Shiva shrines - still exist today, distributed along the coastal lands with the shrines in Udupi being prominent among them. Now, the axe of Parashurama is without question itself a symbol of the crescent Moon – the crescent shaped axe is lunar wherever it is found - and so once again in this myth we have a lunar motif associated with Udupi and with the lunar deity Shiva, and the number 108 is explicitly given in this context.

Furthermore, as this present writer notes in a casual observation that turns out to be relevant, Udupi is a thriving centre for Hindoo astrology, particularly in its lunar mode. There are astrologers on every street corner, and many astrologers have set up practice in the confines of the temple complex itself. It might seem that there are more astrologers in Udupi than in the rest of India combined. The signs and shops throughout make it clear that it is nothing less than an astrological centre. Pilgrims who come to Udupi to make observances at the temple also take the opportunity to have an astrological reading since here, as elsewhere in India, astrology is indeed regarded as a sacred art and an important feature of the Hindoo religion. As it is practiced, it is based upon the twenty-seven lunar mansions (nakshatra) and the sub-division of those mansions into astral regions known as pada. Typically, the Hindoo takes a name from the pada in which he was born. (Typically, also, astrologers inform inquirers that this was done in error and that the error can only be corrected by prayers and generous donations to the temple – such being the way of seers.)

* * *

Let us now string all of these factors together. Udupi is a charming town and the temple is a place of remarkable fascination. There is much that can be said but, again, it will need to wait for another post. What is important at this time is that in Udupi, and its local myths, the nature and import of the number 108 becomes obvious. Even in this there is much to say, but for now it suffices to point to what is plain.

Most crucially, let us note that 27 x 4 = 108. That is, there are 27 lunar mansions each divided into four parts. This is essential to Hindoo astrology. This makes the number 108 symbolic of the lunar zodiac. It is a number that represents the whole cosmic cycle considered by its lunar delineations. It is a lunar, not a solar number. Many numbers measure time (cycles) by solar measures – the number 360, for example. But the number 108 is resoundingly lunar in its essential meanings. In the foundation myth of Udupi, the “twenty-seven stars” dimmed by the evil king and restored by “Moon-crowned” Shiva are the twenty-seven lunar mansions. When, in the other myth, the axe-wielding Parashurama separates the land and the sea and establishes the 108 Shiva shrines, we have the finer division of the pada. The rosary of 108 beads, then, represents the year, and by extension the cosmic cycle (since an annual year is a reflection of the Great Year.) The Moon, in this scheme, is the measurer of time – a function of Lord Shiva – and so it is with lunar time reckonings, great and small, that we are concerned. The beads (japa mala) is a device symbolic of the full lunar cycle. To prayer the japa is to be united with and contextualized by that cycle.

The same significance prevails, surely, in Homer. Penelope’s weaving and unweaving as she awaits the return of Odysseus in the epic poem is, surely, itself a lunar motif. This has been widely observed from ancient times to modern. Just as the moon waxes and wanes, so Penelope weaves and unweaves. But now we can understand why there are 108 suitors seeking her hand. The number is the number of the lunar cycle (and it is furthermore no accident that the total journey of Odysseus is nineteen years, the number of the metonic or lunar eclipse cycle.) Penelope will not submit to any particular division of the small cycle. Odysseus himself, and his journey, signifies the greater cycle. Let us also note, in a Greek context, that 108 is a number relevant to the Platonic Nuptial Number, the calculation of the Great Year given in the Republic: the figures are 12,960,000 = 108 x 120,000.

In any case, 108 is the number of the lunar cycle. Wherever it is found it is likely to have this significance. It features in Udupi because Udupi is the land of the “Lord of Stars” i.e. the Moon. This is an old layer of symbolism in the Udupi temple. The associations of the temple with Krishna are much more recent – medieval rather than ancient. The oldest layers of the Udupi cultus go back beyond this association to Shiva as “Moon-crowned” or “Moon-faced”. It is a cultus that is particularly cosmological and in which an ancient cosmological symbolism has been well preserved. A more detailed description will be given some other time. For now, it is enough to note that 108 is a lunar number – the number of the cosmic cycle in its lunar mode.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

The Zimmerman Who Fell in Love with Iron

A zimmerman, by definition, is a woodworker, a carpenter, but Robert Zimmerman – who masquerades as a fictitious character known as ‘Bob Dylan’, a song and dance man – is having none of that. He is a life-long lover of iron and devotes his spare time to collecting old iron objects and welding them into new and pleasing arrangements. He has a large garage full of old tools, broken machinery, plough shares, engine parts and other found objects, all of iron, and he dons his welding gear every chance he gets, because in his heart of hearts he is an ironworker, not a zimmerman at all. He explains that he has always loved iron and that iron has been a big part of his life. 

He grew up, he explains further, in Hibbing Minnesotta, just a stone’s throw from one of the biggest iron ore deposits in the world. During the Second World War and after the Hibbing mines provided the iron ore needed for the war effort and for industrialization: these were the mines from which modern America was built. And Mr. Zimmerman – always an American patriot - is proud of this fact. The mines of Hibbing formed the background to some of the early songs of his alter ego, Bob Dylan, such as the haunting heart-felt lament ‘North Country Blues’ – a tale of what becomes of mining families when mines are closed:

Come gather 'round friends and I'll tell you a tale
Of when the red iron pits ran a-plenty
But the cardboard-filled windows and old men on the benches
Tell you now that the whole town is empty...

But otherwise this passion for things ferric has remained a little known fact. Only in recent times has he decided to exhibit his ironwork, in particular various gates made from found objects, such as the following: 

* * *

What is one to make of a zimmerman who falls in love with iron, who disguises himself as the affable folk persona ‘Bob Dylan’? It might seem inexplicable, counterfactual and out of character, but only because Mr. Zimmerman has never been very straightforward with his public. Indeed, most of his public are not even aware that ‘Bob Dylan’ is merely a character he plays. He’s a self-declared trickster, a jokerman, who conned an entire generation into thinking he was a spokesman for progressive causes when in fact he was, and is, a religious conservative whose primary literary inspiration throughout his life has been the King James Bible.

Searching for clues, the present writer decided to investigate his horoscope. Several posts ago, this writer made a fuss about the virtues of the traditional horoscope as opposed to its modern deviation, and about the evil obscurities of the modern planets as used by contemporary astrologers. As evidence of his traditional approach he offers the horoscope of the devious Mr. Zimmerman. 

What do we find? Lo and behold! When we cast away the modern trans-Saturnian planets and plot only the ancient seven, and render them clearly in the spatial organization of the traditional square chart, we see, as plain as day, the peculiar disconnectedness of the planet of iron, Mars, adrift in Pisces in the Second House. Mr. Zimmerman, as is well known, is a Gemini, and his ruling planet, the mercurial Mercury, is perfectly at home there – the configuration of the trickster poet. This is in the context of a large crowded grouping of planets in the Sixth and Fifth Houses: a stellarium, the configuration of the famous. 

But Mars, the planet of the metal iron, is not part of this stellarium at all. You’d never see this in a modern round horoscope littered with trans-Saturnians and asteroids. Mars is the odd planet out. Mars is the peculiar and unusual feature of this chart. In Pisces it gives the native the will to realize his dreams, but unconnected as it is here, it forms a secret source of strength and in this particular case it leads Mr. Zimmerman to his garage, to put on his welding gear, and to escape from the crowded life of the so-called ‘Bob Dylan’ and into the seemingly incongruous world of rusty ironwork. Only Mars acting as a singleton in a horoscope like this could make a zimmerman into an ironworker.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

The Square Earth: Astrology, Vedic & Otherwise

Much to her credit, Mother India remains one of the few places on Earth where astrology (to be carefully distinguished from astronomy) is still regarded as a legitimate academic discipline and where Universities still retain entire departments devoted to this traditional science. It has long since disappeared from the Western Academy and been relegated to the status of fringe science. In India it continues to have a serious place in intellectual life as well as in the daily life of honest Indians.

This fact sends the nation’s leftist intelligentsia – largely made up, as elsewhere, of Marxist atheists - into paroxyms of rage, and they have long campaigned in the court system and through other means to expel the astrologers from the academy. It has fallen to so-called “right-wing” political groups and much-loathed “New Hitlers” like Prime Minister Modi to defend astrology (and aryavedic medicine and other traditional sciences besides) as an important part of the nation’s Hindoo heritage.

This political alignment is not much appreciated in the West. There the situation is somewhat different. Astrology is largely the hobby of ‘New Age’ leftist liberals congregating in inner urban coffee shops, while so-called “conservatives” (actually just crony capitalists) tend to champion the hard sciences and the rationalist and utilitarian outlook of the Enlightenment which they construe as the ‘Western Tradition’. It is a topsy-turvy alignment. In the West the residues of the traditional sciences find a home among the mushy genderless feel-good New Agers and progressive trendies; in India, more correctly, they are defended by the reactionaries, the old anti-modernist nationalists against the young tradition-hating intellectual elite. 

As the present writer has witnessed, it drives the latter party to distraction when and where these misalignments meet, such as when young backpacking hippies from Europe travel to places like Benares (which is, by the way, the parliamentary constituency and political stronghold of Prime Minister Modi) to take courses in ‘Vedic’ (or ‘Jyotish’) astrology. Don’t they realize that their Indian counterparts – university educated urban-based young people – associate astrology with the old order and such evils as arranged marriages? Why do these young Europeans – with their bright purple dhotis and Bob Marley tee-shirts, their lesbian relationships and ‘One World’ ideology – indulge all of this traditional rot? Don’t they understand that things like astrology are exactly what progressive young Indians hate and want gone? It is amusing. Two cultures at cross-purposes.

* * *

During his extended stay in traditional Benares the present author was fortunate to discuss ‘Vedic’ astrology with several of its local practitioners. It is, of course, a very complex matter, and so only the absolute basics were canvassed, but even so it was enough to give him some sense of it. The first and most compelling thing about it from his point of view, was that this astrology, unlike that now current in the West, has not itself been infected by the unwarranted distortions and unintelligent innovations of modernity: it is, indeed, still largely traditional. In northern India, though, this means – ironically – that it still preserves the essential features of the Hellenistic astrological tradition that was carried to India by Alexander and also by the Muslim invasions. 

‘Vedic’ astrology, that is, is hardly very Vedic – it is, rather, a Graeco-Islamic astrology that has been naturalized into the older Indian systems. In this respect it is a parallel case to so-called ‘Unani’ medicine which is, in fact, Graeco-Islamic (Gallenic/Hellenic) medicine which has been naturalized to northern India and survives there long after it has died out and been anathemized in the West. The author had suspected as much. His encounter with ‘Vedic’ astrology in Benares confirmed it entirely. When one strips away the Hindoo names and other Hindooizing features, ‘Vedic’ astrology – at least in the north of India, since the south is somewhat different in its history – is largely an Hellenic astrology and as such recognizably akin to familiar Western astrology before the latter was modernized into its present form.

The differences are important. Vedic astrology reminds us of what Western astrology was like before it was reconstructed by such people as Alan Leo in the XIXth century. The present author, it should be disclosed here, is no great enthusiast of contemporary astrology in the West, and regards it as decadent in several important respects. He was thus very happy to encounter a more integral Western astrology – albeit dressed up as ‘Vedic’ - in contemporary India.

Two elements of modern Western astrology are missing in its Vedic cousin: the use of the round chart, and the use of the modern trans-Saturnian planets. These are the chief elements added to Western astrology by modernizers and that served to sever it from its older expressions and that, as far as this writer is concerned, violated some of the science’s most integral symbolism. All astrology degenerates into superstition. This is certainly so in India, as anywhere else, but modern Western astrology is deviationist in an even more fundamental sense. Modernizers (such as Alan Leo) tampered unintelligently with its most basic constituent parts, its most important symbols, and accordingly turned it into a superstition proper. More than any other innovations, the round chart – as opposed to the square – and the new planets – as opposed to the ancient seven – have made modern Western astrology a nonsense. By comparison – happily - Vedic astrology is still intact.

* * * 

There is insufficient space to detail here all the ways in which these innovations have brought Western astrology to ruin. Suffice to say that the present author is an astrological traditionalist – a purist even - and in particular subscribes to the astrology – as a science of symbols – inherited by the Platonic tradition, and especially as found preserved in the writings of one Julius Firmicus Maternus. As such he looks down with disdain upon deviations from this heritage as outright abominations. And, inasmuch as he ever engages in the astrological arts, he still uses the square chart and still confines himself to the ancient planets seven, just as do the Vedic practitioners. These features have a cogent and integral symbolism that is indispensable in the scheme of things. To depart from either is to fall into heresy pure and simple.

The most compelling defense of the both the square chart and the seven planets – and rebuttal of the round variant and the new planets – is that the traditional arrangement is founded in the solid evidence of direct human experience. One can see the traditional seven planets with the naked eye, that is to say, whereas the modern trans-Saturnians planets (how many of these are there these days? The astronomers cannot agree) are abstractions only accessible through a telescope. The traditional cosmology is human scale. And similarly, the square chart corresponds to direct human perception, since it divides the sub-lunary realm into four quadrants and emphasizes four facts, namely the points of “culmination” in the movements of the heavenly bodies. If human beings – and astrologers – had not stopped observing the heavens every night this fact would not require any explanation. Yet it does.

“Culmination” is an obvious fact to the naked eye. We see it very clearly when the moon rises in the east. Often it will appear above the eastern horizon as huge in size. Often too the setting sun will appear to be huge on the western horizon. Indeed, the points of rising and setting, magnify astral phenomena. Similarly, when the sun is at its zenith its heat is fiercest and when the moon is at its zenith its light is brightest. These too are points of culmination. There are four such points: east, west, above, below. In these four places – according to all traditional astrological understandings – heavenly bodies and their influences upon mundane affairs are at their strongest. These are called the ‘cardinal houses’. The square chart of the heavens used in traditional astrology illustrates this. At a glance, in the square chart, one can see this most important feature of the heavens: what planets occupy the ‘cardinal houses’, what planets are rising, setting or culminating. The round chart used by modern Western astrologers obscures this emphasis. It treats space and spatial angles as homogenous. Thereupon it opens astrology to a wealth of misunderstandings and symbolic errors. As if the various ‘houses’ are equal in importance and strength! Only someone who does not really appreciate to what visual realities the astrological chart corresponds could entertain such a basic fallacy. In traditional astrology the earth is, if not flat, then at least square. 

The four angles of culmination.

The four angular or cardinal houses. Planets found in these locations are said to be "on the angles".

An intelligent and symbolically coherent astrology, therefore – and one that remains human scale and so embodies rather than violates the correspondence between micro and macrocosms, surely a desideratum of any astrology whatsoever! – will retain the use of the square chart and will shy away from the reckless use of heavenly bodies that cannot be observed by the unaided human eye and are only known to egg-heads sitting at radiotelescopes in the Rocky Mountains. Such was Hellenic astrology, and the astrology of the Saracens, and that of medieval Europe, and such is the closely related astrology of India today. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

The Vision of Mr. and Mrs. Yeats

Mr. and Mrs. W. B. Yeats

One evening in the declining years of the XIXth century, at the London lodge of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a famous duel took place. Tensions and mutual animosity between two key members of the Order had finally exploded into armed combat and an actual sword fight – with real swords – broke out on the staircase. One of the members, clad in a kilt and full highland regalia, was Aleister Crowley – a dangerously unstable individual – and the other was the neatly dressed, bespectacled and generally mild-mannered Anglo-Irish poet William Butler Yeats. The two men loathed each other with a passion and clashed whenever they met. On this occasion they actually took to each other seeking blood until other members interrupted and persuaded them to drop their weapons. There was no love lost. Crowley went on to slander Yeats at every opportunity for the rest of his life, and Yeats responded in kind.

As it happens, history has been much kinder to Mr. Yeats. He has a well-deserved reputation as one of the finest poets of the English language in the modern era. His poetic powers grew in strength as he grew older. His later poems are sublime. In contrast, Mr. Crowley is more infamous than famous and – quite contrary to his own estimation of his poetic skills – is regarded by all but a few drug-addled cultists in West Coast USA as a tiresome writer of stale doggerel and some really loathsome pornographic verse. Yeats was once kind enough to admit that Crowley had written perhaps three good lines of poetry in his lifetime but when prompted he declined to say what they were.

Several posts ago, the present writer made mention of an expose of Mr. Crowley’s so-called “holy book”, Liber Al vel Legis. See here. It has been shown that Crowley’s account of the reception of this supposed sacred tome from a supernatural agent named ‘Aiwaz’ is almost entirely a baseless fiction and that, in fact, this ‘Book of the Law’ began its life as an experiment in the art of automatic writing. That is, Crowley composed the work himself, albeit in a mild trance state which is the modus operandi of automatic writing. To wit, the writer surrenders conscious involvement. They write without thinking. Whether from their own unconscious mind or, as they might suppose, from some hither ‘spirit world’ or other, words overflow onto the paper in a type of low-level mediumship similar to what happens in a spiritualist séance. Crowley elevated an item of his automatic writing into an Aeon-making revelation and backfitted a suitable ‘reception myth’ to it in order to pass it off as holy writ. We now know that this was largely a case of fraud.

But Mr. Yeats also experimented with automatic writing, and he too drew upon it in order to construct his own mythos – but without any attempt to turn it into a new religion with himself as the Prophet of Horus. In his case, he took a large body of automatic writing compiled over years and worked it into what he called his System (with an upper case S), a complex corpus of esoteric lore that he subsequently used as inspiration for his poetry. He published this ‘System’ – which occupied him for over two decades - in two editions of a book called ‘A Vision’. It is a key to his poetry, even though his poems stand on their own and need not be explicated through their occult background.

Just as his poetry is some of the best written in the XXth century, ‘A Vision’ is a brilliant synthesis of occult themes in the Western Tradition and one of the most important works of occult philosophy in modern times. It came about through the mediumship of Mr. Yeats’ young wife, Georgie. As she later admitted, she faked the automatic writing at first in order to sooth the heart of her new husband, but she sincerely claimed that, after a while, some manner of ‘communication’ took place through her and with her husband prompting her with questions a vast system (or System) of esoterica flowed from her whilst subdued in a trance. Mr. Yeats collected the hundreds of pages of automatic writing that this random process yielded and painstakingly extracted from it a coherent, organized, profound philosophy of symbols. He used Georgie’s mutterings and scribbles to construct his own poetic mythology, much as William Blake had done before him. Both he and Mrs. Yeats believed that the writings had come from some nameless otherworldly ‘Instructor’ although both admitted that they might just as well have surfaced from the depths of the unconscious mind. Either way, it was inspired.

The present writer, it must be admitted here, is a lifelong enthusiast for Yeats’ ‘System’ and returns to it on a regular basis. Framed against the great schema of the Platonic Year and replete with the symbolism of alchemy, at its centre is a symbolic arrangement of the twenty-eight phases of the moon. Each phase represents a human type, or an earthly incarnation. In Yeats’ ‘System’ a soul progresses through the twenty-eight phases in a complicated marriage of solar and lunar ‘tinctures’ amidst the turning ‘gyres’ of the cosmos. It is, in fact, to this arrangement that the very title of this web log ‘Out of Phase’ alludes, if readers have not already gathered. The purpose of this post is to alert readers to the same, and to celebrate the ‘System’ of Mr. and Mrs. Yeats as the work of symbolic genius that it is, regardless of whatever process, psychological or otherworldly, brought it to birth. 

These days one hears much about Mr. Gurdjieff’s ‘Enneagram’ types, and of course much more about the traditional astrological types in their modern form – the Lunar Phases of the Yeats’ System deserve greater study still. Literary critics and fans of Mr. Yeats’ poetry are very often perplexed by the occultism of ‘A Vision’ and hardly know what to make of it. The present writer would like to see it more widely known and acknowledged in ‘occult’ and related ‘fringe’ circles – a key work in occidental esoterica. Certainly, it is a far more important and fruitful work than anything that came from the toxic and demented ego-driven pen of the ithyphallic Aleister Crowley.

In the first edition of ‘A Vision’ Yeats explained the origins of the ‘System’ through the device of several short stories. They relate how a certain character named Michael Robartes journeyed eastwards and encountered a group of Arabic Soofis who taught him the secrets of the Mansions of the Moon. Thus, Mr. Yeats confessed the orientalist themes of his lunar ‘System’. Despite being an Irish nationalist immersed in indigenous Celtic mythology, he was an orientalist by nature, adapting Celtic myths to the conventions of Japanese No theatre, for instance, and producing renderings of the Hindoo scriptures, amongst other oriental projects. Like all Western occultism – this being the thesis of the present writer and a constant theme of this blog – the Vision of Mr. and Mrs. Yeats’ making has its roots in the alchemy and astrology of the Saracens, and in the cosmology of Plato (itself considered as ‘oriental’ in this case.) Mr. Yeats concocted the tale of the adventures of Michael Robartes at the insistence of Mrs. Yeats who wanted her role in the project kept out of public purview. In the second edition of ‘A Vision’ however, the truth was told, although Georgie Yeats remained reticent and shy about the whole business throughout her life and wanted to take no credit for it. But in fact, she was the muse of the poet, and it should be said without equivocation that it was to her mediumship – if not to her more conscious participation – that we owe not only the ‘System’ but also Yeats’ finest poems.

In the diagram below we see a summary of the phases of the moon according to Yeats’ very complex system of cosmological and spiritual mechanisms. A key point to grasp is that the types ascribed to the phases do not correspond to the phases of the moon indicated in the astrological horoscope of a given person. This is a common error. Even many of Yeats’ occultish friends laboured long and hard to link the phases to horoscopes. But the otherworldly ‘Instructor’ in the automatic writing sessions was emphatic on this point. When Mr. Yeats asked again how these lunar types correspond to horoscopes, he was told (via Georgie) that they do not. When he asked one more time, the ‘Instructor’ was uncompromising. There is no correspondence, the Instructor said, and don’t ask again! The phases describe sequences of incarnations through a ‘Great Year’ of time, not moon types in common astrology. Just because the moon was at a certain phase at your birth has no direct relation to this scheme.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black