Under Bare Ben Bulben's Head

 

From my travel journals

I met a windy spirit in the night of a grey soggy day spent sloshing along the shores of Sligo and checking out the burial place of my favorite dead Irish poet in Drumcliffe churchyard.  

Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliffe churchyard Yeats is laid. 

In fact there is no reason to believe that Yeats' mortal remains are under his headstone there. He died in France at the start of the Second World War and in the confusion his corpse was thrown into a communal grave. After the war, with nothing like DNA testing, a committee selected some likely bones to return to Ireland.  Whether or not any part of Yeats the man of flesh and bone is in that ground I do not doubt that some part of his spirit may fly here, like the swan of hammered pewter on the church door. The dark, sere wall of Ben Bulben rises against the horizon. Some say they have seen a door in the wall open around Samhain to let the Wild Hunt ride out. Yeats encountered these trooping fairies and urged great caution around them. His unease was reflected in the epigraph he wrote for his headstone. 

Cast a cold eye on life, on death
Huntsman, pass by 

He changed the key word in the last line and it is the blander version - Horseman, pass by - that tourists and pilgrims read today. The softer word does not dull the edge of what lies beneath. 

I felt that edge, lying back on a creaky bed in a shambling hotel of creaking floors, under bare Ben Bulben's head, as the poet expected to lie in his casket. 

It was wet and blowy outside, and the windows rattled. A harder gusto of wind threw one of them open and it banged so hard against the wall I feared that some of its little planes of glass had broken. 

"Wisp" drawing by Robert Moss

The wind took a form, with knife-sharp features and streaming hair. There was cruelty in the mouth, lordly disdain in the upward tilt of the raptor nose and the sweep of the high forehead. The body was still a force field, a seething bunch of energies whose form would be determined by the will of the airy spirit, and perhaps by the fears and desires of the perceiver. 

This was not a fairy of the sort you find in fairy tales that adults think suitable for children. But children may know this kind of fairy in the stories they live and may never share with their parents. 

"What is your name? " I find that this is the best opening for any dialogue with spirits. The creature appeared to yawn. Really? 

"If you must call me something you may call me Wisp."

Art: "Mountain View" by Jack Butler Yeats, brother of the poet. Lean through the paint and you are at the multipane window of a cozy cottage with lush window boxes. Lean through the glass and you are at the sere, dark wall of Ben Bulben, from which the Wild Hunt is said to ride out in due season. Lean through the stone, if you dare, and you may find yourself among the Sidhe. I came upon this window to the Otherworld during a visit to the wonderful Model Museum of Modern Art in Sligo

Yeats practices symbol sending in Sligo

I have returned to my studies of W.B.Yeats, the poet, magus and maker of mythologies.
    I was intrigued to notice that as a youth in Sligo, Yeats had early practice in what was then called "thought transference" in games he played with his mother's brother George Pollexfen. Uncle George, who often appeared crabby and distant to others, was a visionary and a spirit-seer. Man and boy would walk by the water, one on the shore and another on the bluff, beaming "symbols" to each other and then checking the results. WBY noted in his Autobiographies that when two people shared a symbol, a dream “would divide itself between them, each half being the complement of the other.”
    George Pollexfen later joined WBY in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and they engaged in astral journeying or "mutual visioning" together intended to build a Celtic Castle of the Heroes on the inner planes. For several years, Yeats followed a plan to establish an order of Celtic magicians at a wildly romantic site, the ruined castle on Lough Key, the "Lake of Cé", a legendary druid devoted to the god Nuada.
     I describe a personal experience of "tuning in" to a mutual visioning session between Yeats and his friend Florence Farr in The Boy Who Died and Came Back. Mary Greer gives a vivid account of magical work of this kind by Yeats and his intimate circle in her excellent book Women of the Golden Dawn.

Recent additions to the Yeats shelves in my personal library include some pretty important stuff: Virginia Moore's very hard-to-find The Unicorn: William Butler Yeats' Search for Reality (1954), written with the help of George Yeats and with full access to WBY's magical diaries, otherwise kept secret from the world until very recently; the new scholarly edition of the 1925 version of A Vision (very different from the better-known and just slightly less strange 1937 version); and Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W.B.Yeats, Ann Saddlemyer's extraordinary 800-page biography of of the girl who started out as WBY's desperate substitute for the Gonne women (mother and daughter) and then became his personal medium and spiritist goad. All three are indispensable for understanding WBY.
   

The very latest new Yeats books on my reading table are Talking to the Gods by Susan Johnston Graf, an intriguing study of the role of  Golden Dawn  practices in the lives and writing of WBY and three other writers (Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood and Dion Fortune) and a beautiful subscriber-funded edition of Yeats' early story collection The Secret Rose, bound together with a novel of WBY's early life by Irish writer Orna Ross. I am proud to be listed among the subscribers who helped to bring this to publication.
     In any line of research, the question arises: how far can you go without  becoming entangled in a jungle of material indefinitely? The Yeats material continues to sprout, Jumanji-like. The literary scholarship devoted to WBY is probably exceeded (in English) only by that given the Bible and Shakespeare. There are now industrious literary detectives analyzing which pages were dog-eared in books from WBY's library, and tracking the metallurgy and samurai traditions associated with "Sato's ancient blade", a 500-year-old sword presented to Yeats by a Japanese admirer which became a recurring symbol in his work, including the important and disturbing late poem "A Dialogue of Self and Soul".
     I gain, always, by returning to the poetry, which I read in the much-used early Macmillan edition of the Collected Poems that I received when I was awarded the Ellis Prize for Verse at my high school graduation. I find that Yeats' poems grow, not diminish, in power, with growing knowledge of how they came to be. Though I have long held that a poem must be its own explanation, I also know the truth of WBY's declaration: "A poet writes always out of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness; he never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always a phantasmagoria." So it seems right to inspect the personal life as the seed bed and the mythico-magical studies and practice as feed for the flowering phantasmagoria.

There is knowing through books, and then there are other ways of knowing. When I was working on the book that was published as The Dreamer's Book of the Dead, WBY turned up in my inner sight and declaimed, "What better guide to the Other Side than a poet?" I have written quite openly about how "my" Yeats proceeded to grow my understanding of transitions after death, including what happens to discarded subtle bodies in the astral realm of Luna, and how those who have died visit survivors in the phase he called "Dreaming Back" in an effort to get their life stories straight.
     Yeats took me, in a lucid dream journey, to a magical environment on "the fourth level of the astral plane"; you can read about that here. In a series of dreams and visions, he also introduced me to special places in Ireland, especially Sligo, that were part of his magical geography. Some of these I have yet to visit, and this is high on my list for future travel.

Image: The ruined castle on an island in Lough Key, where Yeats hoped to base a Celtic magical order, the Castle of the Heroes.