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Mysticism

Yeats had a longstanding interest in mysticism. In his early years he explored Theosophy, which is an esoteric religion that draws heavily on Buddhist and Brahmanic traditions. Later, he became involved in the practice of ritual magic. Yeats’s mystical investigations didn’t significantly influence his poetry until around 1917, when he married Georgina Hyde-Lees. Georgina experimented intensively with automatic writing, a psychic practice in which the writer’s hand serves as an unconscious instrument for a spirit or other immaterial agent. Her experiments yielded thousands of pages of writing, which Yeats studied closely and used to elaborate a detailed theory about the cycles of historical and personal development. Central to his theory is a belief in what he called “gyres,” which are interlocking yet oppositional spirals that influence all developmental patterns. Yeats’s fascination with the gyres of world history shows up most prominently in “The Second Coming,” which envisions a coming apocalypse that would mark the end of Christianity’s second millennium of spiritual dominance. Yet the concept of the gyre also appears in “Sailing to Byzantium,” where it relates to the humbler matter of the speaker’s spiritual and aesthetic transition into “the artifice of eternity” (line 24).
 

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