THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OF MICHAEL ROBARTES AND THE DANCER

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Title: Michael Robartes and the dancer

Author: W. B. Yeats

Release date: February 18, 2024 [eBook #72987]

Language: English

Original publication: Dublin: The Cuala Press, 1920

Credits: Christopher Hapka. (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MICHAEL ROBARTES AND THE DANCER ***

MICHAEL ROBARTES AND THE DANCER

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

THE CUALA PRESS

CHURCHTOWN

DUNDRUM

MCMXX

CONTENTS

- PREFACE

- MICHAEL ROBARTES AND THE DANCER

- SOLOMON AND THE WITCH

- AN IMAGE FROM A PAST LIFE

- UNDER SATURN

- EASTER, 1916

- SIXTEEN DEAD MEN

- THE ROSE TREE

- ON A POLITICAL PRISONER

- THE LEADERS OF THE CROWD

- TOWARDS BREAK OF DAY

- DEMON AND BEAST

- THE SECOND COMING

- A PRAYER FOR MY DAUGHTER

- A MEDITATION IN TIME OF WAR

- TO BE CARVED ON A STONE AT BALLYLEE

- NOTES

PREFACE

A few of these poems may be difficult to understand, perhaps more difficult than I know. Goethe has said that the poet needs all philosophy, but that he must keep it out of his work. After the first few poems I came into possession of Michael Robartes’ exposition of the Speculum Angelorum et Hominum of Geraldus, and in the excitement of arranging and editing could no more keep out philosophy than could Goethe himself at certain periods of his life. I have tried to make understanding easy by a couple of notes, which are at anyrate much shorter than those Dante wrote on certain of his odes in the Convito, but I may not have succeeded. It is hard for a writer, who has spent much labour upon his style, to remember that thought, which seems to him natural and logical like that style, may be unintelligible to others. The first excitement over, and the thought changed into settled conviction, his interest in simple, that is to say in normal emotion, is always I think increased; he is no longer looking for candlestick and matches but at the objects in the room.

I have given no account of Robartes himself, nor of his discovery of the explanation of Geraldus’ diagrams and pictures in the traditional knowledge of a certain obscure Arab tribe, for I hope that my selection from the great mass of his letters and table talk, which I owe to his friend John Aherne, may be published before, or at any rate but soon after this little book, which, like all hand-printed books will take a long time for the setting up and printing off and for the drying of the pages.

W. B. YEATS.

MICHAEL ROBARTES AND THE DANCER

HE

Opinion is not worth a rush;

In this altar-piece the knight,

Who grips his long spear so to push

That dragon through the fading light,

Loved the lady; and it’s plain

The half-dead dragon was her thought,

That every morning rose again

And dug its claws and shrieked and fought.

Could the impossible come to pass

She would have time to turn her eyes,

Her lover thought, upon the glass

And on the instant would grow wise.

SHE

You mean they argued.

HE

Put it so;

But bear in mind your lover’s wage

Is what your looking-glass can show,

And that he will turn green with rage

At all that is not pictured there.

SHE

May I not put myself to college?

HE

Go pluck Athena by the hair;

For what mere book can grant a knowledge

With an impassioned gravity

Appropriate to that beating breast,

That vigorous thigh, that dreaming eye?

And may the devil take the rest.

SHE

And must no beautiful woman be

Learned like a man?

HE

Paul Veronese

And all his sacred company

Imagined bodies all their days

By the lagoon you love so much,

For proud, soft, ceremonious proof

That all must come to sight and touch;

While Michael Angelo’s Sistine roof

His ‘Morning’ and his ‘Night’ disclose

How sinew that has been pulled tight,

Or it may be loosened in repose,

Can rule by supernatural right

Yet be but sinew.

SHE

I have heard said

There is great danger in the body.

HE

Did God in portioning wine and bread

Give man His thought or His mere body?

SHE

My wretched dragon is perplexed.

HE

I have principles to prove me right.

It follows from this Latin text

That blest souls are not composite.

And that all beautiful women may

Live in uncomposite blessedness,

And lead us to the like—if they

Will banish every thought, unless

The lineaments that please their view

When the long looking-glass is full,

Even from the foot-sole think it too.

SHE

They say such different things at school.

SOLOMON AND THE WITCH

And thus declared that Arab lady:

“Last night, where under the wild moon

On grassy mattress I had laid me,

Within my arms great Solomon,

I suddenly cried out in a strange tongue

Not his, not mine.” And he that knew

All sounds by bird or angel sung

Answered: “A crested cockerel crew

Upon a blossoming apple bough

Three hundred years before the Fall,

And never crew again till now,

And would not now but that he thought,

Chance being at one with Choice at last.

All that the brigand apple brought

And this foul world were dead at last.

He that crowed out eternity

Thought to have crowed it in again.

A lover with a spider’s eye

Will find out some appropriate pain,

Aye, though all passion’s in the glance,

For every nerve: lover tests lover

With cruelties of Choice and Chance;

And when at last that murder’s over

Maybe the bride-bed brings despair

For each an imagined image brings

And finds a real image there;

Yet the world ends when these two things,

Though several, are a single light,

When oil and wick are burned in one;

Therefore a blessed moon last night

Gave Sheba to her Solomon.”

“Yet the world stays:” “If that be so,

Your cockerel found us in the wrong

Although he thought it worth a crow.

Maybe an image is too strong

Or maybe is not strong enough.”

“The night has fallen; not a sound

In the forbidden sacred grove

Unless a petal hit the ground,

Nor any human sight within it

But the crushed grass where we have lain;

And the moon is wilder every minute.

Oh, Solomon! let us try again.”

AN IMAGE FROM A PAST LIFE

HE

Never until this night have I been stirred.

The elaborate star-light has thrown reflections

On the dark stream,

Till all the eddies gleam;

And thereupon there comes that scream

From terrified, invisible beast or bird:

Image of poignant recollection.

SHE

An image of my heart that is smitten through

Out of all likelihood, or reason.

And when at last,

Youth’s bitterness being past,

I had thought that all my days were cast

Amid most lovely places; smitten as though

It had not learned its lesson.

HE

Why have you laid your hands upon my eyes?

What can have suddenly alarmed you

Whereon ’twere best

My eyes should never rest?

What is there but the slowly fading west,

The river imaging the flashing skies,

All that to this moment charmed you?

SHE

A sweetheart from another life floats there

As though she had been forced to linger

From vague distress

Or arrogant loveliness.

Merely to loosen out a tress

Among the starry eddies of her hair

Upon the paleness of a finger.

HE

But why should you grow suddenly afraid

And start— I at your shoulder—

Imagining

That any night could bring

An image up, or anything

Even to eyes that beauty had driven mad,

But images to make me fonder.

SHE

Now she has thrown her arms above her head;

Whether she threw them up to flout me,

Or but to find,

Now that no fingers bind,

That her hair streams upon the wind,

I do not know, that know I am afraid

Of the hovering thing night brought me.

UNDER SATURN

Do not because this day I have grown saturnine

Imagine that some lost love, unassailable

Being a portion of my youth, can make me pine

And so forget the comfort that no words can tell

Your coming brought; though I acknowledge I have gone

On a fantastic ride, my horses flanks were spurred

By childish memories of an old cross Pollexfen,

And of a Middleton, whose name you never heard,

And of a red-haired Yeats whose looks, although he died

Before my time, seem like a vivid memory.

You heard that labouring man who had served my people. He said

Upon the open road, near to the Sligo quay—

No, no, not said, but cried it out—“You have come again

And surely after twenty years it was time to come.”

I am thinking of a child’s vow sworn in vain

Never to leave that valley his fathers called their home.

November, 1919.

EASTER, 1916

I have met them at close of day

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey

Eighteenth-century houses.

I have passed with a nod of the head

Or polite meaningless words,

Or have lingered awhile and said

Polite meaningless words,

And thought before I had done

Of a mocking tale or a gibe

To please a companion

Around the fire at the club,

Being certain that they and I

But lived where motley is worn:

All changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

That woman’s days were spent

In ignorant good will,

Her nights in argument

Until her voice grew shrill.

What voice more sweet than hers

When young and beautiful,

She rode to harriers?

This man had kept a school

And rode our winged horse.

This other his helper and friend

Was coming into his force;

He might have won fame in the end,

So sensitive his nature seemed,

So daring and sweet his thought.

This other man I had dreamed

A drunken, vain-glorious lout.

He had done most bitter wrong

To some who are near my heart,

Yet I number him in the song;

He, too, has resigned his part

In the casual comedy;

He, too, has been changed in his turn,

Transformed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone

Through summer and winter seem

Enchanted to a stone

To trouble the living stream.

The horse that comes from the road.

The rider, the birds that range

From cloud to tumbling cloud,

Minute by minute change;

A shadow of cloud on the stream

Changes minute by minute;

A horse-hoof slides on the brim,

And a horse plashes within it

Where long-legged moor-hens dive,

And hens to moor-cocks call.

Minute by minute they live:

The stone’s in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.

O when may it suffice?

That is heaven’s part, our part

To murmur name upon name.

As a mother names her child

When sleep at last has come

On limbs that had run wild.

What is it but nightfall?

No, no, not night but death;

Was it needless death after all?

For England may keep faith

For all that is done and said.

We know their dream; enough

To know they dreamed and are dead.

And what if excess of love

Bewildered them till they died?

I write it out in a verse—

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn.

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

September 25th, 1916.

SIXTEEN DEAD MEN

O but we talked at large before

The sixteen men were shot,

But who can talk of give and take,

What should be and what not?

While those dead men are loitering there

To stir the boiling pot.

You say that we should still the land

Till Germany’s overcome;

But who is there to argue that

Now Pearse is deaf and dumb?

And is their logic to outweigh

MacDonagh’s bony thumb?

How could you dream they’d listen

That have an ear alone

For those new comrades they have found

Lord Edward and Wolfe Tone,

Or meddle with our give and take

That converse bone to bone.

THE ROSE TREE

“O words are lightly spoken”

Said Pearse to Connolly,

“Maybe a breath of politic words

Has withered our Rose Tree;

Or maybe but a wind that blows

Across the bitter sea.”

“It needs to be but watered,”

James Connolly replied,

“To make the green come out again

And spread on every side,

And shake the blossom from the bud

To be the garden’s pride.”

“But where can we draw water”

Said Pearse to Connolly,

“When all the wells are parched away?

O plain as plain can be

There’s nothing but our own red blood

Can make a right Rose Tree.”

ON A POLITICAL PRISONER

She that but little patience knew,

From childhood on, had now so much

A grey gull lost its fear and flew

Down to her cell and there alit,

And there endured her fingers touch

And from her fingers ate its bit.

Did she in touching that lone wing

Recall the years before her mind

Became a bitter, an abstract thing,

Her thought some popular enmity:

Blind and leader of the blind

Drinking the foul ditch where they lie?

When long ago I saw her ride

Under Ben Bulban to the meet,

The beauty of her country-side

With all youth’s lonely wildness stirred,

She seemed to have grown clean and sweet

Like any rock-bred, sea-borne bird:

Sea-borne, or balanced on the air

When first it sprang out of the nest

Upon some lofty rock to stare

Upon the cloudy canopy,

While under its storm-beaten breast

Cried out the hollows of the sea.

THE LEADERS OF THE CROWD

They must to keep their certainty accuse

All that are different of a base intent;

Pull down established honour; hawk for news

Whatever their loose phantasy invent

And murmur it with bated breath, as though

The abounding gutter had been Helicon

Or calumny a song. How can they know

Truth flourishes where the student’s lamp has shone,

And there alone, that have no solitude?

So the crowd come they care not what may come.

They have loud music, hope every day renewed

And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.

TOWARDS BREAK OF DAY

Was it the double of my dream

The woman that by me lay

Dreamed, or did we halve a dream

Under the first cold gleam of day?

I thought “there is a waterfall

Upon Ben Bulban side,

That all my childhood counted dear;

Were I to travel far and wide

I could not find a thing so dear.”

My memories had magnified

So many times childish delight.

I would have touched it like a child

But knew my finger could but have touched

Cold stone and water. I grew wild

Even accusing heaven because

It had set down among its laws:

Nothing that we love over-much

Is ponderable to our touch.

I dreamed towards break of day,

The cold blown spray in my nostril.

But she that beside me lay

Had watched in bitterer sleep

The marvellous stag of Arthur,

That lofty white stag, leap

From mountain steep to steep.

DEMON AND BEAST

For certain minutes at the least

That crafty demon and that loud beast

That plague me day and night

Ran out of my sight;

Though I had long pernned in the gyre,

Between my hatred and desire,

I saw my freedom won

And all laugh in the sun.

The glittering eyes in a death’s head

Of old Luke Wadding’s portrait said

Welcome, and the Ormonds all

Nodded upon the wall,

And even Stafford smiled as though

It made him happier to know

I understood his plan;

Now that the loud beast ran

There was no portrait in the Gallery

But beckoned to sweet company,

For all men’s thoughts grew clear

Being dear as mine are dear.

But soon a tear-drop started up

For aimless joy had made me stop

Beside the little lake

To watch a white gull take

A bit of bread thrown up into the air;

Now gyring down and pernning there

He splashed where an absurd

Portly green-pated bird

Shook off the water from his back;

Being no more demoniac

A stupid happy creature

Could rouse my whole nature.

Yet I am certain as can be

That every natural victory

Belongs to beast or demon,

That never yet had freeman

Right mastery of natural things,

And that mere growing old, that brings

Chilled blood, this sweetness brought;

Yet have no dearer thought

Than that I may find out a way

To make it linger half a day.

O what a sweetness strayed

Through barren Thebaid,

Or by the Mareotic sea

When that exultant Anthony

And twice a thousand more

Starved upon the shore

And withered to a bag of bones:

What had the Caesars but their thrones?

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

A PRAYER FOR MY DAUGHTER

Once more the storm is howling and half hid

Under this cradle-hood and coverlid

My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle

But Gregory’s Wood and one bare hill

Whereby the haystack and roof-levelling wind,

Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;

And for an hour I have walked and prayed

Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour

And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,

And under the arches of the bridge, and scream

In the elms above the flooded stream;

Imagining in excited reverie

That the future years had come,

Dancing to a frenzied drum,

Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty and yet not

Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,

Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,

Being made beautiful overmuch,

Consider beauty a sufficient end,

Lose natural kindness and maybe

The heart-revealing intimacy

That chooses right and never find a friend.

Helen being chosen found life flat and dull

And later had much trouble from a fool,

While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,

Being fatherless could have her way

Yet chose a bandy-legged smith for man.

It’s certain that fine women eat

A crazy salad with their meat

Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned;

Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned

By those that are not entirely beautiful;

Yet many, that have played the fool

For beauty’s very self, has charm made wise,

And many a poor man that has roved,

Loved and thought himself beloved,

From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree

That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,

And have no business but dispensing round

Their magnanimities of sound,

Nor but in merriment begin a chase,

Nor but in merriment a quarrel.

Oh, may she live like some green laurel

Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,

The sort of beauty that I have approved,

Prosper but little, has dried up of late,

Yet knows that to be choked with hate

May well be of all evil chances chief.

If there’s no hatred in a mind

Assault and battery of the wind

Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,

So let her think opinions are accursed.

Have I not seen the loveliest woman born

Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn,

Because of her opinionated mind

Barter that horn and every good

By quiet natures understood

For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Considering that, all hatred driven hence,

The soul recovers radical innocence

And learns at last that it is self-delighting,

Self-appeasing, self-affrighting.

And that its own sweet will is heaven’s will;

She can, though every face should scowl

And every windy quarter howl

Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

And may her bride-groom bring her to a house

Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;

For arrogance and hatred are the wares

Peddled in the thoroughfares.

How but in custom and in ceremony

Are innocence and beauty born?

Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn.

And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

June, 1919.

A MEDITATION IN TIME OF WAR

For one throb of the Artery,

While on that old grey stone I sat

Under the old wind-broken tree,

I knew that One is animate

Mankind inanimate phantasy.

TO BE CARVED ON A STONE AT BALLYLEE

I, the poet William Yeats,

With old mill boards and sea-green slates,

And smithy work from the Gort forge,

Restored this tower for my wife George;

And may these characters remain

When all is ruin once again.

NOTES

AN IMAGE FROM A PAST LIFE

Robartes writes to Aherne under the date May 12th, 1917. “I found among the Judwalis much biographical detail, probably legendary, about Kusta-ben-Luki. He saw occasionally during sleep a woman’s face and later on found in a Persian painting a face resembling, though not identical with the dream-face, which was he considered that of a woman loved in another life. Presently he met & loved a beautiful woman whose face also resembled, without being identical, that of his dream. Later on he made a long journey to purchase the painting which was, he said, the better likeness, and found on his return that his mistress had left him in a fit of jealousy.” In a dialogue and in letters, Robartes gives a classification and analysis of dreams which explain the survival of this story among the followers of Kusta-ben-Luki. They distinguished between the memory of concrete images and the abstract memory, and affirm that no concrete dream-image is ever from our memory. This is not only true they say of dreams, but of those visions seen between sleeping and waking. This doctrine at first found me incredulous, for I thought it contradicted by my experience and by all I have read, not however a very great amount, in books of psychology and of psycho-analysis. Did I not frequently dream of some friend, or relation, or that I was at school? I found, however, when I studied my dreams, as I was directed in a dialogue, that the image seen was never really that of friend, or relation, or my old school, though it might very closely resemble it. A substitution had taken place, often a very strange one, though I forgot this if I did not notice it at once on waking. The name of some friend, or the conceptions “my father” and “at school,” are a part of the abstract memory and therefore of the dream life, but the image of my father, or my friend, or my old school, being a part of the personal concrete memory appeared neither in sleep nor in visions between sleep and waking. I found sometimes that my father, or my friend, had been represented in sleep by a stool or a chair, and I concluded that it was the entire absence of my personal concrete memory that enabled me to accept such images without surprise. Was it not perhaps this very absence that constituted sleep? Would I perhaps awake if a single concrete image from my memory came before me? Even these images—stool, chair, etc. were never any particular stool, chair, etc. that I had known. Were these images, however, from the buried memory? had they floated up from the subconscious? had I seen them perhaps a long time ago and forgotten having done so? Even if that were so, the exclusion of the conscious memory was a new, perhaps important truth; but Robartes denied their source even in the subconscious. It seems a corroboration that though I often see between sleep and waking elaborate landscape, I have never seen one that seemed a possible representation of any place I have ever lived near from childhood up. Robartes traces these substitute images to different sources. Those that come in sleep are (1) from the state immediately preceding our birth; (2) from the Spiritus Mundi—that is to say, from a general store-house of images which have ceased to be a property of any personality or spirit. Those that come between sleeping and waking are, he says, re-shaped by what he calls the “automatic faculty” which can create pattern, balance, etc. from the impressions made upon the senses, not of ourselves, but of others bound to us by certain emotional links though perhaps entire strangers, and preserved in a kind of impersonal mirror, often simply called the “record,” which takes much the same place in his system the lower strata of the astral light does among the disciples of Elephas Levi. This does not exhaust the contents of dreams for we have to account also for certain sentences, for certain ideas which are not concrete images and yet do not arise from our personal memory, but at the moment I have merely to account for certain images that affect passion or affection. Robartes writes to Aherne in a letter dated May 15th, 1917: “No lover, no husband has ever met in dreams the true image of wife or mistress. She who has perhaps filled his whole life with joy or disquiet cannot enter there. Her image can fill every moment of his waking life but only its counterfeit comes to him in sleep; and he who classifies these counterfeits will find that just in so far as they become concrete, sensuous, they are distinct individuals; never types but individuals. They are the forms of those whom he has loved in some past earthly life, chosen from Spiritus Mundi by the subconscious will, and through them, for they are not always hollow shades, the dead at whiles outface a living rival.” They are the forms of Over Shadowers as they are called. All violent passion has to be expiated or atoned, by one in life, by one in the state between life and life, because, as the Judwalis believe, there is always deceit or cruelty; but it is only in sleep that we can see these forms of those who as spirits may influence all our waking thought. Souls that are once linked by emotion never cease till the last drop of that emotion is exhausted—call it desire, hate or what you will—to affect one another, remaining always as it were in contact. Those whose past passions are unatoned seldom love living man or woman but only those loved long ago, of whom the living man or woman is but a brief symbol forgotten when some phase of some atonement is finished; but because in general the form does not pass into the memory, it is the moral being of the dead that is symbolised. Under certain circumstances, which are precisely described, the form indirectly, and not necessarily from dreams, enters the living memory; the subconscious will, as in Kusta-ben-Luki in the story, selects among pictures, or other ideal representations, some form that resembles what was once the physical body of the Over Shadower, and this ideal form becomes to the living man an obsession, continually perplexing and frustrating natural instinct. It is therefore only after full atonement or expiation, perhaps after many lives, that a natural deep satisfying love becomes possible, and this love, in all subjective natures, must precede the Beatific Vision.

When I wrote An Image from a Past Life, I had merely begun my study of the various papers upon the subject, but I do not think I misstated Robartes’ thought in permitting the woman and not the man to see the Over Shadower or Ideal Form, whichever it was. No mind’s contents are necessarily shut off from another, and in moments of excitement images pass from one mind to another with extraordinary ease, perhaps most easily from that portion of the mind which for the time being is outside consciousness. I use the word “pass” because it is familiar, not because I believe any movement in space to be necessary. The second mind sees what the first has already seen, that is all.

THE SECOND COMING

Robartes copied out and gave to Aherne several mathematical diagrams from the Speculum, squares and spheres, cones made up of revolving gyres intersecting each other at various angles, figures sometimes of great complexity. His explanation of these, obtained invariably from the followers of Kusta-ben-Luki, is founded upon a single fundamental thought. The mind, whether expressed in history or in the individual life, has a precise movement, which can be quickened or slackened but cannot be fundamentally altered, and this movement can be expressed by a mathematical form. A plant or an animal has an order of developement peculiar to it, a bamboo will not develop evenly like a willow, nor a willow from joint to joint, and both have branches, that lessen and grow more light as they rise, and no characteristic of the soil can alter these things. A poor soil may indeed check or stop the movement and a rich prolong and quicken it. Mendel has shown that his sweet-peas bred long and short, white and pink varieties in certain mathematical proportions, suggesting a mathematical law governing the transmission of parental characteristics. To the Judwalis, as interpreted by Michael Robartes, all living mind has likewise a fundamental mathematical movement, however adapted in plant, or animal, or man to particular circumstance; and when you have found this movement and calculated its relations, you can foretell the entire future of that mind. A supreme religious act of their faith is to fix the attention on the mathematical form of this movement until the whole past and future of humanity, or of an individual man, shall be present to the intellect as if it were accomplished in a single moment. The intensity of the Beatific Vision when it comes depends upon the intensity of this realisation. It is possible in this way, seeing that death is itself marked upon the mathematical figure, which passes beyond it, to follow the soul into the highest heaven and the deepest hell. This doctrine is, they contend, not fatalistic because the mathematical figure is an expression of the mind’s desire, and the more rapid the developement of the figure the greater the freedom of the soul. The figure while the soul is in the body, or suffering from the consequences of that life, is frequently drawn as a double cone, the narrow end of each cone being in the centre of the broad end of the other.

It has its origin from a straight line which represents, now time, now emotion, now subjective life, and a plane at right angles to this line which represents, now space, now intellect, now objective life; while it is marked out by two gyres which represent the conflict, as it were, of plane and line, by two movements, which circle about a centre because a movement outward on the plane is checked by and in turn checks a movement onward upon the line; & the circling is always narrowing or spreading, because one movement or other is always the stronger. In other words, the human soul is always moving outward into the objective world or inward into itself; & this movement is double because the human soul would not be conscious were it not suspended between contraries, the greater the contrast the more intense the consciousness. The man, in whom the movement inward is stronger than the movement outward, the man who sees all reflected within himself, the subjective man, reaches the narrow end of a gyre at death, for death is always, they contend, even when it seems the result of accident, preceded by an intensification of the subjective life; and has a moment of revelation immediately after death, a revelation which they describe as his being carried into the presence of all his dead kindred, a moment whose objectivity is exactly equal to the subjectivity of death. The objective man on the other hand, whose gyre moves outward, receives at this moment the revelation, not of himself seen from within, for that is impossible to objective man, but of himself as if he were somebody else. This figure is true also of history, for the end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to that of its greatest contraction. At the present moment the life gyre is sweeping outward, unlike that before the birth of Christ which was narrowing, and has almost reached its greatest expansion. The revelation which approaches will however take its character from the contrary movement of the interior gyre. All our scientific, democratic, fact-accumulating, heterogeneous civilization belongs to the outward gyre and prepares not the continuance of itself but the revelation as in a lightning flash, though in a flash that will not strike only in one place, and will for a time be constantly repeated, of the civilization that must slowly take its place. This is too simple a statement, for much detail is possible. There are certain points of stress on outer and inner gyre, a division of each, now into ten, now into twenty-eight, stages or phases. However in the exposition of this detail so far as it affects the future, Robartes had little help from the Judwalis either because they cannot grasp events outside their experience, or because certain studies seem to them unlucky. “‘For a time the power’ they have said to me,” (writes Robartes) “‘will be with us, who are as like one another as the grains of sand, but when the revelation comes it will not come to the poor but to the great and learned and establish again for two thousand years prince & vizier. Why should we resist? Have not our wise men marked it upon the sand, and it is because of these marks, made generation after generation by the old for the young, that we are named Judwalis.’”

Their name means makers of measures, or as we would say, of diagrams.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

The nested quotation marks near the end of the Notes have been corrected from the printed text.

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Table of Contents

Michael Robartes and the Dancer

CONTENTS

Preface

Michael Robartes and the Dancer

Solomon and the Witch

An Image from a Past Life

Under Saturn

Easter, 1916

Sixteen Dead Men

The Rose Tree

On a Political Prisoner

The Leaders of the Crowd

Towards Break of Day

Demon and Beast

The Second Coming

A Prayer for My Daughter

A Meditation in Time of War

To Be Carved on a Stone at Ballylee

NOTES

AN IMAGE FROM A PAST LIFE

THE SECOND COMING

Transcriber’s Notes

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