Visions of Æon:The Language of the Gods and the Clairvoyance of Nature

Phil Legardp.p.legard@leedsbeckett.ac.uk

Originally published in Eyelids of Dawn #3

If, as Kathleen Raine wrote, visionary poetry is the language of an “unseen world, whose riches are as inexhaustible as those of nature”, the same may also be said for the luminescent, symbolic and ecstatic prose found in the Candle of Vision by Æ, alias George William Russell. Indeed, much of the writing therein concerns the reception of actual mystical visions, and are often narrative accounts of material he had previously treated poetically. A man of varied talents, there can be no doubt that theexperiences recorded in this 1918 publication were profoundly affecting to the author, influencing the spheres of both Æ the poet and painter, and Æ the journalist and ‘agricultural economist’. Having discovered his work almost a century after its first publication, the power and conviction evidenced in his writing on practical mysticism have not waned.

My first encounter with Æ’s visionary memoir was an exhilarating one: no less than the profound feeling of myself being in the presence of a kindred soul, whose experiences and outlook correlated perfectly with my own. Much like Æ, I began my own experiments with visualisation and imagination as a boy, and I hoped, as did the youthful Æ, that I could live in a lucid, alternate reality in my imagination. Yet it quickly becomes apparent that the visionary mind is not so easily placed under the yoke of waking consciousness: to have a serious engagement with it, one has to surrender control and allow it to speak with its own sights, sounds and symbolism, unmolested by waking fancies and preoccupations.

In 1884 Æ was aged 17, a student at the Metropolitan School of Art he would shortly become friends with a boy two years his senior called ‘Willie Yeats’. Shortly prior to this, however, he began to receive his visions. The sights and symbols that Æ recounts as welling from these are often glorious, radiant landscapes replete with visions of spirits and subtle beings and their kingdoms; the breath of earth, rising and mingling with the glowing heavens; and cosmological journeys leading to insights concerning nature as the mantle of the divine.

I’ve often been struck by the poet Louis Singer’s observation to Colin Wilson that “once one becomesinvolved in the psychic, there is a certain lack of communication with those who have not had similar experience.” A profound visionary experience leaves a lasting impression, permanently changing the seer’s outlook and relationship with the world: even making it difficult to adjust once again to the mundane world; aching to once more experience the divine, and even delivered into raptures at inopportune moments, as Æ himself discovered while working as a clerk in a gloomy office while his soul was snatched away into glorious visions of the earth-breath.

Such visionary experiences also change interpersonal relationships. The seer may appear deluded or naive to his contemporaries - not a magician, but a fool - and his critics dubbed his poetry ‘inhuman’ since it did not deal with the mundane range of human emotions. However, he did find a keen following among what Yeats described as “young Dublin men and women who love religious speculation, but have no historical faith”. However, speaking of their art school days even Yeats

describes Æ as “almost unintelligible” and “incapable of coherent thought”. Describing him some years later, Yeats writes “he had become, I think, to all his fellow students, sacred, as the fool is sacred in the East”.

Kathleen Raine observed that poetic vision touches upon “the ancient anima mundi, the soul of the world, whose images at times, waking or in dreams, we behold with amazement, so beautiful and so fraught with meaning do these appear. Because this world is not personal but common to all, its symbols are intrinsically intelligible as Freud’s symbols from the personal conscious are not. To EdwinMuir that world seemed to open spontaneously, as it did to Æ; Yeats sought by magical evocation, as others have attempted by prayer and invocation, to pierce the veil.” Æ’s reliance simply on meditation and training the will as a key to mystical vision was perhaps at odds with Yeats’ more intellectualised, ritual approach to the mysteries. At art school the pair had held a seance, but Æ was alarmed by Yeats’ attempt to dominate the proceedings, setting a precedence for the often antagonistic relationship between the pair.

To those who have, in Singer’s words, “had a similar experience” of the psychic (or transcendental), Æ’s poetry and rapturous lyrical prose concerning his visions and intuitions is powerfully moving. It is true that his poems are not technically adept: almost entirely relying on iambic tetrameter they can hardly be called rhythmically adventurous. From the standpoint of contemporary poetry the decadesmay not have been kind to them, but the impulses that inspired his work are timeless. To quote Sri Aurobindo, who perhaps echoes Yeats’ charge of incoherence: "Æ is not a great rhythmist, he is too preoccupied with his vision, more of a truth-seer than a truth-hearer of the Spirit [...] He lives on the spiritual plane to which so much of this poetry is an indistinct or a less distinct aspiration, and his hole self expression is bathed, perhaps rendered sometimes a little remote and unseizable by its immersion, in an unusual light, the light of the spirit breaking through the veils of the intelligence in which it has to find its means of speech."

Throughout The Candle of Vision, Æ seems mindful of how his visions may be received when not presented in the artistic context of poetry or painting. His work constantly returns to introspection, analysing the phenomenology underlying his visions and enquiring into the natures of memory and imagination.

During one of his analyses, Æ asks “have imaginations body?” Undoubtedly the forms he experiencesand places his dreams and visions conjured were more than jumbled memories projected on the screen of the mind: they are lucid and undeniably three-dimensional. It seems a shame that Æ did not live to read Henri Corbin’s work on the mundus imaginalis, although he evidently intuited the essential spiritual truth that:

“It should be acknowledged that forms and shapes in the mundus imaginalis do not subsist in the same manner as empirical realities in the physical world; otherwise anyone could perceive them. It should also be noted that they cannot subsist in the pure intelligible world, since they have extension and dimension, an "immaterial" materiality, certainly, in relation tothat of the sensory world, but, in fact, their own "corporeality" and spatiality.”

Of the mundus imaginalis, John Hutchinson writes that “according to some Sufi thought, the ‘other’ world already exists in this one - our task is to externalize it, to allow it to unfold.” With this in mind, Æ’s own motto - seek on earth what you have found in heaven - seems curiously apt. One of the

greatest challenges of the mystic is to translate their experience into action within the mundane sphere, yet it cannot be doubted that even in later life, as Æ toured Ireland helping to organise agricultural cooperatives and set up creameries, his visions formed “the foundation of his political and economic faith.”

One of the most intriguing and obscure chapters of The Candle of Vision concerns itself with the archetypal qualities of sound and language. In a superficial reading Æ’s intuitions about the affinities,colours and symbols relating to speech can seem like a jumble of vague, disconnected ideas naively associated with various vowels and consonants. A closer reading, however, reveals a subtle system oflinguistic cosmogenesis: an aural and geometrical cabala worthy of further investigation.

Æ begins by investigating sounds formed at the back of the mouth and works forward toward the teeth and lips, intuiting a cosmological affinity for each sound he finds. The formation of the root sounds of speech thus become associated with the creation of the world by divine speech: perhaps one of the reasons that Æ calls it ‘the language of the gods’.

The traditionalist vision of the cosmos is suggested in the Æ’s exploration of the sounds that he calls ‘the primordial roots’ as they move from vowels, formed at the back of the mouth to the labial ‘W’ atthe front. Æ suggests that the vowels relate to seven states of consciousness, which suggests an affinity with the ‘super-celestial’, ‘intellectual’ or divine world of traditional tripartite cosmology. The roots ‘R’ and ‘H’, which Æ gives the affinities of motion and heat respectively, suggest the movement and heat of the celestial spheres. The next three roots ‘L’, ‘Y’, ‘W’ could be interpreted as relating to the ‘sublunary’, elemental world of fire, air and water that surrounds the Ptolemaic earth.

Æ tells us that ‘we have now descended to earth and with this descent comes dualism’. He suggests eight pairs of ‘earthly roots’, again placed in order of formation, from the back to the mouth to the lips: as above, so below.

Although his intuition fails to find affinities for the roots ‘J’ and ‘Tch’, and symbols for many of the other affinities, it is worth exploring and meditating on what he did divine. ‘L’ seems to suggest the ‘lashing’ or cutting qualities of flame; the whistling of a sustained ‘Y’ is imitative of the wind and vortices of its affinity; the utterance of an aspirated ‘W’ particularly evokes the crashing of waves, while the last sound, ‘M’, which can be sounded as a closed-mouth hum, somehow seems appropriate for death, finality and closure.

Æ often acknowledged drawing inspiration from the Upanishads, which may have influenced his sensitivity to the power of speech and prompted him to consider the symbolic aspects of linguistic roots. Additionally the metaphysical sound journey from ‘A’ to ‘M’ may also have been inspired by Jacob Boehme’s Aurora (1600), in the 18th chapter of which the ‘Teutonic Philosopher’ undertakes a lengthy meditation on the phrase Am Anfang schuf Gott Himmel und Erde (“In the Beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth”). The first syllable, Am, Boehme tells us is a sound formed in the heart and thence moving towards the lips, where it is captured: “This signifies that the sound (the voice of God) went forth from the heart of God, and encompassed the whole place or extent of this world.”

In the context of meditative and imaginal exploration, the applications of the Language of the Gods are manifold: silently forming the sounds during breathing exercises provides an interesting

meditative focal point - the unfolding of the sounds and their affinities from the back to the front of the mouth also suggest imaginative ways to explore the spiritual hierarchies intuited by Æ. The associated symbols and colours - which descend in a rainbow from ‘R’ to ‘M’ may - be perhaps used in visualisation in a similar manner to the tattvas. Such suggestions may sound profoundly simplistic, yet they rest on the fundamentally experiential nature of mysticism - as Æ wrote in an earlier essay, The Renewal of Youth:

“Let us get near to realities. We read too much. [...] The soul of the modern mystic is becoming a mere hoarding-place for uncomely theories. He creates an uncouth symbolism, and blinds his soul within with names drawn from the Kabala or ancient Sanskrit, and makes alien to himself the intimate powers of his spirit, things which in truth are more his than the beatings of his heart. Could we not speak of them in our own tongue, and the language of today will be as sacred as any of the past.

[...]

“Then we may learn that speech of many colours, for they [the gods] will not speak in our mortal tongue; they will not answer to the names of men. Their names are rainbow glories. Yet these are mysteries, and they cannot be reasoned out or argued over. We cannot speak truly of them from report, or description, or from what another has written.”

This synaesthetic tongue of ‘rainbow glories’ is the language of the visionary world, which Æ calls ‘the many-coloured land’. Here, colour, shape and the primordial parts of speech have archetypal resonances. Shortly after Æ’s work was published, Rudolf Steiner, and his disciple the Russian poet Andrei Bely, also investigated the esoteric nature of vowels and consonants, particularly with regard to the precepts of eurythmy. However, being firmly entrenched in anthroposophical philosophy, the Steinerian interpretations lack the directness and purity of Æ’s language. For Æ, theories of body, soul and higher worlds are of limited use when compared to actual first-hand visionary experience.

Æ departed the 'mid-world' on the 17th of July 1935. His headstone reads:

Æ

I moved among men and placesand in living I learned the

truth at last. I know I am a spirit and that I wentforth in old time from the

self-ancestral to labours yetunaccomplished.

The visions of Æ are remarkable for not only their power, but their time and place: at the dawn of artistic and literary modernism, both of which have an often unacknowledged debt to spiritual and Theosophical thought. Yet, like all visions handed down through the ages, they carry within them the ancient, perennial luminosity of the divine. Æ may well have departed with labours yet unaccomplished, but even in death the vibrancy of his vision endures and will no doubt inspire other sympathetic souls to continue his labours in art and the imagination, for, as Kandinsky - perhaps the archetypal modernist - wrote, “Every man who steeps himself in the spiritual possibilities of his art is a valuable helper in the building of the spiritual pyramid which will someday reach heaven.”

Bibliography

Æ, 1915, Imaginations and Reveries, Maunsel, London.

Æ, 1918, The Candle of Vision, Macmillan, London.

Sri Aurobindo, 1997 (1953), The Future Poetry, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry.

Boheme, Jacob, 1656 (1600), Aurora, John Streater, London.

Corbin, Henri, 1972 (1964), 'Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal' in Spring,

Spring, Zurich.

Ervine, John G., 1922, Some Impressions of My Elders, Macmillan, New York.

Hutchinson, John, 2013, 'The Other World' in Reliquiæ, Vol. 1. Corbel Stone Press.

Kandinsky, Wassily, 1977 (1912), Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M. T. H. Sadler, Dover, New York.

Müller, Max, 1879, The Upanishads, Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Raine, Kathleen, 1985 (1967), Defending Ancient Springs, Golgonooza, Ipswich.

Wilson, Colin, 1971, The Occult: A History, Random House, New York.

Yeats, William Butler, 1922, The Trembling of the Veil, T. Werner Laurie, London.