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Master’s Thesis

Yeats and Jung: Mapping the Unconscious

Advisor: Dr. John Holt

Primary Reader: Dr. Angela Elliott, English and Foreign Languages Dept.

Secondary Reader: Dr. Christine Floether, Behavioral and Historical Studies Dept.

Submitted by:

Gary B. Wack

As part of fulfillment of the requirements

For Masters of Arts in English Literature

Department of English and Foreign Languages

Centenary College

May 2012

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CONTENTS

Abbreviations …3

Introduction: The Yeats and Jung Connection …4

Chapter 1: Yeats’s Wheel and Jung’s Mandala …16

Chapter 2: Yeats’s Gyre and Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis …25

Chapter 3: Yeats’s Poetic Vision and Jung’s Process of Individuation …35

Conclusion: Mythopoetics: Yeats, Frye, and Campbell …41

Works Cited …50

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ABBREVIATIONS

WORKS BY YEATS

AV1 A Vision. New York: Macmillan, 1938.

AV2 The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats Volume XIII: A

Vision: The Original 1925 Version.

The Collected Works: Plays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats: The Plays. New

York: Scribner, 2011.

WORKS BY CARL JUNG

Alchemical Alchemical Studies. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983.

Man and His Man and His Symbols. Ed. Marie-Luise Von Franz.

New York: Doubleday, 1964.

Mysterium Mysterium Coniunctionis. Princeton: Princeton UP,

1963.

The Archetypes The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious.

Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.

Civilization Civilization In Transition. Princeton: Princeton UP,

1970. Print.

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Introduction:

The Yeats and Jung Connection

Several scholars have examined the link between the symbol systems of W.B.

Yeats and Carl Jung, the major ones being James Olney, James Hollis, and Brian Arkins.

Several other scholars tend to regard the similarity between the systems of Yeats and

Jung either in passing, or to quote Olney, as simply an intellectual curiosity.

James Olney claims that his study of Yeats and Jung is not about the similarities

of Yeats and Jung in general, but about how both of their systems relate to what Leibniz

called the study of the “Perennial Philosophy” (Olney ix). As explained by Aldous

Huxley, “Philosophia Perennis [is] the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality

substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the

soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places

man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being”

(Huxley vii). Such a “philosophy” according to its proponents is universal and at least

implicitly present in all human systems of fundamental beliefs and values. A Christian

ideal, for example, is the Roman Catholic idea of the semina verbi or the seeds of the

word or Logos, which refers to the truth-value of all the words of Christ, the Gospels and

the Bible. Another religion incorporating the “Perennial Philosophy” is Hinduism, in

which the idea of Sanatana Dharma is considered eternal law, comparable to the Christian

Logos. Olney’s focus on the “Perennial Philosophy” leads one to the same truths

explored by Yeats and Jung, who examine the idea of “completion,” or the notion that

humanity is predisposed to searching for a final resolution or final truth. This final truth

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may shed light on what exists outside the realm of the physical that can only be explored

more fully through the psychological, which points toward the soul as the final leg of that

spiritual journey that all take in the course of their lifetime. The physical world connects

with the psychological world through the exploration of the self and religion. The

systems of Yeats and Jung amount to a version of the “Perennial Philosophy” and a

pathway to enlightenment. The ground of that pathway would be Yeats’s “anima mundi”

and Jung’s “collective unconscious.” Olney suggests that Yeats’s esoteric treatise on the

subject called A Vision is the completion of a system initiated by the “automatic writing”

of Yeats’s wife Georgie. Since such “writing” comes directly from the unconscious, it

makes sense to use Jungian psychology to explain it (Olney 239).

James Hollis, in addition to Olney, focuses on the patterns of opposition found in

the ideas and writings of Yeats and Jung. Hollis compares Yeats’s idea of the “primary”

and “antithetical” and the opposition between action and reflection with the Jungian

concept of the schism of the human personality and the psychological traits that include

the male and female counterparts of the psyche, where the male is influenced by the

hidden female aspect of his psyche called the “anima” and the female is affected by the

male aspect of her psyche known as the “animus” (Patterns of Opposition 365).

Although there is a clear comparison between Yeats and Jung in respect to the opposites,

Hollis seems to ignore the expanded evolution of the opposites, which includes Jung’s

idea of the “quaternity.” Jung’s and Yeats’s examination of the “quaternity” will be

examined later in this thesis.

Brian Arkins notes that both Yeats and Jung were disturbed by modern industrial

culture, science and technology, which brought about horrors as well as marvels (Arkins

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77). Arkins suggests that as a result of the horrors of modernity, Yeats and Jung desired

a return to their roots in an older civilization where myth meant more to the psyche and

where humanity felt freer to create new myth. Arkins mentions that Yeats seems to favor

Plato rather than Aristotle, and Jung seems to favor the Presocratics (Arkins 70). Who

favors what philosophy is not as important here as the idea that Yeats and Jung shared the

desire to return to a time when myth was vital to the human imagination and when myth

informed human activity from sacred rituals to architecture. This is not to say that myth

is dead in the modern world, just that the World Wars and increasing secularity replace

religion and suffocate the psyche and its pathway toward enlightenment via Yeats’s

“anima mundi” and Jung’s collective unconscious. Arkins concludes with a comment

that humanity needs to restore its myth, for only myth can restore a unity of thought and

meaning (Arkins 43). Yeats and Jung might have agreed that this unity of thought and

meaning can lead humanity to redemption, an enlightenment, and a freedom of the soul to

ascend and form a closer connection between the earthly and the divine.

Scholars other than Olney, Hollis, and Arkins have noted the Yeats-Jung

connection, but only in passing. A review of their arguments and conclusions, however,

may serve to indicate the growing interest in the topic. Carla Copenhaven marks that the

nature of Yeats’s symbols and Jung’s psychology point to a shared vision, perhaps one

where the two of them were not fully aware, but floating upon an invisible rhythm, that of

the remythification of the cosmos (Grabes 336). Copenhaven focuses on Yeats as a

symboliste poet who shares a style of poetic vision with other poets such as Mallarmé,

Rimbaud and Baudelaire, but ignores any further connection with Jung.

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Richard Finneran mentions the connection of Yeats and Jung in passing when he

states that Yeats had once referred to a German psycho-analyst in his writings who has

traced the “mother complex” back to the mother of the sea (The Collected Works: Plays

743). He also describes A Vision as both fragmented symbols and the revisitation of

legend born in part by his roots in an old Irish world (Finneran 714). Finneran focuses on

the cultural significance of Ireland for Yeats, but fails to see the larger picture that is

presented through the continued study of the link between Yeats and Jung.

Phillip Marcus examines the significance of the shared symbols of Yeats and

Jung. Marcus suggests that archetypes are the path and goal toward what Jung called

Individuation (Marcus xvii). This “Individuation,” as Jung would later describe it in

numerous sections of his collected works, is the union of opposites where male and

female merge to form a whole and that whole becomes a kind of purification of the soul

and a freedom of the psyche to pass from the obstructions of imbalance to a higher level

of personal awareness and collective meaning. Marcus further states that as the sun and

moon have similar symbolic meaning, so does all of humanity have the same or similar

goals toward Individuation, which both Yeats and Jung believe are achievable through a

shared personal and historical experience that occurs in shared spirals and cycles (Marcus

xviii).

George Harper explains in Yeats and the Occult how there is a “Yeats-Jung

parallel” in their recreation of an “ancient system” that hasn’t been seen since the

Renaissance and one that both Yeats and Jung were toiling to decode (Harper 29).

Perhaps, Harper imagines, had Yeats and Jung known each other and worked together,

they might have found the answers they both were looking for.

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Barbara Croft attempts to explain both Jung’s and Yeats’s fascination with the

“mythic land of the dead.” She sees Yeats and Jung as sharing a search for the

“archetypal self,” which may be a mask worn over the unconscious self in the form of the

conscious self. Croft suggests that Yeats was notably drawn to the wise-old-man figure

of Jungian psychology and seemed to wear that archetype as a mask toward the end of his

life (Croft 100).

Harold Bloom describes a kind of kinship between Yeats and Jung in that they

both share a therapeutic symbolism (Bloom 225). Bloom doesn’t go any further in

exploring the connection between Yeats and Jung except to say that the two were not

meant to meet and that they also shared a formulated “religious psychology” with

William Blake (Bloom 220). One product of this “religious psychology” might exist in

the symbolism shared by both Yeats and Jung, examples of which would be Jung’s

“quaternity” and Yeats’s “cross”.

F.A.C. Wilson also suggests that there is a religious connection between Yeats

and Jung. Wilson points out that their shared symbolism brings them together just as it

does Buddhism and Brahmanism with European convention (Wilson 27). Wilson further

notes that both Yeats and Jung had particular personal interest in comparative religion

(Wilson 28).

Frank Barron mentions the focus of the number four as a kind of protean marker

of psychological reality in the writings of both Yeats and Jung (Barron 290). This is the

idea of the Jungian quaternity as noted earlier, and the idea of the four faculties or four

principles in Yeats’s A Vision that will be further explained below.

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Richard Kearney notes that both Yeats and Jung shared a receptiveness to

supernatural experience, worked with mediums, and investigated eastern philosophy,

which made it more likely that their paths would eventually converge (Kearney 225).

This convergence never did take place person-to-person. Instead, their ideas seem to

intersect forming an unconscious psychic link that can only be realized because humanity

as a whole shares the common basis of psychic experience. This is to say that we all

have a psychic imprint of distant memories within our unconscious that we have never

personally experienced, but that the collective unconscious shares these residual

memories in the form of DNA.

David Tacey studies the darker aspects of the human psyche as both Yeats and

Jung saw it, and concludes that Yeats and Jung were both shaped by the dark times they

inhabited, and that Yeats’s “spiritus mundi” and Jung’s collective unconscious reflect

their desire to discover a unifying ground underneath the fragmentation and disorder of

modern history (Tacey 98).

Even in the wake of all of this prior scholarship, there is still more that has yet to

be explored in regard to the joining of Yeats and Jung. Yeats’s A Vision may not gain as

much attention as his poetry, but by slicing the layers of A Vision with a Jungian scalpel,

one begins to see clarity of vision and the possibility for further serious study in the

future.

* * *

Jung once said, “The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his

own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him” (The Spirit in Man

101). This notion may have been one of the motives behind William Butler Yeats’s A

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Vision, a record of Yeats’s attempt to name and explain the sources of his creative

impulses. These sources, it is now fair to say, have their roots in what has come to be

called “the unconscious mind.” Yeats calls these sources “intricate symbols,” or symbols

that transcend space and time. They represent the artist’s knowledge of what is in our

buried memories, and access to them gives the artist the role of a kind of seer of past,

present, and future (Essays and Introductions 45). Jung explains that an artist is a

collective man, a vehicle and molder of the unconscious psychic life of humankind (The

Spirit in Man 101). The role of the poet, then, is to create or express a symbolic order

that helps to provide a direction in conscious life. If one were able to organize these

symbols and triangulate them into concepts, one might be able to explain the greater

mysteries of being and human existence.

According to both Yeats and Jung, the unconscious mind contains an alignment of

ideas that pass unbeknownst from one mind to another as a kind of psychic connection.

James Olney notes such a connection or shared vision between Yeats and Jung, and that

their respective notions of “Anima Mundi” and the collective unconscious complement

each other (Olney 6).

Few scholars recognize any direct connection between Yeats and Jung, only to

say that there is no proof of such contact and call the question simply an intellectual

curiosity. James Olney and James Hollis are but two of many who take the stance that

Yeats and Jung were perfect strangers. If one were to examine the evidence, however,

this stance can be challenged. The evidence lies in the books that Yeats possessed in his

library, such as a signed copy of Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology and Jung’s

introduction to The Secret of the Golden Flower. As to the possible connection between

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Yeats and Jung, Olney mentions, “There is one volume of Jung in Yeats’s library,

Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology, which is very revealing of Jung’s maturing

ideas” (Olney 6). Olney mentions the inclusion of The Secret of the Golden Flower as

being less likely to have been read by Yeats, as it appears that the book was borrowed

from Olivia Shakespear, and it is thought that Yeats only encountered the book in

1931/32, later in his life (Olney 6). Hollis points to the shared connection between Yeats

and Jung only as far as to suggest that they did read some common primary materials,

especially those of Gnostic, Eastern, platonic, hermetic, and theosophic origin, but

nothing more to suggest any intimate connection between them (Convergent Patterns 60).

One can argue, however, that Yeats may very well have read Jung’s Collected Papers on

Analytical Psychology, which mentions that one way by which a person can connect with

the unconscious is through the activity of “automatic writing” (Collected Papers 49).

The inception of A Vision came about, in part, with the aid of his wife’s Georgie’s

automatic writings as well as recorded speech during sleep.

The aim of this thesis is to use Jungian theory to understand Yeats’s A Vision.

This is to say that Yeats’s esoteric attempt in A Vision to describe the faculty of the

unconscious as a symbol system connecting the individual mind with transcendent

spiritual patterns gains meaningful clarity when subjected to Jungian analysis. Yeats and

Jung share a conceptual view of the cosmos and a shared interest in mapping the

unconscious. Jungian thought carries with it more structure and clarity than the relatively

unstructured randomness of Yeats’s ideas as they are presented in A Vision. Applying the

ideas of Jung to Yeats’s ideas as they are presented in A Vision give one a greater insight

into A Vision.

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Yeats may have wanted more structure to illuminate his ideas, for he describes a

kind of disappointment in A Vision. He mentions his reluctance to publish it in a letter to

Ethel Mannin. Yeats speaks of A Vision as what began as his “private philosophy” (The

Letters 916). Yeats goes on to say: “My ‘private philosophy’ is the material dealing with

individual mind which came to me with that on which the mainly historical Vision is

based” (The Letters 916). This “historical Vision” is his 1925 edition of A Vision. Yeats

ends by saying, “I have not published it because I only half understand it” (The Letters

916). The A Vision he is reluctant to publish is his revised and edited edition that was in

fact published in 1937. If Yeats had relinquished his A Vision to Jung, as James Joyce

had done with his Ulysses, maybe Yeats would have received the feedback he needed to

improve the later and revised edition of A Vision.

On the other hand, however, Yeats did have a high regard for A Vision by saying

that it is “a last act of defense against the chaos of the world” (Unterecker 43). It also

served no doubt as a personal attempt to create new myth out of old.

Harold Bloom believes that “Yeats went very wrong in it” and that the book is not

“with all its inventiveness and eloquence, adequate to Yeats’s own imagination” (Bloom

210). It could be said that Yeats’s ideas were well beyond his comprehension of the

greater vision as a whole, but to call it a complete failure is shortsighted. Nevertheless,

Yeats’s A Vision becomes more clear if placed side by side with Jungian analysis. Bloom

does acknowledge that Helen H. Vendler spreads some new light upon A Vision through

her argument that it is “essentially an account of aesthetic experience, a poetics, rather

than an esoteric philosophy in its own right” (Bloom 211).

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A greater clarity of Yeats’s vision may be attainable by taking the ideas within A

Vision and simply transposing them upon the structure and analysis of Jungian

psychology. In order to better understand how Yeats’s ideas relate to and mesh with

Jung’s ideas, a first glance at some of the main terms might be in order. One way to do

this would be to place side-by-side some of the main terms visited by both Yeats and

Jung. Two such terms are Yeats’s “great symbol” and Jung’s “archetype,” which are

identical in meaning. Yeats calls the “great symbol” a relic of forgotten times, “hidden

things” and “ancient secrets” that permeate the world with a truth beyond experience

(Essays and Introductions 51). Jung describes the archetype as the God-image in man

and a product of the psyche that remains hidden from view until purged through analysis:

“The archetype is essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming

conscious and by being perceived, and it takes its colour from the individual conscious in

which it happens to appear […] What the word ‘archetype’ means in the nominal sense is

clear enough, then, from its relations with myth, esoteric teaching, and fairytale” (The

Archetypes 5). Yeats describes the “great symbol” or archetype in the figures of the gyre

and the wheel, which will be better examined later.

Another example of their convergent ideas is Yeats’s “cyclical pattern” and

Jung’s “mandala”. Yeats describes a cyclical pattern of movement, which he calls “the

great wheel,” that is prevalent in all of society. Jung’s mandala illustrates this cycle in

society as well. Jung often speaks of the mandala as a force that shapes time itself and

shapes us within it. Jung also regards the mandala as a symbol of psychic wholeness:

“The mandala archetype expresses the totality of the psyche in all its aspects, including

the relationship between man and the whole of nature” (Man and His 266). Jung further

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explains, “The mandala is a driving force that spins upon its nuclear atom, the human

psyche that spins in constant motion against opposite driving forces” (Man and His 230).

Another example of convergent ideas is Yeats’s “unity of being” and Jung’s

“Individuation.” For Yeats, the “unity of being” is the completed symbol. In one way,

Yeats refers to the union as a union of opposites, such as the connection and

interconnection of the “primary” and “antithetical” man: “The primary is that which

serves, the antithetical is that which creates” (AV2 85). Their union causes action and

creation. Without one, the other could not exist. The Jungian equivalent of the opposites

would be the anima and animus archetypes. As previously mentioned, the anima

archetype is the female aspect of the male psyche, while the animus is the male aspect of

the female psyche. This union of opposites is analogous to the Taoist concept of yin and

yang.

To further explain the “unity of being,” Yeats refers to the completed symbol as

an interconnection and joining of the human faculties. Yeats’s human faculties are the

“Husk,” “Passionate Body,” “Spirit,” and “Celestial Body” (AV2 187). The Jungian

equivalent to Yeats’s human faculties is the “quaternity,” which he explains as a joining

of the four elements of the self: thinking, sensation, intuition, and feeling (Psychology

and Alchemy 107).

One last example of convergent thought between Yeats and Jung is Yeats’s Anima

Mundi and Jung’s collective unconscious. Anima Mundi means “soul of the world.”

Yeats explains Anima Mundi in his autobiography as a memory independent of embodied

individual memories (The Autobiography 175). Jung’s concept of the collective

unconscious complements Yeats’s Anima Mundi and adds greater definition by

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explaining that the collective unconscious is the personal unconscious that expands

universally by way of “archaic and mythic thought” (The Archetypes 3). The personal

experience and personal acquisition of the unconscious is inborn. Jung’s ideas of the

collective unconscious come to fruition when he calls it the “universal soul” (The

Archetypes 4). Yeats states that the borders of our mind are always shifting and that

many minds flow into one another creating a single mind, a “great memory,” also called

the Anima Mundi (Essays and Introductions 28). Yeats adds, “This great mind and great

memory can be evoked by symbols” (Essays and Introductions 28). This is to say that

the wellspring of the human psyche where symbols are gathered takes on similar form in

cultures alien to each other and is the direct product of the collective unconscious.

Yeats mentions that one way to open the doorway into the state of world memory

is to dabble in such things as “spiritualism” (The Autobiography 268). Throughout

Jung’s collected works, Jung suggests, in turn, the best way to achieve the link with the

collective unconscious is to look more closely at one’s spiritual connection with the

world through psychoanalysis.

Yeats and Jung, then, aim for the same results. Yeats, however, was a poor

systematic thinker if a great poet and Jung was a master of systematic thought. Since

Yeats’s aim in A Vision was to understand the same material that Jung covers

systematically, it makes sense to apply Jung to Yeats.

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Chapter 1

Yeats’s Wheel and Jung’s Mandala

Yeats’s use of the circle, the wheel, and the phases of the moon is comparable to

Jung’s concepts of the mandala archetype, the quaternity, and the rebirth of the psyche.

Jung says that the mandala archetype symbolizes the psyche and its connection to the

unconscious (Man and His 267). Likewise, Yeats says that the wheel is the geometric

form that has a mystical draw upon the psyche and a symbolic relation to what he calls

“spaceless reality” (AV2 69). This “spaceless reality” can be understood through the

Jungian concept of the mandala as it forms the basis of archaic remnants, primordial

images, and collective images (Man and His 57). This is to say that both the mandala

and the wheel are recognizable across cultures.

Jung states that the mandala represents a union within the unconscious of the soul

with God (Man and His 268). Ross suggests that A Vision’s vision is the collective soul

of a people and the essence of a civilization (Ross 175). Jung’s mandala resembles

Yeats’s wheel through their recognizable nature, such as in religious symbolism. Jung

compares the mandala archetype to the image of the halo of Christ, his suffering as the

Son of Man and his death on the cross, but at the same time, the mandala also represents

a symbol of his differentiated wholeness (Man and His 269). In A Vision, Yeats likewise

recognizes the wheel as a circular movement found in Thomas Aquinas’s examination of

the circular movement of the angels as they connect God to humanity (AV2 69).

Yeats also transforms the two-dimensional shape of the wheel into the three-

dimensional shape of the sphere using the gyre as the catalyst. Jung also connects the

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mandala to the sphere and the sphere to the gyre as the psychic connection to the divine.

Jung describes a central point of the psyche that begins as the center of the mandala that

spreads outward as the body connects to the spirit, then to God (The Archetypes 325).

This image of the psyche as it spreads outward is Jung’s depiction of the gyre. In Jung’s

words, the God-image is a big part of the link between the psyche and the divine. Jung

calls God ‘the infinite circle’ (or sphere) whose centre is everywhere and the

circumference nowhere” (The Archetypes 325). Likewise, the wheel for Yeats is the

point where the gyre begins and expands outward. Barbara Croft observes that the center

of the cone is the center of the wheel. She notes that the cone expands outward into the

gyre as a moving body spiraling outward (Croft 65).

Yeats describes the wheel’s movement as a cycle of opposites and illustrates this

movement through his interpretation of the moon cycles, of time, and the propulsion of

time as the attraction and repulsion of opposites, which is the driving force in human

experience (AV2 81). Yeats describes this push and pull of the psyche in his journal

where he suggests that the mask of some other self creates a window into the antithetical

self: “I think all happiness depends on having the energy to assume the mask of some

other self, that all joyous or creative life is a rebirth as something not oneself, something

created in a moment and perpetually renewed in playing a game like that of a child where

one loses the infinite pain of self-realization, a grotesque or solemn painted face put on

that one may hide from the terrors of judgment, an imaginative Saturnalia that makes one

forget reality” (Memoirs 191).

Yeats further explains that the action of opposites leads to an awakening of the

self, bringing one closer to the divine. In his Memoirs, Yeats defines this awakening of

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the self as a “blinding beam” where the world is in constant motion, spinning upon the

gyre, reaching toward enlightenment (Memoirs 191). This “blinding beam” resembles

Jung’s concept of the God-image where the mandala spirals toward enlightenment. As

Arkins says, the gyre spirals outward from Yeats’s wheel to bring the soul of man closer

to God (Arkins 53). Arkins also suggests that Yeats valued a unity of being and sought to

achieve it through his exploration of the cycles of myth. Yeats also focuses on this unity

of being as he writes of the need to reconnect the driving force of opposites, which is also

found, for example, in military conflicts. A culture’s inner struggles and clashes of ideas

are one point from which myths and cycles are spawned. It is apparent that for one to

find one’s unity of being, one must overcome both the inner and outer conflicts of that

being.

Just as Yeats searches for the divine connection of the psyche in his occult

studies, so does Jung also search for that connection in his alchemical studies. The

symbolic unity of the psyche with the divine can only come about through

acknowledging the psyche’s connection with the unconscious and the collective

unconscious. The end result is what Jung calls the “God-image” (Psychology and

Religion 363). Jung also suggests that for this to happen, one must also connect with the

magic of symbolism, the primitive, and the archaic (Alchemical 28).

Jung sees the schism between the psyche and the divine as comparable to

schizophrenia. In the art of Pablo Picasso and the writings of James Joyce, for example,

both artist and writer have a connection with the dark soul or anima that emulates a kind

of schizophrenia (The Spirit in Man 138). Yeats uses the terms “primary man” and

“antithetical man” to show this conflict of opposites (AV2 195). Hollis suggests that the

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existence of the “primary man” is the objective and active man, whereas the “antithetical

man” is the subjective, reflective, and passive man (Patterns of Opposition 365). Yeats

illustrates this interaction of the human psyche with what he calls the “circular

movement” fundamental to an attainment of self-knowledge and self-understanding

(AV2 81). More to the point, Yeats paints a picture of this circular movement in a

diagram that shows the wheel as part of a moon cycle reflective of human characteristics

(see Figure 1). In this diagram, Yeats initiates the cycle with the primary man in

complete objectivity, and as he moves counter clockwise down the wheel he succumbs to

a fall from objectivity to passivity, eventually to intersect with the antithetical man on the

other side. In so doing, the primary man falls and curves around the wheel toward that

antithetical man on the other side of the wheel, reaching subjectivity where the heart is,

then returning to the head and objectivity once more (AV2 81). Yeats describes this

movement as man seeking his opposite or the opposite of his condition as he attains his

objectivity so far as it is attainable through the departure of the objective into the

subjective and then back again (AV2 81). Somewhere in the middle is the unity of being

that all humankind strives for to reconnect the opposites as they reconnect with the heart,

the head, the loins, and the feet. Stock regards this cyclical flow of humanity as a

reincarnation of the soul (Unterecker144).

Jung’s theory of the opposites bears resemblance to Yeats’s, for according to it

the individual psyche strives to connect to the unconscious through a struggle with the

hidden forces of the psyche, such as the anima and the animus. Yeats’s Primary and

Antithetical man can be compared to Jung’s anima and animus. The anima is the female

aspect of the male psyche and the animus is the male aspect of the female psyche. In

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Yeatsian terms, the outer shell of a man is the primary self and his inner anima is his

antithetical self. Likewise, the outer feminine shell of the woman is her primary self and

her inner animus is her antithetical self. Jung often mentions that all people, male and

female, possess both characteristics in one body. That is, “The anima and animus are the

‘soul-image’ which is a specific image among those produced by the unconscious just as

the persona (via the soul) or outer attitude is presented in dreams by images of definite

personas who possess the outstanding qualities of the persona in especially marked form,

so in a man the soul, i.e., anima or inner attitude, is presented in the unconscious by

definite persons with the corresponding qualities” (Psychological Types 470). These

qualities Jung calls individuality, identity, and the soul’s transference to a real person

through intense feelings, as in the intense feelings of love and hate (Psychological Types

471). This conflict of opposites is also represented by the spinning mandala in which the

connected yin and yang spin upon the mandala’s center, this illustrating the movement of

the opposites as they ride one upon the other in constant motion. This is the struggle in

Yeats’s movement of the wheel where the Primary and Antithetical duel for control of the

psyche. This constant circular movement between the Primary and Antithetical is the

psyche’s defense against static immobility, which would prevent outward growth toward

the divine. Yeats mentions in his journal how the Antithetical is the living face behind

the mask (Memoirs 192). This living face is the real inner face, the face of the

unconscious, where the outer face is the mask and the conscious mind.

Another aspect of the psyche that Jung presents as the anti-self corresponding to

Yeats’s antithetical self is the shadow archetype, the darker half of the human psyche that

arises when opposing forces within the unconscious create a schism resulting in a

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neurosis that plagues the individual until the darker half is brought to light and outwardly

addressed. Jung states, “The shadow-side of the psyche may come about through a

conflict with our moral convictions, an erotic conflict, or a great resistance within” (Two

Essays 266). This condition creates movement that may come about through consciously

examining the unconscious and bringing to light what can be called autonomous

complexes (Two Essays 266). Yeats also describes this conflict within the psyche as a

reflection of the antithetical Tincture, wherein the mind desires a merger with the Will

upon the wheel (AV1 59). Yeats’s concept of the Will and the Mask can be compared to

Jung’s concept of the unconscious and the conscious. The shadow archetype is the

attraction or link between the conscious and the unconscious, just as Yeats’s concept of

the antithetical tincture is the attraction of the Will to the Mask.

Within Yeats’s wheel, the twenty-eight phases of the moon can be broken down

into four elements. These four elements are the Will, the Mask, the Creative Mind, and

the Body of Fate (see Figure 3). Yeats suggests that the Will upon the wheel is always in

conflict with the Body of Fate. The Mask has a natural desire for the Will and the

Creative Mind has an attraction to the Body of Fate. This correlation can also be made in

nature, as the Will can be compared to the sun and the Body of Fate can be compared to

the moon (AV2 94). Jung also mentions the duality of the sun and moon and its relation

to the psyche. Jung suggests that the psyche can be compared to the germinating seed

planted in the earth where the sun and moon revolve around it, encouraging its growth

(Alchemical 337). This seed planted in the earth in Yeats’s vision is the psyche at the

center of the wheel, and the Will represents the sun and the Body of Fate represents the

moon as they constantly chase each other in a circle around the wheel. Jung describes

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what he calls a “quaternity” that demarcates a circle, in which the center point itself is the

simplest symbol of wholeness and therefore the simplest vision of the God-image

(Alchemical 337). Just as Yeats has his quaternity in the wheel, so does Jung have his

quaternity in the mandala.

Yeats’s Will, Mask, Creative Mind, and Body of Fate, as representative of the

subdivisions of the wheel, correspond to Jung’s idea of the quaternity in the mandala.

Jung’s mandala moves in a clockwise motion, whereas Yeats’s wheel moves in a counter-

clockwise motion. Jung’s ordering of the mandala comes with the four elements of

thought, intuition, feeling, and sensation, which follow each other around the mandala in

constant motion (see Figure 1). His concept of “thought” corresponds to Yeats’s concept

of the “head” (see Figure 2); “feeling” corresponds to “heart”; “sensation” corresponds to

“loins”; “intuition” corresponds to “fall.” In sum, the cyclical motion of both Yeats’s

wheel and Jung’s mandala follows a similar path. This path is the cycle of human

existence common to all of humanity.

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Thought (Head)

Feeling (Heart)Intuition (Fall)

Sensation (Loins)

Jung's Mandala QuaternityFigure 1

Yeats's WheelFigure 2

Breaking of Strength

Discovery of Strength

Complete Subjectivity(Antithetical Man)

Head

Heart

Loins

Complete Objectivity(Primary Man)

Fall(feet)

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Figure 3

CreativeMind

Bodyof Fate

Yeats's Four Elements

Mask

Will

PsycheSeedEarth

The Sun

The Moon

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Chapter 2

Yeats’s Gyre and Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis

Jung’s notion of the Mysterium Coniunctionis helps to explain Yeats’s symbol of

the gyre. Jung refers to the Mysterium Coniunctionis as an “arcane substance” that exists

in part through the symbols of four elements that link nature to the God-image, or the

conscious to the unconscious (Mysterium 207). These four elements exist in more

variations than the earth, air, fire, and water. They also exist in a higher form, such as the

body, the mind, the soul, and the heart. All variations of the four elements act as the

quaternity within the mandala, and this quaternity begins in the elemental, or lower

world, and then ascends like a spiral toward the higher world of the spirit (Aion 132). One

might imagine that the connection between the lower and higher world exists as layers of

mandalas, where one mandala rides flat upon another interconnected by an expanding

gyre (see Figure 5). Each mandala possesses its own quaternity. If one were to flatten

the mandalas and lay them flat, one upon another, each one connected by an expanding

gyre, the resulting figure resembles that of Yeats’s gyre, but with one difference: Yeats’s

gyre appears in the inverse as an upside-down pyramid shape (see Figure 6). Despite this

difference, both figures follow a similar path, Yeats’s gyre ending at the top with the

Celestial Body and Jung’s at the top with the God-image.

Another way to understand both gyre figures is to envision a bedspring coil as

representing the gyre, and then imagine laying a paper circle representing the mandala

inside each layer of coil (see Figure 5). Now imagine this coil small at the bottom and

progressively larger at the top. At the bottom of this coil would exist nature, birth,

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creation, the conscious mind, and the Husk body, while at the top would exist rebirth, the

God-image, the unconscious mind, the Celestial Body, and the collective unconscious.

Yeats’s Husk body corresponds to Jung’s conscious mind, while Yeats’s Celestial Body

corresponds to Jung’s collective unconscious.

As previously mentioned, Jung’s mandala as applied to the gyre takes the shape of

an inverse pyramid where the gyre’s apex is at its smallest on the bottom while

expanding outward like the funnel of a tornado. Yeats’s gyre takes the shape of an

upright pyramid where there are two pyramid gyres that connect one on top of the other

(see Figure 6). Yeats says that two interwoven gyres assist in connecting the body to the

spirit (AV2 194), and that these gyres begin as an antithesis, seen for example in the

symbol for hot and cold, light and dark and the pairs of opposites that permeate both the

moral and physical universe (AV1 107). The picture one might infer through Yeats’s

description of the gyre in the case of the opposites looks like the bottom of a pyramid

from where two opposing forces constantly clash from one side of the pyramid to the

other, bouncing upward from the birth and creation of the Husk toward the top of the

pyramid where rebirth, the unconscious mind, the Celestial Body, and the God-image

reside. Another way to envision Yeats’s gyre is to imagine a triangle-shaped popcorn-

popping machine in which the hard corn kernels lie dormant until the opposing heat pops

the kernel into a transformed light fluffy shape that bounces upward seeking a release

from its container. A third way to envision Yeats’s vision of the gyre is to imagine a

black hole where a wide base picks up all forms of matter and creation and funnels them

into a center point where there is not nothingness, but a higher consciousness.

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The Primary and Antithetical Tinctures are comparable to Jung’s concept of the

alchemical opposites, which include the symbols of the female and male aspects of the

psyche such as the anima and animus, or the opposing forces of good and evil, day and

night, the conscious mind and the shadow. These opposing forces, according to Jung

“force the growth of a culture and civilization” (Alchemical 163). Jung explains that

there must be a light and dark or a God and Satan to supplement action (Alchemical 166).

These forces are comparable to Yeats’s Primary and Antithetical selves, whose activity

begins at the bottom of the gyre like the forces of good and evil battling it out, not for

control of the other, but to encourage progress through self-reflection and eventual

evolution of consciousness through reasoning. Yeats says that opposing forces constantly

move the Husk or the physical plane of being, and that without the work of these

opposing forces, there would be no birth, creation, or evolution of the physical Husk into

the higher plane of being, where the top of one inverted gyre touches the bottom of

another, representing the connection of the Husk with the Passionate Body, then to the

Spirit, or what Jung would call the unconscious mind, the Celestial Body, and the

collective unconscious (AV2 195).

Within each ascending coil of the gyre that corresponds to Jung’s ascending flat

mandalas, we can see the incorporation of the symbol of four (see Figure 5), which in

both Yeats and Jung relates to the layers of the rising and spinning gyre, beginning with

the four natural elements. Jung regards the four natural elements as essential to

alchemical studies. In nature the basic four elements are fire, water, earth, and air, but

more basic to the human condition are the four elements of warm, cold, dry, and moist

(Mysterium 422). These four elements can be seen inside Yeats’s four interwoven gyres

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as they reflect each other in pairs of opposites. Fire opposes water, and earth opposes air.

These four elements are the beginning of life and creation (Psychology and Alchemy

262). One might imagine these four elements existing inside one mandala as only one

part or level of an ascending gyre. We might further infer that both pairs of opposites

contrast each other inside the mandala, chasing each other around the mandala and

generating a circular movement in the form of an interwoven gyre spinning upward and

outward, circulating from one opposite to the other as they climb the coil to the next

mandala level (see Figure 5). This is to say that there must be a clash of opposites for

movement and growth to occur, and that growth is a kind of evolution of consciousness.

We see this evolution of consciousness in Yeats’s lists of the “Four Types and Phases”

(AV2 100). He sees these opposites as the basic forms of nature, such as fire and water,

air and earth, which then pass to a higher plane to that of the soul and heart, mind and

body, which then expand further toward the moral and emotional, intellectual and

instinctual, then toward sanctity and desire, power and knowledge before a final ascent

into the unconscious and the God-image (AV2 101). This ascension of the gyre

represents levels of consciousness where the beginning is very carnal and fleshy while

the end is transcendent and divine. As illustrated above, Yeats spells out the movement

of the elements of four as the antithetical table of quarters (AV2 102). Jung states that

this movement is akin to “antithetical nature” (Mysterium 174), which is “the great

embryo of life.” Jung further explains, “Antithetical nature exists as the prototype of

individuation, a prefiguration of the self” (Mysterium 175). Simply put, even the basis of

life depends on the coincidence of opposites such as a male sperm penetrating a female

egg for the inception of life.

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Yeats summarizes the evolution of consciousness through “The Two Directions”

of the Phases, with Phases 1 through 15 pointing toward nature, while 15 through 28

point toward God (AV2 104). Jung likewise notes that the mandala is but an

interpretation of alchemy where the spirit of life revolves around a spinning mandala that

is naturally connected with movement in all directions as it connects the whole earth with

its elements and with the divine (Mysterium 207). Yeats’s spinning gyre as it emerges

from the mandala, is comparable to Jung’s illustration of the Mysterium Coniunctionis as

it connects nature to the body, the body to the conscious, the conscious to the

unconscious, and the unconscious to the collective unconscious. This connection with

the collective unconscious lies at the end of both Jung’s spinning mandala and Yeats’s

gyre.

Yeats expands on the concept of the gyre through his further analysis of the four

faculties and principles as they relate to birth, death, and rebirth. The wheel, cone, or

gyre of the faculties directs one toward a completion of a symbol, which is a movement

of birth to death to rebirth (AV2 188). The four faculties and principles are called the

Spirit, the Celestial Body, the Husk, and the Passionate Body (AV2 188). The period

between death and rebirth is the period between lives, within which the Spirit and the

Celestial Body prevail (AV2 188). Within the period between life and death the Husk

and the Passionate Body prevail (AV2 188). Yeats describes this cycle of birth to death

to rebirth as transcendence of the body toward the spirit and anima mundi, or world spirit

(AV2 188). This world spirit is the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious as it

expands outward from the personal unconscious. Jung relates the outward expansion of

the conscious to the eventual collective unconscious to the alchemical symbol known as

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the “Tree of Life” (Alchemical Studies 267). Here, a Jungian approach to the gyre

movement would see the branches of the tree as akin to the outward movement—the

direction and choices one makes in life—that propels one forward. These choices and

directions one makes are analogous to the coils of Yeats’s gyre where one will move

upward only through the kinetic connection of opposites. The basic elements of

opposites can collide creating life, death and rebirth, hence, the evolution of

consciousness.

One might imagine the relation of Yeats and Jung as analogous to a patient to a

doctor. Jung is the doctor and analyst of the symbol, and Yeats is the patient and the

dreamer of the symbol. As the patient, Yeats is at the mercy of these “symptoms of

symbols.” Yeats once referred to such “symptoms of symbols” as both a detachment

from the conscious mind and an abstraction in the “the mind’s eye” (Memoirs 28). Jung

would say that it is the power of the abstract symbol that propels the progress of

humanity. This power of propulsion allows the unconscious mind to emerge from the

conscious mind and merge with the collective unconscious. Jung concludes that if it

weren’t for the two opposing elements in nature, we would still be nestled inside the

sleeping innocence that preceded original sin (Mysterium 382). In essence, the basic

symbol of the gyre is the Mysterium Coniunctionis where the Tree of Life and the Tree of

Knowledge interweave and branch outward and upward through a clash of opposing

forces, from the foundation of the conscious Husk toward the Celestial Body, and finally

to the collective unconscious.

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Figure 4

Yeats's Gyre of Opposing Forces

Illustration by Mann, Neil. Yeats Vision. 2012. www.yeatsvision.com/Geometry.html.

Note the opposing elements of the gyre. The center is the birth, the expanding blue lines, the cold, and the expanding red lines, the hot, in the birth of sensation and consciousness.

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God-Image

Nature

The Human(The Conscious Mind)

The Divine(The Collective Unconscious)

Yeats/Jung SynthesisThe Mandala Gyre

The Evolution of Consciousness

Figure 5

Side View(see detailed view on next page)

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Yeats/Jung SynthesisThe Mandala Gyre

The Evolution of Consciousness

Figure 5, cont.

Detailed View

The Character of the Creative Mind

The Elemental

The Celestial BodyThe God-Image

The Unconscious Mind

Rebirth, The Collective Unconscious

The Conditions of the Will

The Four Contests of the Antithetical within the Self

Husk, The Conscious Mind, Creation

Water

Heart

Emotional

DesireSpiritualSanctity

Moral

Soul

Fire

Air

Earth

Body

MindInstinctive

Intellectual

Strength, Power

Self-knowledge, Wisdom

Birth

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Yeats's Pyramid Gyres

Figure 6

The Celestial Body

The Spirit The Passionate Body

The Husk

The Primary Tincture The Antithetical Tincture

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Chapter 3

Yeats’s Poetic Vision and Jung’s Process of Individuation

One way to explain some of Yeats’s poetry and A Vision is to explore Jung’s

examination of human psychic growth toward Individuation, where the gap is bridged

between the conscious, the unconscious, and the collective unconscious. Individuation is

a transcendent function that awakens the imagination by connecting the conscious with

the unconscious mind. The process of Individuation is also a pathway on which the God-

image guides the soul toward its final enlightenment in the collective unconscious

(Symbols of Transformation 433).

Yeats spoke of the pathway and journey toward enlightenment as a connection

between Nature and Knowledge (AV2 113). Nature is the equivalent of Jung’s concept

of the conscious mind and Knowledge the equivalent of the unconscious. Yeats refers to

Nature as the aspect of existence where one experiences the rhythms of the earth (AV2

114). Knowledge exists inside an individual who is only half-awake or only half aware

of the meaning of being (AV2 114). Nature, then, connects us to the physical or bodily

plane of existence, and Knowledge connects us to the abstract. In the Jungian sense,

Nature would be the conscious mind tying the body to the physical plane, and Knowledge

would be the connection an individual has to the unconscious. Jung refers to the process

of moving from the conscious to the unconscious as a journey and deliverance of the hero

and his or her soul into a higher plane of existence (Symbols of Transformation 348).

In Yeats’s poem “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” there seems to be a wavering

connection between the conscious and the unconscious. The Self could represent the

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conscious mind, for the images within each of the dialogues of the Self include tangible

items of a physical existence tying the Self to the earth. This Self describes Sato’s

ancient blade as being still “razor-keen, still like a looking-glass/ Unspotted by the

centuries;/ That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn/ From some court-lady’s dress

and round/ The wooden scabbard bound and wound/ Can, tattered, still protect, faded

adorn” (The Collected Poems 235). These images within the Self’s dialogue reflect a

kind of tangible existence, one dependent on a conscious awareness where the ancient

sword ties the hand and body to physical existence. Jung refers to the conscious mind as

old skin that ages with time and keeps one connected to the body through the senses

(Symbols of Transformation 344). The Soul in Yeats’s poem has a very different

existence, one in the mind or the intellect. It calls out: “I summon to the winding ancient

stair;/ Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,/ Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,/

Upon the breathless starlit air,/ Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;/ Fix every

wandering thought upon/ That quarter where all thought is done:/ Who can distinguish

darkness from the soul?” (The Collected Poems 234). It looks to the sky and urges the

Self to acknowledge that there is something above the earthly plane of existence. The

steep ascent is the Soul’s journey beyond the “broken, crumbling battlement” of the earth

and the Self below. Furthermore, the Soul looks upon the starlit sky and rides upward

upon the pole of the imagination away from the Self, or that “quarter” of the mind that

lies dormant, hiding the poet from true enlightenment inside the collective unconscious.

That last question –“Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?”—suggests that

Yeats was struggling with the unconscious shadow archetype. Jung states that the

shadow archetype is the aspect of the self that lies hidden within the unconscious and

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comes out only to remind the conscious of an imbalance within the psyche (Two Essays

250). This shadow archetype may be the embodiment of My Soul as Yeats saw it, and a

call for My Self to transcend the world of the senses into the world of the spirit where the

collective unconscious resides. My Self seems only half aware of My Soul, as the

conversation within the conscious self is only half aware of the unconscious soul

representing the shadow as it arises within the psyche to merge with the collective

unconscious.

In his introduction to Yeats’s Memoirs, Denis Donoghue suggests that in the

poem “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” Yeats is torn between the “morbidity” of daily life

and a struggle of the mind to ascend beyond the everyday life (Memoirs 10). As

Donoghue notes, “Yeats found it hard to be patient with Dublin, theater business, and the

management of men” (Memoirs 11). Donoghue further suggests that Yeats was torn

within his own mind as he looked toward his poetry in self-examination and reflection:

“The man who thought psychology vulgar spends many pages peering into his own

motives, accusing and forgiving himself by turns, knowing himself morbid” (Memoirs

12). “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” expresses a call to leave the conscious for the

unconscious world, where the soul can finally win out over the self. At the end of the

poem, My Self is the last speaker with the last word: “I am content to live it all again/ And

yet again, if it be life to pitch/ Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch,/ A blind man

battering blind men;/ Or into that most fecund ditch of all,/ The folly that man does/ Or

must suffer, if he woos/ A proud woman not kindred of his soul” (The Collected Poems

236). If Jung had read this line, he might have ascertained that Yeats’s conscious had

won out over his unconscious and that he was content with reliving this earthly existence

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where the wooing of love can exist between two people on a physical plane. The

ascension of the soul into that great unknown, however, requires that one cast off the

concerns of the physical self and enter a more metaphysical state where the soul can join

with the collective unconscious.

Yeats may have questioned an existence beyond that which he could see or touch,

or he may have been content to be limited to an earthly existence where he could remain

the poetic dreamer and creator of myth. This will to remain corporeal, however, kept his

unconscious and soul hidden just below the threshold of human understanding, where

access to the collective unconscious also resides. The idea of being held between two

states of being, both conscious and unconscious, carries forth within A Vision when Yeats

suggests that Nature and Knowledge remain in constant conflict. This conflict emerges

where the spirit creates symbols out of Nature in order to transcend Nature and connect it

with Knowledge and the spirit with the collective unconscious. This ascension may only

be possible through the language of the symbol. Yeats suggests that ancient thought

believed that the spirit was connected to the air and sea, but now there is a separation of

spirit as the symbol of the beggar and the decaying corpse hold one firmly to the earth

and the limitations of mortality (AV2 225).

Jung claims that the symbol lies at the center of a design that links the conscious

with the unconscious mind and then finally to the collective unconscious where the end

exists as Individuation. In Civilization in Transition, he states, “The forlorn state of

consciousness in our world is due primarily to loss of instinct, and the reason for this lies

in the development of the human mind over the past aeon […] The more power man had

over nature, the more his knowledge and skill went to his head, the deeper became his

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contempt for the merely natural and accidental, for all irrational data – including the

objective psyche, which is everything that consciousness is not” (Civilization 291). The

connection with Yeats’s A Vision and with the schism between Nature and Knowledge

might be to say that “instinct” is the individual’s connection between Nature (the

conscious mind) and Knowledge (the unconscious mind). Jung clarifies by saying,

“Western man is in danger of losing his shadow or unconscious altogether, of identifying

himself with his fictive personality and the world with the abstract picture painted by

scientific rationalism, his spiritual and moral opponent, which splits his conscious from

the unconscious in an inner polarity where religious orientation has grown ineffective,

and not even a god can check the sovereign sway of unleashed psychic functions”

(Civilization 290). This is to say that the rational and conscious mind hold fast the

unconscious from ascending because of civilization’s movement away from the spiritual

world toward the world of the concrete and material.

Yeats’s A Vision likewise resonates with the idea of a schism of the individual

from his unconscious mind by suggesting that an “antithetical age” exists where the

individual is now concerned with wealth, immediate gratification, and technology, thus

choosing to forget the past, the primary age of one who held life as sacred, with a

spiritual connection of the earth to the sky and symbols of nature representing that

connection of the individual with the divine or the conscious mind with the collective

unconscious. Yeats states, “There is a state before rebirth where one is tied to the body

and the Husk” (AV1 195). Humanity exists within this pre-rebirth stage, for without the

aid of Knowledge to show one the connection between Nature and the self through

symbols, there will be no transcendence into the spirit (AV1 196). This transcendence

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into the spirit world would be akin to the Jungian concept of the process of Individuation

where the conscious beholds a symbol and then translates it into something more

meaningful. Thereafter, the unconscious mind is finally provided a gateway into the

collective unconscious. Jung adds a plea to the individual to behold the symbol and the

soul-image through acknowledgment of the image or “imago” of man’s origin as the

object-imago that connects the individual to the psyche or the conscious mind with the

collective unconscious (Civilization 292). The journey of the conscious mind toward the

collective unconscious needs a vehicle that exists in the form of images and symbols.

Yeats likewise suggests that one way a person might achieve this ascension is through

dreaming, in which we communicate with spirits (AV1 201).

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Conclusion

Mythopoetics: Yeats, Frye, and Campbell

A final look at W.B. Yeats’s A Vision may lead one to believe that Yeats was

attempting to create new myth, or at least a new conception of mythology. For one to see

this conception more clearly, one must look at later scholars and their own exploration of

similar ideas and themes for mapping the unconscious. We have explored some of

Yeats’s themes inside A Vision and determined how they can be explained through

examination of the theories of Carl Jung. Yeats and Jung, of course, are not the final

word in the exploration of the human mind to map its pathway toward the collective

unconscious; others, particularly Northrop Frye and Joseph Campbell, open up new

questions and pose new insights and answers to further explore the symbols and concepts

that shape the unconscious and its response to the cosmos. We can see an evolution of

thought in Frye and Campbell by comparing their theories with Yeats’s wheel archetype

(see Figures 7 and 8). As we examine the schemata of Yeats’s A Vision, we are led to

some of the same things that Frye and Campbell are exploring in their own vision.

Frye’s theories of myths bring more clarity and evolved thought when compared

to Yeats’s vision of the wheel. Frye’s cycle of seasons and mythoi describes the

expressions of the poetic imagination and a broad sense of a collective being, where it

seems that Yeats is only grasping at ideas that encompass the individual, yet fails to

bridge the gap between the individual and the collective whole of human experience. In

A Vision, Yeats alludes to his vision of the wheel as being perhaps limited in scope, but in

a process that is ever evolving. Yeats later admitted that for all his toil, perhaps all he has

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managed to do is scratch the surface of something larger than himself (AV2 302). He

also admits that “Perhaps I am too old,” as A Vision may have been more than he could

manage within the last years of his life; or he may have simply run out of time to explore

his mind’s wandering more deeply. Frye’s theories, however, are the work of a thorough

collaboration between his broad literary experience and his religious experience. An

examination of Frye’s “theory of myths” may show how Yeats’s “vision” can be

elaborated.

Frye’s “mythos” of spring and comedy compares to Yeats’s idea of the head in

the wheel in that the head possesses the attributes of intellect and creativity with the

element of air behind it (AV2 103). Frye refers to the spring and comedy myth as related

to the mind when he describes the process of comic discovery (Anatomy 163). In

comedy, that is, the narrative encounters a device in the plot that brings the hero and

heroine together, despite what happens in the beginning, when it seems the action is a

hopeless affair for the possibility of a happy ending; but then “there is a moment when

this crystallization occurs” and a point of resolution is reached in a comic discovery

(Anatomy 163). In comedy, the mind plays a larger part than the heart, the feet, or the

loins in Yeats’s vision of the wheel.

Frye’s mythos of romance and summer compares to Yeats’s idea of the heart in

the wheel. Yeats suggests that the heart is imitative, emotional, and embraced by the

element of water. Frye refers to romance and summer as a byproduct of adventure. In

this Frye suggests that romance looks to new hopes and desires (Anatomy 186). When

Frye’s theory of myth in romance and summer is transposed to Yeats’s heart on the

wheel, one can clearly see the correlation between them. Yeats refers to the heart on the

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wheel as a product of fantasy or something that is a moving away from the intellect and

into the realm of fantasy or of magical things as they spring from the imagination (AV2

90). Frye’s cycle of summer also reflects an element of fantasy and imagination.

Frye’s myth of tragedy and autumn compares to Yeats’s idea of the fall and feet

in the wheel. Frye begins by saying that autumn and tragedy follow romance as the hero

falls away from a kind of dream-like state of being and is thrust into a waking state of

discomfort, provocation, isolation and a kind of powerlessness (Anatomy 209). This

powerlessness may be what Yeats was getting at when he says that the feet are the

antithesis of the head, as they are where the darker half of the conscious resides and

where the earth meets the body in “a raw embrace” (AV2 275). One might imagine the

feet as being the connection to the harsh reality of the ground, while the head remains in

the clouds.

Frye’s myth of winter and satire compares to Yeats’s idea of the loins in the

wheel. Frye mentions the winter and satire as being a shifting of ambiguities, a stasis of

rest, death, then awakening to a rebirth at the end or once again, to begin again (Anatomy

223). Yeats’s loins upon the wheel are representative of what he called “the sudden

inexplicable anxiety of creation” (AV1 141). One might imagine this creation as the

erection of the loins upon the wheel to spread the seed of impregnation. Yeats puts it

another way: “A whole age may have been bound in a single dream, or wheel, where the

character lives and dies, then lives again” (AV1 141). This is to say that the loins upon

the wheel are the end of an age and also its beginning, while the dreamer awakes just

under the first cold gleam of day, where a woman lay awaiting upon the ground where

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insemination occurs before the hero dies and then is reborn through her offspring to begin

the cycle again.

When put side-by-side, Frye’s mythos and Yeats’s wheel are not dissimilar. They

seem to express the same thing. Frye’s adaptation of the journey is more structured and

more inclusive. Frye might see the wheel as an arm or embodiment of literature, a

language that crosses all boundaries and touches all with the same quill, brushing all with

similar symbols so that life is more than simply an individual experience. Yeats’s wheel

is limited to the individual with mention of individual organs and individual actions,

feelings, and thoughts as one rests upon the journey of an individual experience.

Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” or “Monomyth” also compares to Yeats’s

vision of the wheel. Like Frye’s theories, Campbell’s are more macro than micro, and

more universal than individual in experience. As Campbell says in reference to the cycle

of the wheel, “The hero is every man within his own life and journey” (The Hero With A

Thousand Faces 8). Campbell’s universal Hero leaves on a journey and a call to

adventure, which is analogous to Yeats’s vision of the head on the wheel as it begins the

journey of the mind to reclaim the body. Yeats’s vision of the head on the wheel is the

starting point for every meaningful beginning in the process of the flow of action that

spurs the rest of the body into action whether consciously or unconsciously. Yeats

explains that the head in the wheel remains in constant discord with the heart, much as a

person’s reason is to emotion (AV2 131). Campbell’s Hero faces challenges and

temptations along the journey, which compares to Yeats’s heart upon the wheel. The

heart pumps blood to the rest of the body, aids in the action and exertion of the Hero, and

enables the Hero to overcome challenges and temptations. Yeats’s heart on the wheel

Wack 45

encapsulates what he calls the Passionate Body, and that Passionate Body drives action

toward a resolution that will end in rest (AV2 195). The flame of passion, so to speak,

will burn its brightest just before it is finally spent.

Just as Campbell’s Hero faces a movement toward transformation after death, so

does Yeats’s body find movement of the feet toward the heart. Transformation upon the

wheel occurs when the loins move toward the feet, the feet toward the heart, and then to

the head before the cycle begins again. Yeats mentions that the feet also represent the

equilibrium, balance and momentum where the body moves past the center and onward

toward the loins, the heart and back to the head (AV2 173). The whole wheel or cycle

represents a passage from the feet back to the head. Yeats’s vision of the wheel also

resembles Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man,” a universal symbol that requires the entire human

body to form the wheel (see Figure 9).

Campbell’s Hero reaches atonement, a return and rebirth, just as Yeats’s loins

upon the wheel represent the essence of resurrection and rebirth. The rebirth of the Hero

is analogous to the rebirth of a person’s essence in offspring. As Campbell says, “Full

circle, from the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb, we come: an ambiguous,

enigmatical incursion into a world of solid matter that is soon to melt from us, like the

substance of a dream” (The Hero With A Thousand Faces 8).

Yeats, Frye, and Campbell share similar theories of myth; however, those brought

about by Frye and Campbell far out pass those formulated in A Vision. Yeats’s theories

are rudimentary and half-complete, as if Campbell’s hero were only part of the way

through the journey. Nevertheless, Yeats’s A Vision is a partial success in that it did

accomplish an entry point in Yeats’s own journey to better understand the unconscious

Wack 46

and its connection to the collective unconscious or anima mundi. Yeats was a great poet

who sought to systematize his intuitions into a theory that would reveal a universal order

that lay under the disorder of modern history and the fragmentation of modern

consciousness. That his symbol system, awkward as it is, is consistent with the symbol

systems of more rigorous theorists, suggests its basic validity and truth.

Wack 47

Yeats/ Frye SynthesisThe Wheel

Figure 7

Yeats's Wheel

Northrop Frye'sTheory of Myths

Lo

i ns H

ea

d

He

ar

tFa l l ( f ee t )

S p r i n g

Su

mm

er

Au

t um

n

S a t i r eW

i nt e r Comedy

T r a g e d y Ro m

a n c e

CompletelyObjective

CompletelySubjective

Wack 48

Yeats/ Campbell SynthesisThe Wheel

Figure 8

Yeats's Wheel

Joseph Campbell'sHero's Journey

(Monomyth)

Lo

i ns H

ea

d

He

ar

tFa l l ( f ee t )

Hero's Call to Adventure

Hero's Challenges/

Tem

ptat

ionsH

ero 's Transformation

Hero

's R

eturn

CompletelyObjective

CompletelySubjective

Hero'sAtonement

Hero's DeathAbyss

Revelation

Hero's Rebirth

Wack 49

Figure 9

Leonardo Da VinciVitruve Luc Viatour (The Vitruvian Man), circa 1487.

Notice the striking similarity between Yeats's wheel and The Vitruvian Man. Rotate the man so that his head is where his left hand is and you will have Yeats's wheel.

Wack 50

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