The Irish poet William B. Yeats (1865–1939), Nobel Prize in Literature laureate in 1923, was a passionate student of the tarot. This interest led him to write several pages that, even today, remain mysterious.
William Butler Yeats was born in 1865 into an Irish family, in a town near Sandymount, not far from Dublin. In 1867, the Yeats family moved to London, where John Yeats, the poet’s father, attempted to establish himself as a portrait painter. However, the limited success he achieved forced John Yeats to return to Ireland, to Sligo, where his in-laws lived. There, young William nourished his childhood imagination with stories of gnomes and fairies and ancient Gaelic legends, which later played a significant role in his literary work.
In 1885, he enrolled at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin and began publishing poetry in a university journal. During this same period, he started to draw closer to esoteric traditions. Two years later, he left his family and returned to London.
Poet and Magician
In the British capital, William B. Yeats came into contact with various esoteric circles, particularly followers of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and members of the Theosophical Society founded a few years earlier by the Russian visionary Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. It appears that Yeats personally met Blavatsky in 1887 during a cycle of lectures she gave in London.
In 1889, he published his first collection of poetry, The Wanderings of Oisin, inspired by the exploits of the legendary Gaelic warrior. In 1891, together with some friends, he founded the Rhymers’ Club, and the following year, in Dublin, the Irish Literary Society.
Meanwhile, on March 7, 1890, Yeats was initiated as a neophyte into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn at the Isis-Urania Temple in London, adopting the initiatory motto Daemon est Deus Inversus (“The Devil is God inverted”). In the following years, he progressed through the grades until reaching, in 1893, the rank of Zelator Adeptus Minor (5–6).
In 1900, he was elected instructor of “mystical philosophy” for the neophytes of Isis-Urania. Through this role, the poet became deeply involved in the rituals and doctrines of the Golden Dawn, as can be inferred from reading his essay Magic, published in 1901:
“I believe in practice and in a philosophy that we have agreed to call magic.”
Yeats and the Golden Dawn
One of Yeats’s main concerns regarding his involvement in the Golden Dawn was preserving the integrity of the Order’s doctrine, which at that time was in deep crisis due to the behavior of Samuel Liddell Mathers (1854–1918), one of the founders, and of his pupil Aleister Crowley, who entered Isis-Urania in 1898.
The Tarot Through…
February 1900: The Crisis in the Golden Dawn
In February 1900 it was discovered—thanks to a letter from Mathers—that the manuscripts considered the key teachings of the Golden Dawn had been falsified. The London adepts formed a committee led by William Butler Yeats to investigate the matter. Mathers, who at the time was living in Paris, declared the committee illegal.
The young Aleister Crowley, after visiting Mathers, went to the lodge premises and took possession of them in Mathers’ name. When he presented himself the following day, dressed in Scottish attire and wearing a mask, Yeats expelled him and called the police. The poet then convinced the other adepts to expel Mathers, Crowley, and all those who supported them from the Order.
Subsequently, the legal case initiated by Crowley was dismissed for procedural reasons. Dissatisfied, the young magician undertook a long-distance magical duel with Yeats—an action that ultimately led nowhere.
The Order of the Star of the Morning
All these events led Yeats to reflect deeply on the future of the Order, and in March 1901 he presented his thoughts to the adepts in a pamphlet titled Should the Order of the R.R. & A.C. Remain a Magical Order? In it, he explained the necessity of remaining faithful to the laws, rituals, and internal doctrines of the Golden Dawn.
For a time, peace seemed to be restored, but in 1903 a new schism occurred. On one side were the “purists,” led by Robert Felkin, grouped under the name Star of the Morning, faithful to magical structure and Egyptian symbolism. On the other side were the followers of Arthur Edward Waite, who sought to give the rituals a more distinctly Christian and Rosicrucian orientation.
Yeats sided with Felkin and, in the years that followed, continued his initiatory path in the Temple of Amon, eventually attaining in 1916 the grade of Adeptus Exemptus (7=4).
Between 1914 and 1922, Yeats’ role within the Star of the Morning became increasingly important, particularly after Felkin moved to New Zealand in 1916. From that point on, Yeats served as Imperator and Instructor of the Ancient Traditions. However, in early 1922, faced with the irreversible decline of the fraternity, Yeats withdrew permanently.
Curiosities — Yeats and the Tarot
The Irish poet held deep respect for Tarot cards and believed—according to the instructions contained in the Golden Dawn’s “Occult Papers,” reserved for initiates—that the figures represented a means of entering into contact with other dimensions, as well as a way of knowing the future and transforming oneself.
His wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, was also a student of mystical doctrines. On October 24, 1917—four days after their wedding—she began to write through automatic writing, dictated by a series of “unknown instructors.” These phantasmagorical entities recall the “Unknown Superiors” of the Theosophical Society.
This automatic writing ceased in 1920, leaving Yeats with a vast quantity of material, which he later organized into A Vision (1925). This work—one of the most mysterious and least understood of the Irish poet’s writings—was structured around Tarot-based esoteric teachings, organized into “28 incarnations,” which Yeats described as phases of the transformation of being.
From this foundational material arose, over time and under the influence of Ezra Pound, poetic collections such as The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933).
Final Years
Yeats never abandoned magic or the study of esoteric philosophies. Together with his wife, he undertook a series of occult experiments that had a profound influence on his literary production.
In 1923, Yeats received the Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of the magnificent poetic works he had published in previous years. This honor was followed by his appointment as a senator of the newly founded Irish Republic.
At his death in 1939, in the French village of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, the Irish government sent a warship to repatriate his body. Today, in accordance with the poet’s wishes, he rests at the foot of Ben Bulben, the mountain he exalted in one of his final poems.
