Talking to the Gods

Susan Johnston Graf

Description

Talking to the Gods explores the linkages between the imaginative literature and the occult beliefs and practices of four writers who were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. William Butler Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune were all members of the occult organization for various periods from 1890 to 1930. Yeats, of course, is both a canonical and well-loved poet. Machen is revered as a master of the weird tale. Blackwood's work dealing with the supernatural was popular during the first half of the twentieth century and has been influential in the development of the fantasy genre. Fortune's books are acknowledged as harbingers of trends in second-wave feminist spirituality. Susan Johnston Graf examines practices, beliefs, and ideas engendered within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and demonstrates how these are manifest in each author's work, including Yeats's major theoretical work, A Vision.
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. An Overview of the Golden Dawn System of Magic

2. W. B. Yeats

3. Arthur Machen

4. Algernon Blackwood

5. Dion Fortune

Conclusions
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)
• Reino Unido
• Ireland
• United Kingdom
• Science fiction
• Stephen Ireland
• Great Britain
• Fantasy
• Royaume-Uni

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 30 mars 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438455570
• Langue: English

Extrait

TALKING TO THE
GODS
SUNY series in Western Esoteric Traditions

David Appelbaum, editor
TALKING TO THE
GODS
Occultism in the Work of W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune
SUSAN JOHNSTON GRAF
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2015 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Eileen Nizer
Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Graf, Susan Johnston, author.
Talking to the Gods : Occultism in the Work of W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune / Susan Johnston Graf.
pages cm. — (SUNY series in Western Esoteric Traditions)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5555-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5557-0 (ebook)
1. English literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Spiritualism in literature. 3. Occultism in literature. 4. Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. 5. Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865–1939—Criticism and interpretation. 6. Machen, Arthur, 1863–1947—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Blackwood, Algernon, 1869–1951—Criticism and interpretation. 8. Fortune, Dion—Criticism and interpretation. PR478.S64T35 2015 820.9'37—dc23 2014015523
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For R. T. Gault
In Memoriam
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. An Overview of the Golden Dawn System of Magic
Chapter 2. W. B. Yeats
Chapter 3. Arthur Machen
Chapter 4. Algernon Blackwood
Chapter 5. Dion Fortune
Conclusions
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Figures
Figure 1. Interpenetrating Gyres.
Figure 2. Six-pointed Star Presented on Its Side.
Figure 3. The Seal of Solomon.
Figure 4. Kabbalah Projected on a Sphere, Bottom View.
Figure 5. The Great Wheel.
Acknowledgments
I thank the Pennsylvania State University for granting me a sabbatical leave that allowed me to begin this project. I also thank the librarians at Penn State, without whom I would have been unable to do this work. Janell Graf and Michael Graf lent their graphic design know-how and artistic sensibilities and talents to this project. I am also indebted to Karen Price. She read many incarnations of the manuscript, and she generously gave me materials from her late husband, R. T. Gault’s, book collection for the Machen and Blackwood sections of this book. Finally, I thank my husband George for his support and encouragement.
Introduction
Talking to the Gods is a study of the beliefs and practices of four writers who were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. In most discussions of Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Dion Fortune, and W. B. Yeats there is mention of their membership in the Order of the Golden Dawn. This work explores what that membership meant and how it shaped their work. Machen, Blackwood, and Fortune are minor literary figures by most accounts, whereas Yeats is a monolithic modernist poet. Still, much of the material that forms the basis for their works is similar because all four were influenced by occultism and the religious convictions engendered in the Golden Dawn temples to which they belonged.
Although none except Yeats can claim canonization by the academic literary establishment, all the writers chosen for this study are still in print and have a wide readership, which differentiates them from various other individuals who produced imaginative literature and were members of the Golden Dawn or its various offshoots. For this study, the most prolific and popular writers whose works have remained in print have been selected. This study is also narrowed to writers who were members, at least initially, of the original Isis-Urania Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn or its later offshoot, the Stella Matutina.
Yeats may be the reigning literary genius of the Golden Dawn, but Fortune, Machen, and Blackwood still manage to sell books. A journal is devoted to the study of Machen, and a listserv is devoted to discussing him. If the library at the Pennsylvania State University can be considered typical, then academic libraries considered the works of Machen worthwhile investments when they were published, and he was a recognized member of the literary establishment in England. In the 1960s, there was a brief resurgence of popular and scholarly interest in Machen. Science fiction fans found him interesting, and study of the Inklings, particularly Tolkien, led readers to him. Nonetheless, Machen remains a fringe figure with a cult following.
Like Machen, Blackwood has found a following among the aficionado of “the weird tale,” the name J.T. Joshi and others give to the genre. Blackwood’s story is much the same with regard to academic recognition and acceptance as Machen’s. The academic libraries collected his works when they were published, and he was a member of England’s literary establishment, but then he seems to have faded from memory, at least within academia, for the most part. A biography was published in 2001, and, as with Machen, there is an article here and there within a scholarly journal. Still, he is not the stuff of literary survey courses in college.
Fortune is beyond the pale in terms of academic attention. However, in terms of readership, she does quite well. Of course, the same could be said for many popular writers who are not studied, except maybe in the occasional popular culture course. I would assume that is because such writers are not considered to be serious or skilled enough to present us to ourselves in a deep, artful, or interesting way that would call for more intensive study and meditation. It is notable, however, that Blackwood and Machen gained recognition within the literary establishment of the day, whereas Fortune did not fare as well. Many of her works were reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement , but she was known as an occultist, whereas Blackwood and Machen were not. They both kept a low profile when it came to their occultism. Perhaps there was a bias against Fortune because she was a woman and openly admitted that she was a practicing occultist while she was writing occult fiction about powerful female occultist heroes. Her stories are a good read, and she is worthy of study because of the esoteric ideas that she presents in her work and the cultural history they preserve by documenting, even if in fictional terms, ideas circulating within the occult establishment of the first half of the twentieth century.
W. B. Yeats is a Nobel laureate and is arguably one of the most important poets writing in English in the twentieth century. Not only has he remained the stuff of college survey courses, but he also is considered to be a worthy topic for graduate seminars and doctoral dissertations, and many scholars have invested a good portion of their intellectual capital in him. However, Yeats and occultism were not complementary subjects until fairly recently, despite the 1954 publication of Virginia Moore’s ground-breaking study of Yeats’s occultism, The Unicorn: William Butler Yeats’ Search for Reality . Until the publication of Yeats’s Vision Papers in three volumes in 1992, scholars were still in denial about Yeats’s occult practices and beliefs. When George Mills Harper, general editor for the Vision Papers , published Yeats’s Golden Dawn in the 1970s, he established that Yeats was dedicated to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, but somehow scholars still tried to ignore or at least minimize the occultism. By and large, it did not fit with their vision of a great modernist poet, and it caused them discomfort. Not only that, but it was outside the area of interest and expertise for most English professors. Thus, Yeats’s occultism managed to go largely unnoticed until some thirty years ago, and even then it was not widely considered. Certainly, Yeats’s work was not thought to be primarily about occultism.
This study presents a group of writers who, in a sense, come from the same school although they are never thought of as such. To put Yeats, Machen, Blackwood, and Fortune in one book, claiming kinship among them, may sound ill considered at best. It is not, and that is one reason that this book is necessary—so that the very real connections among this disparate group of writers can be exposed. The connections are forged between 1890 and 1930 in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn where each writer found a basis for or a confirmation of his or her conception of reality and imagination. Yeats will not look quite the same once he is put beside his Golden Dawn contemporaries who worked with the same ideas and symbols and, with some minor adjustments, held the same religious beliefs.
That W. B. Yeats, Algernon Blackwood, and Arthur Machen were influenced by their membership in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn has become a truism. Yeats wrote about his order involvement, and some important work has been accomplished over the past sixty years with regard to Yeats’s involvement with the order and its effect on his c