Non-fiction: A Vision

Overview
A Vision (1925) sets out William Butler Yeats’s esoteric system for understanding personality, destiny, and history through an elaborate geometry of opposing forces. Drawing on occult study and a private revelation he and his wife believed they received, Yeats constructs a symbolic machinery of interlocked cycles, lunar phases, and spiritual components that explain how individuals and civilizations wax and wane between opposed ideals: the objective, utilitarian, and communal on one side; the subjective, aesthetic, and aristocratic on the other. The book is both a handbook to this system and a myth of modernity’s turning point, forging links between psychology, metaphysics, and cultural history that would feed directly into his later poetry.

Origins and Method
The project begins in 1917, when Georgie Hyde-Lees, Yeats’s new wife, begins automatic writing that produces reams of cryptic notes from guiding “Instructors.” Yeats organizes and tests these communications through notebooks, sleep trances, and diagrams, eventually shaping the material into a philosophical treatise. He frames parts of the 1925 edition as documents transmitted by fictional personae, notably Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne, and attributed to an imagined Arabic source, a device that offers distance and mystery while preserving the authority of revelation.

The System: Gyres and Tinctures
At its core stand two interpenetrating cones or “gyres,” a figure Yeats uses to model reality’s perpetual reversal. As one gyre expands, the other contracts, and at their extremes each embodies a dominant “tincture.” The primary tincture seeks order, morality, practicality, and collective life; the antithetical tincture seeks beauty, self-expression, aristocratic distinction, and inwardness. Human lives, artistic styles, religious eras, and political forms all move through these oscillations, passing crises when the gyres cross and values invert.

Phases and Faculties
Yeats maps human nature onto a lunar circle of twenty-eight phases. Each phase corresponds to a characteristic balance of four “Faculties”: Will (motive and desire), Mask (the ideal image or adopted persona), Creative Mind (shaping intellect), and Body of Fate (the given circumstances that meet the Will). From New Moon to Full Moon the antithetical intensifies; from Full back to New the primary gathers force. No phase is perfect; each has its complementary limit and an opposing “Daimon,” the anti-self that draws the person toward the necessary counterbalance. The scheme generates portraits of temperaments, saint and soldier, courtier and contemplative, fanatic and artist, each with fated conflicts and gifts.

The Principles and the Afterlife
Beneath the Faculties stand the more enduring “Principles”: Husk (the bodily vehicle), Passionate Body (vital and emotional energy), Spirit (rational and moral essence), and Celestial Body (the form of ultimate pattern). After death, the soul sheds and purifies these layers in ordered states, revisiting the images of life until it is ready to re-enter another incarnation at a new lunar phase. Karma, as moral arithmetic, gives way to rhythm and complementarity: what is unachieved in one phase is sought in its opposite.

History and the Great Year
The gyres also govern eras. Yeats imagines great cycles of roughly two millennia in which a civilization culminates in an extreme of one tincture before yielding to its contrary. Classical paganism, centered on artistic selfhood and aristocratic measure, embodies an antithetical climax; the Christian era asserts the primary through humility, law, and collective faith. As the gyres turn, violent “catastrophes” and prophetic “annunciations” signal transition. Writing amid the upheavals of the early twentieth century, Yeats reads his moment as a threshold, the contraction of the Christian primary and the advent of a new antithetical age whose values would reshape art, politics, and belief.

Style and Purpose
A Vision is speculative and diagrammatic, alternating dense exposition with parables, symbol lists, and historical sketches. Its ambition is to provide a single symbol-system able to illuminate a life’s pattern, judge an epoch’s style, and forecast the shape of change. Though its machinery is occult, the book offers a dramatized psychology of conflict and completion, and a cyclical philosophy of history that recasts modern crisis as part of a vast, revolving design.