Ritual and Belief in William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley Amy M
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University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School January 2011 Religion as Aesthetic Creation: Ritual and Belief in William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley Amy M. Clanton University of South Florida, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the American Studies Commons, and the Religion Commons Scholar Commons Citation Clanton, Amy M., "Religion as Aesthetic Creation: Ritual and Belief in William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley" (2011). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/3718 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Religion as Aesthetic Creation: Ritual and Belief in William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley by Amy M. Clanton A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: Phillip Sipiora, Ph.D. Sara Deats, Ph.D. William T. Ross, Ph.D. Ylce Irizarry, Ph.D. 7 November 2011 Keywords: performance, art, Percy Bysshe Shelley, occult, magic Copyright © 2011 Amy M. Clanton DEDICATION I dedicate this dissertation to my father and late mother and thank them for always aiding and encouraging me in all my academic and creative pursuits. I also thank my late aunt, June Stillman; she influenced my educational path perhaps more than she knew. Finally, I thank my entire family for their love and support. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, I would like to thank my major professor, Dr. Philip Sipiora, for his guidance and encouragement, which made a seemingly-Herculean task manageable. I would also like to thank my committee members, Dr. Sara Deats, Dr. Tom Ross, and Dr. Ylce Irizzary for their insightful comments and meticulous care in recommending revisions. I must also give acknowledgment to Dr. Michael Angrosino and the late Dr. William Heim, whose courses laid a foundation and provided inspiration for my work. Thanks also to Dr. John Hatcher, who first encouraged me to pursue a doctorate in English. Finally, thank you to Dr. Stephanie Moss, without whose mentoring and support completion of this dissertation would have been impossible. i TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Tables ......................................................................................................... ii List of Figures ....................................................................................................... iii List of Abbreviations ............................................................................................. iv Abstract ................................................................................................................ v Chapter One: Introduction .................................................................................... 1 Review of Literature ................................................................................... 4 Art and Religion ....................................................................................... 11 Yeats, Crowley, and the Occult ................................................................ 17 Chapter Two: The Romantic Idea of Poetry as Religion: Shelleyan Influence on Yeats and Crowley .............................................. 22 Chapter Three: Prophecy and Belief: Creating Sacred Texts ............................. 31 The Nature of Belief ................................................................................. 34 Reincarnation and Unity ........................................................................... 44 Unity and Ecstasy .................................................................................... 49 The Progression of Ages ......................................................................... 50 Antimonies ............................................................................................... 54 Chapter Four: Ritual and Myth: Performing Religion .......................................... 73 Ritual, Myth, and Art ................................................................................ 78 Yeats’s Celtic Mysteries ........................................................................... 81 Crowley’s Rites of Eleusis ........................................................................ 91 Chapter Five: Invocation and Magic: Performative Language in Religious and Occult Practice ................................................................................ 113 Crowley’s “Hymn to Pan” ....................................................................... 116 Yeats’s Island of Statues ....................................................................... 130 Invocation, Trance, and Vision ............................................................... 134 Crowley’s The God Eater ....................................................................... 142 Art and Religion ..................................................................................... 144 Works Cited ...................................................................................................... 149 Appendix .......................................................................................................... 160 ii LIST OF TABLES Table 4.1: Roles of Ritual Officers ...................................................................... 86 Table 4.2: Ritual Correspondences .................................................................... 88 iii LIST OF FIGURES Figure A.1: The Tree of Life .............................................................................. 162 Figure A.2: The Four Worlds ............................................................................ 164 Figure A.3: The Flaming Sword ........................................................................ 166 Figure A.4 The Serpent .................................................................................... 166 iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Crowley EG Equinox of the Gods Lies Book of Lies MTP Magick in Theory and Practice MWT Magick Without Tears Yeats AVA A Vision (1925) AVB A Vision (1937) E&I Essays and Introductions YVP Yeats Vision Papers Mircea Eliade SP The Sacred and the Profane v ABSTRACT William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley created literary works intending them to comprise religious systems, thus negotiating the often-conflicting roles of religion and modern art and literature. Both men credited Percy Bysshe Shelley as a major influence, and Shelley’s ideas of art as religion may have shaped their pursuit to create working religions from their art. This study analyzes the beliefs, prophetic practices, myths, rituals, and invocations found in their literature, focusing particularly on Yeats’s Supernatural Songs, Celtic Mysteries, and Island of Statues, and Crowley’s “Philosopher’s Progress,” “Garden of Janus,” Rites of Eleusis, and “Hymn to Pan.” While anthropological definitions generally distinguish art from religion, Crowley’s religion, Thelema, satisfies requirements for both categories, as Yeats’s Celtic Mysteries may have done had he completed the project. 1 Chapter One Introduction Art and religion, two of the most important expressions of human culture, have a complex and changing relationship. Some of the earliest examples of visual art—the cave paintings and sculptures of the Paleolithic era—were, according to most archeological theories, created for religious or magical ritual purposes, and the earliest known dramas are the religious “Passion Play” of middle-kingdom Egypt and the Greek tragedies associated with the worship of Dionysus in ancient Athens. As Jane Ellen Harrison affirms, “Athenian theatres were on holy ground, [and] attendance at the theatre for the Spring Festival of Dionysus was considered an act of worship” (10). Among many examples of the linkage between art and religion, she provides one from Egypt: Countless bas-reliefs that decorate Egyptian tombs and temples are but ritual practices translated into stone. […] Ancient art and ritual are not only closely connected, not only do they mutually explain and illustrate each other, but […] they actually arise out of a common human impulse. (18) Purely secular works of art (beyond utilitarian objects) were to evolve later in human history. When more recent art forms have been linked to religion, they have often been seen occupying a subservient role: aesthetic expressions of religious beliefs; however, this assumed position of the arts was questioned in 2 the Romantic era when poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley suggested that art should fill the role of religion in society. While Shelley never fulfilled this idea in any literal sense, the conjoining of art and religion was later pursued by William Butler Yeats and his contemporary, Aleister Crowley. Yeats and Crowley, despite their mutual animosity, both sought to unify their art with their occult pursuits by creating new religions from their art. This dissertation will investigate how William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley created literary works intended to function as religious systems and will explore how these works negotiate the often-conflicting roles of religion and modern art and literature. I will examine the negotiation and construction of the changing relationship between religion and