Colin Wilson

The persistence of magic

W.B. Yeats became a member of the magical Order of the Golden Dawn on 7 March 1890. According to its founder, W. W. Wescott, the Order was based on certain magical manuscripts written in code, and discovered on a book barrow in the Farringdon Road. Subsequent research proved this to be an invention, so everyone concluded that the Golden Dawn was a fraud. When I was doing a night class on Yeats in Leicester in 1948, I remember our professor, Philip Collins, explaining that we simply had to accept that the great poet was also a credulous idiot, the only extenuating circumstance being that he wanted to believe such rubbish because it gave him ‘material for poetry’.

Yeats himself would have rejected this with fury. And The Place of Enchantment offers much support for his view. Alex Owen explains that Yeats himself, the actress Florence Farr, and the Irish patriot Maude Gonne all joined the Golden Dawn to learn the techniques of ‘astral projection’, and that there is evidence that they succeeded. Yeats tells in his autobiography how, when he was asked to deliver a message to a fellow student, he ‘appeared’ to him when the student was among a crowd of people in a distant hotel, and then simply vanished.

Professor Owen is far from being a whole-hearted believer. She simply feels that Max Weber was correct when he said that ‘disenchantment’ is the characteristic mood of the modern world, and that the poets of the 1890s — Dowson, Lionel Johnson, even Oscar Wilde — were making a determined attempt to bring it back. The same thing, she argues, could be said of Eliphaz Levi, Madame Blavatsky, and the magicians of the Golden Dawn, and that between them they managed to re-create the ‘place of enchantment’ out of magic, mysticism and belief in the supernatural.

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