Occult poetry, ceremonial magic
1865 – 1939
William Butler Yeats was Ireland's preeminent poet and a lifelong practitioner of occultism, joining the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1890 and remaining an active member for over three decades, reaching the sixth grade of initiation. His mystical system, elaborated in A Vision (1925), drew on astrology, Neoplatonism, and automatic writing to construct a cyclical philosophy of history and the soul that permeated his mature poetry.
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