YEATS, THE TAROT, AND THE FOOL by Joan Weatherly To mention his association with the Order of the Golden Dawn has always been obligatory for commentators on W. B. Yeats, but that association has too often been dismissed as a youthful dalliance which the mature poet out- grew with the Celtic Twilight. More recently, however, a few scholars have begun to reemphasize the early influence of the symbolic rituals of the Golden Dawn on Yeats’ later poetry.' Both Moore and Raine consider the Tarot a major source of inspiration for Yeats’ later, most famous symbols such as the Tower: as suggested by her title Yeats, the Tarot, and the Golden Dawn, Raine explores particularly the significance of the Tarot on Yeats’ lyric poetry. Although Raine discusses the Tarot fool, especially with regard to Hanrahan and to a lesser degree to Robartes, the centrality of the Fool in other lyrics, in such fictional pieces as ‘Rosa Alchemica,”’ and in such dramas as On Baile’s Strand and The Hour Glass, remains largely un- noticed. Some of Yeats’ fools are compared to those of Shakespeare in Desai’s Yeats’s Shakespeare, but Desai’s main interest is of course not in the Tarot or its influence on Yeats or on Shakespeare, where it has remained totally neglected.* Raine’s penetrating study mentions, but does not fully explore, Waite’s idea that Zero the Fool (‘‘0”’ or “‘Nothing’’ frequently mentioned by both Shakespeare and Yeats) is the initiate who moves through the phases of initiation depicted by the other twenty-one cards of the major arcana to become at last the fully initiated, perfectly balanced figure, the World, similar to Phase 28 in Yeats’ system. Golden Dawn ini- tiates were assigned the number 0=0 ‘“‘which by implication identifies the uninitiated man with the Tarot’s Fool.’’* Yeats seems to have considered the Fool as his significator in keeping with the rule that a Tarot querent may substitute a major arcana card for the court card significator assigned by 112YEATS, THE TAROT, AND THE FOOL. 113 age and coloring. The Tarot Fool, a symbol for the mystical life Yeats said was the center of all he wrote, may be considered a masking image for the encompassing gestalt he was constantly attempting to construct from his life and work. Yeats’ identification with the Fool’s quest for liberation along the winding Path of Life is corroborated by Unterecker’s belief that the ‘ideal collected works’’ Yeats was always striving to put together were “‘to be what T. S. Eliot would call an objective correlative for the entirety of Yeats’ life and thought, a kind of literary equivalent for the total experience of a man, a total experience shaped, through art, into a form less perishable than flesh, a form freed from accident.’’* The most basic structure of Yeats’ mythology—indeed of his whole plan for an Irish mystical order—rests on the Tarot system. Ellmann (1964) quotes from the first, unpublished draft of Yeats’ autobiography the poet’s “efforts to work out symbolic correspondences for the ‘four talismans’ ’’: “At any moment of leisure, we obtained in vision long lists of symbolic forms that corresponded to the cardinal points, and the old gods and heroes took their places gradually in a symbolic fabric that had for its centre the four talismans of the Tuatha DeDanaan [legendary inhabitants of Ireland], the Sword, the Stone, the Spear, and the Cauldron, which related themselves in my mind with the suits of the Tarot.’* In the Tarot deck the four suits are the Sword, the Pentacle (Stone), the Wand (Spear), and the Cup (Cauldron). Ellmann describes the infinite variety of symbolic configurations of the quadripartite structure with the four elements appearing steadily, often in various quises: ‘The talismans of sword, stone, spear, and cauldron are related to the elements of earth, air, water, and fire; each of these represents an aspect of the mind [a Zoa for Blake] that must be controlled. The spear is associated with passion, the sword with intellect, the cauldron with moving images (presumably ima- gined), and the stone with fixed ones (presumably seen). The man who has mastered cach of these can hope to attain to the fifth element or final har- mony (‘Jerusalem’), where he is at one with universal forces, and where pas- sion and intellect, desired image and actual fact, are united into one whole. (29-30) The influence of Blake is strong here as Ellmann suggests, but so is that of Swedenborg and, above all, of the Tarot. It is precisely the quest of this mastery upon which Zero the Fool in the Tarot embarks as he steps off the precipice in the Waite deck to emerge first as the Magician, later as the Hanged Man, and finally as the World—clearly associated with Phases one, fifteen, and twenty-eight in Yeats’ system as well as with the entire mystical path lying at the heart of his works.114 COLLEGE LITERATURE Although, as Raine and Ussher have shown, any attempt to equate Yeats’ Vision exactly with the Tarot keys is perhaps futile, there are nevertheless striking similarities between the two systems. Eliphas Lévi, for instance, whose works Yeats surely knew, “‘assigns the twenty-eight days of the moon to the twenty-two Tarot keys and the seven planets—twenty-eight in all as the Fool counts as zero.’’® Raine suggests that one way to find an exact cor- respondence between Lévi’s, and Yeats’ phases of the moon is to consider the former’s Luna, Sol, and Fool as the latter’s Hunchback, Saint and Fool (23). In any case, Raine sees Yeats’ system as similar to many other forms of the Jungian mandala such as the spiral path or the path encircling a wheel, all of which reflect ‘‘that abiding human instinct to project upon the uni- verse of the macrocosm the archetypal configurations of the soul’’ (24). It is certain that Yeats, as a Golden Dawn initiate and later adept, thoroughly knew and used in poems early and late the correspondences between the ‘22 major Arcana keys and the 22 paths on the Tree of Life and the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, as well as astrological signs.’”” The structure of the Tree of Life resolves itself into the numbers four, ten and twenty-two, as does the Tarot pack in which the Fool must pass through the twenty-two paths of the Sephiroth to arrive at perfection. This winding, spiraling path the Fool must follow as described by Gray—who, like Kaplan and Moakley as well as almost all Tarot commentators, sees the Fool’s journey as the heart of the Tarot—is strikingly similar to Yeats’ system: It may be helpful to think of the Tarot as representing the spokes of a huge wheel upon which each of us travels during his life on earth, experiencing ma- terials [sic] and spiritual ups and downs. These are reflected in the cards when they are laid out by a Reader—their positions, juxtapositions, and combina- tions are all significant. The Fool, representing the Life-force before it comes into manifestation on the earth plane, is in the center of the wheel, moves to its outer edge through 21 phases of experience, and then returns to the center whence it came.* The Fool, the mask of masks and the image of images provides the poet with the needed ‘‘ice and salt” packing, ‘‘the individual intellect,’’ the ener- gy upon which ‘‘all happiness depends”? ‘‘to assume the mask of some other self,’ to come with Shakespeare, Lear, and the feigned fool Hamlet into the “presence of a soul lingering on the storm-beaten threshold of sanctity.””* Raine sees Hanrahan’s affinity with the Tarot Fool in ‘‘the amnesia of the generated soul who has forgotten eternity and the destination of the pil- grimage of life’ as he stumbles, tumbles, fumbles along the serpant path “to and fro on the journey back to that other world where he is a prince” (20). She suggests that the Tarot Magician could be associated with Hanra-YEATS, THE TAROT, AND THE FOOL 11s han as Fool who has phased into the Magician. Hanrahan, like the Unwise Man, the “‘first emanation,’’ is ‘‘the soul who leaves eternity for the jour- ney of time’’ and the door shutting behind him ‘‘might seem to signify the irrevocability of birth into this world.’’!° This figure of the wandering fool appears again and again in Yeats’s poems and mythologies, as the Fool by the Roadside, Poor Tom, Tom, Lunatic, and ‘‘Yeats himself as statesman exchanging the illusion of stability for the blind pilgrimage of service with an outdated hat, stiff back, and ‘a strutting turkey walk.’ ’’ The Fool’s journey relates to this life and to many lives, for Yeats assumes rebirth “in all his thought from first to last’’ and ‘‘we see therefore in the fool’s jour- ney a foreshadowing of the Phases of the moon, in which the soul travels the circuit of the Wheel of Fortune.’’'' The restorative spirit of the Fool’s mask—again echoing Shakespeare’s Hamlet—reenters for Yeats in 1929 when having stopped writing for almost a year on the advice of a doctor, he wrote ‘Words for Music Perhaps,” which includes the Crazy Jane poems.'? As Yeats puts it in 1933: Then in the spring of 1929 life returned as an impression of uncontrollable energy and daring of the great creators; it seemed that but for journalism and criticism, all the evasion and explanation, the world would be torn in pieces. I wrote ‘Mad as the Mist and Snow,” a mechanical little song, and after that al- most all that group of poems called in memory of those exultant weeks ‘Words for Music Perhaps.’ . . . Since then I have added a few poems to “Words for Music Perhaps’, but always keeping the mood and plan of the first poems. '* Nowhere so clearly as in this group of poems, whose major speaker is the Fool’s feminine counterpart, Crazy Jane—probably the Star of the Tarot and Yeats’ own Phase 17 as well as Phase 12—is the old triad of fool, poet, and lover so well integrated. Crazy Jane affords the old, rejuvenated poet with the exactly correct mask of detachment needed for these poems in which the relationships between love, art, and foolishness are so ‘‘objective- ly”’ explored. In ‘‘Mad as the Mist and Snow’’—which follows ‘‘After Long Silence’’ wherein the poet proposes that the lovers ‘‘descant and yet again descant’’ upon ‘‘the supreme theme of art and song’”’—the poet in Fool’s Mask, his mind at its best, admits to the lover: That even Cicero And many-minded Homer were Mad as the mist and snow, (No. 293, lines 16-18) These poems reflect clearly the relationship between symbol, poetry and Tarot Fool which lies at the heart of Yeats’ philosophy, the same tripartite116 COLLEGE LITERATURE relationship Ussher describes in speaking of himself as one ‘‘who believes in the revivification of the Idea (that poor sleeping princess, today entombed in the briar-thickets of universities) through her true guardian, the Symbol—the Spirit of Poetry, the Tarot Fool.’’'* The ‘‘Words for Music Perhaps”’ section includes ‘‘Tom the Lunatic,”’ ‘‘Tom at Cruachan,”’ and “Old Tom Again’”’ as well as Crazy Jane is at least as impertinent as Lear’s Fool on the heath. It is no unnatural stride at all for Yeats to shift his masks from the image of old Tom the lunatic to the ‘Delphic Oracle upon Plotinus” as he speaks truth dialectically (through the tension of primary and antithetical) from the mask of the Fool.'* All of the four suits and the four elements are reflected in Yeats’ poetry from early through late collec- tions by the Fool and by the All-destroying sword-blade still Carried by the wandering fool. (‘‘Symbols,’” No. 254, lines 3-4). Again in the short story ‘‘The Queen and the Fool’’ the connection be- tween wisdom and folly—‘‘Beauty and fool together laid’’ as the last line of ““Symbols’’ puts it—between death (the Hanged Man and Death of Tarot) and the Fool is made as Yeats Celticizes the ancient esoteric ritual. Here as elsewhere he associates poetry and art with the Fool—hence with him- self—and the wisdom of woman (Lady Gregory) with the Tarot Empress. In “The Queen and the Fool,’’ Yeats makes abundantly clear the relationship between the Fool and Aengus; in fact, in this story the Fool is the messenger of Aengus.'’ The peacock feathers in this story recall the feathers lost by the Tarot Fool of the Italian pack in which he is the personification of Lent, an association which may account for the negativity Ussher sees in Yeats’ system. Yeats owned an Italian Tarot pack with his own handwritten attri- butions on II Matto (the Fool).'* The little story ‘‘Where there is Nothing there is God’? (a phrase running through several works) illustrates precisely the relationship Yeats perceived between the Fool and the Hermit—the lat- ter one of the paths travelled by the Tarot Fool.'’ In this story, the dull, foolish boy whose ‘‘stupidity, born of a mind that would listen to every wandering sound and brood upon every wandering light’’ evokes the secret rose through the aid of a wandering hermit he alone had at first been able to hear.'* Since the Fool here, like the Hanged Man and Phases one and fif- teen, has ‘‘nothing”’ in his mind but pure love, the rose of God can bloom and the Hermit turns out to be none other than Aengus ‘‘the Lover of God, and the first of those who have gone to live in the wild places’’ of nothing- ness (189). This adaptation of the Tarot ritual along with that in ‘‘The Queen and the Fool”’ illustrates Yeats’ attempt to integrate the ancient IrishYEATS, THE TAROT, AND THE FOOL 117 mythologies into the Irish landscape: it goes without saying that Yeats asso- ciates himself with Aengus, another version of the artist and the Tarot Fool. The earlier short story ‘“‘Rosa Alchemica’’ is laced with quotations exempli- fying Yeats’ consciousness of the Tarot teachings, only a few of which can be given here: ‘‘even in my most perfect moment I would be two selves, the one watching with heavy eyes the other’s moment of content’’; ‘‘a search for an essence which would dissolve all mortal things’’; “‘few needs, so few servants’’; ‘‘something between a debauchee, a saint, and a peasant’’; “There is Lear, his head still wet with the thunder-storm and he laughs be- cause you thought yourself an existence who are but a shadow, and him a shadow who is eternal God’’; 2 then 4 then many; rises through spirits “each wrapped in his eternal moment”; ‘it seemed to have been plucked out of the definite world and cast naked upon a shoreless sea’’; ‘a great tolerance for those people with incoherent personalities”’; ‘“‘hysteria passio”” (Lear’s Fool); ‘ta teeming, fantastic inner life.’’!° ‘The Secret Rose’? and the Michael Robartes stories—indeed almost all of the Mythologies—are filled with Tarot lore.?° As at virtually every significant juncture Yeats’ career, the Fool twitches his ‘cap and bells” in 1902 following the play, Where There is Nothing. Paul, the Fool character in the play takes to the road and lives among the gypsies in search of laughter, and a little later Ezra Pound sug- gested that Yeats turn the tragedy The Player Queen into a comedy. The dis- covery of the Fool’s laughter marked a turning point for Yeats and the Ab- bey Theatre. Ellmann points out that Yeats in these plays of the early 1900’s. became increasingly successful in accomplishing his goal of molding ‘“‘oc- cultism and nationalism into his art.’’?! It is finally in his dramas that some of Yeats’ most successful manipulations of the Fool’s mask are made, for as Harper has pointed out, Yeats’ hope of reintegrating ‘‘the human spirit in our imagination” as well as the quest for proper aesthetic distance is inti- mately related to his concept of masks.?? In the dramas Yeats frequently uses the mask of the Fool both for achieving distance and for finding reinte- gration of the human spirit and in his comments on drama, he often reveals that revelation is the artist’s chief aim, that loss of faith and bad literature are related, and that mythology can provide the means for revelation. Yeats’ whole theory of language and his quest for style are tied up in the theatre as indeed is his main hope for an Irish national literature to be ef- fected through mystical revelation set to music. Yeats more than once stated that he was striving for the expression of ‘‘character in action’’ rather than “action in character,’ a quest in which he was surely aided by the Tarot Way he had learned in the nineties.** The intimate connection between this118 COLLEGE LITERATURE quest of the poet and the quest of the Fool in the Tarot for organized inno- cence is reflected in Harper’s comment: ‘‘It should be observed perhaps that the continuing search for an appropriate style was related in Yeats’ mind to the quest for innocence—the ‘vision of Eden,’ as he once called it... ‘Il may be permitted the conviction that—grown a little nearer inno- cence—I have found a more appropriate simplicity.’ ’’** Recalling the path of the Tarot Fool, Yeats says in On Baile’s Strand: Life drifts between a fool and a blind man, To the end, and nobody can know his end.?* That the Fool is to be associated with abstractions for Yeats is evident in his commentary in Wheels and Butterflies on the creation of On Baile’s Strand in which the main characters are a Fool, a Blind Man, Cuchulain, and Conchubar: So did the abstract ideas persecute me that On Baile’s Strand, founded upon a dream, was only finished, when, after a struggle of two years, | had made the Fool and Blind Man, Cuchulain and Conchubar whose shadows they are [as Lear’s Fool is his shadow], all image, and now I can no longer remember what they meant ex- cept that they meant in some sense those combatants who turn the wheel of life. Had I begun On Baile’s Strand or not when I began to imagine, as always at my left side just out of the range of the sight [as is the Devil, another Tarot key Yeats’ asso- ciated with himself, in Swedenborg’s reports], a brazen winged beast that I asso- ciated with laughing, ecstatic destruction? Then I wrote, spurred by an external necessity, Where There is Nothing, a crude play with some dramatic force, since changed with Lady Gregory’s help into The Unicorn from the Stars. A neighbour- hood inflamed with drink, a country house burnt down, a spiritual anarchy preached! Then after some years came the thought that a man always tried to be- come his opposite, to become what he would abhor if he did not desire it, and I wasted some three summers and some part of each winter before I had banished the ghost and turned what I had meant for tragedy into a farce: The Player Queen.?° Surely then it is in meditating on the Fool that Yeats comes to apply his theory of antithetical masks to drama whence it later spreads to his other literary forms. Each of the plays mentioned by Yeats contains numerous di- rect and indirect Fool characters and references to the Tarot Way as does The Hearne’s Egg and The Hour-Glass in which ‘‘the Fool figures’’: ‘When one gets quiet. When one is so quiet that there is not a thought in one’s head maybe, there is something that wakes up inside one, something happy and quiet, and then all in a minute one can smell summer flowers, and tall people go by, happy and laughing, but they will not let us look at their faces. O no, it is not right that we should look at their faces.””YEATS, THE TAROT, AND THE FOOL 119 The Fool views Hell as ‘‘A Lake of Spaces, and a World of Nothing”? (line 262) and “‘the soul knows no virtue but itself’’: Only when all the world has testified, May soul confound it, erying out in joy, And laughing on its lonely precipice. ‘What’s dearth and death and sickness to the soul That knows no virtue but itself? (lines 278-282) Yeats ends the Wheels and Butterflies passage above: Then unexpectedly and under circumstances described in A Packet to Ezra Pound came a symbolical system displaying the conflict in all its forms: Where got I that truth? Out of a medium’s mouth, Out of nothing it came, Out of the forest loam, Out of dark night where lay The crowns of Nineveh. And then did all the Muses sing, Of Magnus Annus at the spring. (93) The Tarot Fool, who is one with Lear’s Fool, seems to have followed and led Yeats from the early years of the Celtic twilight—that mid-state between the heavenly and earthly illustrative of the precarious balanced state the Fool seeks and represents in his quest for equilibrium through the Path of Life. The one ‘‘Circus Animal’’ who never deserts Yeats, the Fool is proba- bly the masked voice which commands: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by! (“Under Ben Bulben,”” No, 386, lines 92-94) The Fool is at once the ‘‘pure mind’’ and the ‘‘foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’’ in which “those masterful images”’ grew. Yeats was ever careful not to disclose the forbidden secrets of the Order of the Golden Dawn— even after they had become public knowledge—but he employed them throughout his career. Through him, the Fool has become a major influence on modern drama especially upon the Absurdist Movement. It is frequently said that had Yeats produced nothing beyond the nineties he would today be unknown: it should be added that without his affiliation with the Tarot-120 COLLEGE LITERATURE laced Golden Dawn in the nineties, many of the great twentieth-century poems might not have been. RON wT © 10 i 12 13. 14 15 16 17 18 NOTES Mary Catherine Flannery. Yeats and Magic: The Earlier Works. New York: Harper, 1978; George Mills Harper. Yeats’ Golden Dawn. New York: Macmillan, 1974; Virginia Moore. The Unicorn. New York: Octagon, 1973; Kathleen Raine. Yeats, the Tarot and the Golden Dawn. Dublin: Dolmen. Press, 1972. Rupin W. Desai. Yeats’ Shakespeare. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1971. Raine, 18. John Unterecker. A Reader’s Guide to William Butler Yeats. London: Thames and Hudson, 1959: 5. Richard Ellmann. The Identify of Yeats. New York: Oxford UP, 1964: 29. Raine, 23. Raine, 13. Eden Gray. A Complete Guide to the Tarot. New York: Bantam, 1970: 14. See also S. R. Kaplan. Tarot. New York: U.S. Game Systems, 1970 and Gertude Moakley. The Tarot Cards. New York: New York Public Library, 1966. W. B. Yeats. ‘‘A General Introduction to My Work.’ In Essays and Introduc- tions. New York: Macmillan, 1961: 519, 525, and The Autobiography of Wil- liam Butler Yeats. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958: 340, 354. Raine, 20. Raine, 21. See 25-27, for Arland Ussher’s Notes on Yeats’ use of the Tarot in de- vising his Phases of the Moon. Ussher sees the Tarot as *‘a sort of inverted reflex of Yeats’ system,’’ The Hanged Man being Yeats’ Fool upside down since there in no Hanged Man (crucifixion) in Yeats’ system for Ussher. See also Arland Ussher. The Twenty-Two Keys of the Tarot. Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1953, esp. 9-10, 52-54. See Desai, 264, and Hamiet (IV, i, 7). W. B. Yeats. Notes for The Winding Stair and Other Poems. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. New York: Macmillan, 1968: 831. All poems cited by No. from this edition. Ussher, Twenty-Two Keys, 7. W. B. Yeats. ‘‘The Queen and the Fool.”’ In Mythologies. New York: Macmil- lan, 1959: 115. Raines, 76. See Raines, 45ff, for discussion of relationship between Michael Robartes, the Fool, and the Tarot Hermit. W. B. Yeats. “Where there is Nothing, there is God.’’ In Mythologies. New York: Macmillan, 1959: 189.YEATS, THE TAROT, AND THE FOOL 121 19 W.B. Yeats. “Rosa Alchemica.”” Mythologies. New York: Macmillan, 1959: 225, 227, 228, 235, 236, 239, 240, 243. 20 See Raine, 59ff for illustrations of Yeats’s Tarot artifacts. 21 Richard Ellman. Yeats: The Man and the Masks. New York: Dutton, 1948: 115, 210, 211. 22 George Mills Harper. The Mingling of Heaven and Earth: Yeats’s Theory of Theatre. Dublin: Dolman Press, 1975: 21-25. 23 Quoted in Harper, The Mingling of Heaven and Earth, 28. 24 Harper, 28. 25 W. B. Yeats. On Baile’s Strand. In Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats Ed. Russell K. Alspach and Catherine C. Alspach. London: Macmillan, 1966: 514 (lines 623-24). All plays cited by title and lines from this edition. 26 W.B. Yeats. Introd. to Resurrection. Wheels and Butterflies. New York: Macmillan, 1935: 92-3. 27 W. B. Yeats. The Hour-Glass, (lines 196-203).