Ideas of Good and EvilYeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Philosophy
Ideas of Good and Evil
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Essays
A man in chain armour passed through a castle door, and the seeress
noticed with surprise the bareness and rudeness of castle rooms. There was
nothing of the magnificence or the pageantry she had expected. The man
came to a large hall and to a little chapel opening out of it, where a
ceremony was taking place. There were six girls dressed in white, who took
from the altar some yellow object--I thought it was gold, for though, like
my acquaintance, I was told not to see, I could not help seeing. Somebody
else thought that it was yellow flowers, and I think the girls, though I
cannot remember clearly, laid it between the man's hands. He went out
after a time, and as he passed through the great hall one of us, I forget
whom, noticed that he passed over two gravestones. Then the vision became
broken, but presently he stood in a monk's habit among men-at-arms in the
middle of a village reading from a parchment. He was calling villagers
about him, and presently he and they and the men-at-arms took ship for
some long voyage. The vision became broken again, and when we could see
clearly they had come to what seemed the Holy Land. They had begun some
kind of sacred labour among palm-trees. The common men among them stood
idle, but the gentlemen carried large stones, bringing them from certain
directions, from the cardinal points I think, with a ceremonious
formality. The evoker of spirits said they must be making some kind of
masonic house. His mind, like the minds of so many students of these
hidden things, was always running on masonry and discovering it in strange
places.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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