Ideas of Good and EvilYeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Philosophy
Ideas of Good and Evil
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Essays
as a part of folk-lore, base most that is of importance in their claims
upon this memory. I have read of it in 'Paracelsus' and in some Indian
book that describes the people of past days as still living within it,
'Thinking the thought and doing the deed.' And I have found it in the
prophetic books of William Blake, who calls its images 'the bright
sculptures of Los's Halls'; and says that all events, 'all love stories,'
renew themselves from those images. It is perhaps well that so few believe
in it, for if many did many would go out of parliaments and universities
and libraries and run into the wilderness to so waste the body, and to so
hush the unquiet mind that, still living, they might pass the doors the
dead pass daily; for who among the wise would trouble himself with making
laws or in writing history or in weighing the earth if the things of
eternity seemed ready to hand?
VII
I find in my diary of magical events for 1899 that I awoke at 3 A.M. out
of a nightmare, and imagined one symbol to prevent its recurrence, and
imagined another, a simple geometrical form, which calls up dreams of
luxuriant vegetable life, that I might have pleasant dreams. I imagined it
faintly, being very sleepy, and went to sleep. I had confused dreams which
seemed to have no relation with the symbol. I awoke about eight, having
for the time forgotten both nightmare and symbol. Presently I dozed off
again and began half to dream and half to see, as one does between sleep
and waking, enormous flowers and grapes. I awoke and recognized that what
I had dreamed or seen was the kind of thing appropriate to the symbol
before I remembered having used it. I find another record, though made
some time after the event, of having imagined over the head of a person,
who was a little of a seer, a combined symbol of elemental air and
elemental water. This person, who did not know what symbol I was using,
saw a pigeon flying with a lobster in his bill. I find that on December
13, 1898, I used a certain star-shaped symbol with a seeress, getting her
to look at it intently before she began seeing. She saw a rough stone
house, and in the middle of the house the skull of a horse. I find that I
had used the same symbol a few days before with a seer, and that he had
seen a rough stone house, and in the middle of the house something under a
cloth marked with the Hammer of Thor. He had lifted the cloth and
discovered a skeleton of gold with teeth of diamonds, and eyes of some
unknown dim precious stones. I had made a note to this last vision,
pointing out that we had been using a Solar symbol a little earlier. Solar
symbols often call up visions of gold and precious stones. I do not give
these examples to prove my arguments, but to illustrate them. I know that
my examples will awaken in all who have not met the like, or who are not
on other grounds inclined towards my arguments, a most natural
incredulity. It was long before I myself would admit an inherent power in
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