Michael Robartes and the dancerYeats, W. B. (William Butler)
General
Michael Robartes and the dancer
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
English poetry -- Irish authors
Robartes copied out and gave to Aherne several mathematical diagrams
from the _Speculum_, squares and spheres, cones made up of revolving
gyres intersecting each other at various angles, figures sometimes
of great complexity. His explanation of these, obtained invariably
from the followers of Kusta-ben-Luki, is founded upon a single
fundamental thought. The mind, whether expressed in history or in
the individual life, has a precise movement, which can be quickened
or slackened but cannot be fundamentally altered, and this movement
can be expressed by a mathematical form. A plant or an animal has an
order of developement peculiar to it, a bamboo will not develop
evenly like a willow, nor a willow from joint to joint, and both
have branches, that lessen and grow more light as they rise, and
no characteristic of the soil can alter these things. A poor soil
may indeed check or stop the movement and a rich prolong and
quicken it. Mendel has shown that his sweet-peas bred long and
short, white and pink varieties in certain mathematical proportions,
suggesting a mathematical law governing the transmission of parental
characteristics. To the Judwalis, as interpreted by Michael Robartes,
all living mind has likewise a fundamental mathematical movement,
however adapted in plant, or animal, or man to particular
circumstance; and when you have found this movement and calculated
its relations, you can foretell the entire future of that mind. A
supreme religious act of their faith is to fix the attention on the
mathematical form of this movement until the whole past and future
of humanity, or of an individual man, shall be present to the
intellect as if it were accomplished in a single moment. The
intensity of the Beatific Vision when it comes depends upon the
intensity of this realisation. It is possible in this way, seeing
that death is itself marked upon the mathematical figure, which
passes beyond it, to follow the soul into the highest heaven and
the deepest hell. This doctrine is, they contend, not fatalistic
because the mathematical figure is an expression of the mind’s
desire, and the more rapid the developement of the figure the
greater the freedom of the soul. The figure while the soul is
in the body, or suffering from the consequences of that life,
is frequently drawn as a double cone, the narrow end of each
cone being in the centre of the broad end of the other.
[Illustration: A line drawing of two cones superimposed on
each other, with the tip of each cone in the centre of the
base of the other.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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